This Is How We Change The World

Stephen, when he was a little kid.

I don't remember when he.

Wasn'T making.

Noise.

He had this innate ability to set goals and achieve them.

And I remember hearing him pray, this.

Kid with the orange hair, and I.

Thought, this kid is different.

God is all over his life.

He can captivate grown people and they sit there and listen to him intently.

But I've just never seen one come along like Stephen. And the crazy thing is the 80 year olds love him and the 4 year olds love him.

I knew he was gonna turn out to be a fine young man and preach the word of the Lord. I can tell you one thing, he was a talker. Always the last one to go to sleep anywhere.

As long as there would be one.

Eye open on somebody, he'd be like.

Talk, talk, talk.

Hop.

Well, he was really fun to be around. Everything, everything about him was, was fun and energetic.

You've got to meet this kid. He's a student at North Greenville and he is insane. And that's the way it's always been.

If he felt like he had to.

Do it, he needed to do it, he wanted to do it, he was.

Led to do it. He's going to do it.

Yeah, he took a stand and he didn't back down.

You know, ever since we were young, I always knew that God would use Pastor Stephen. I always knew that he would have a huge platform to share the gospel from, to reach the world. I've just always known that that's who God created him to be.

I always knew Stephen was going to change the world.

It was just a matter of who was going to do it with him.

Sa.

So Stephen and I had this conversation one day. All right, we're done. We're leaving Shelby. We're going to go start this church. And so of course he needs somebody to like, be his right hand man because for all of the strengths that he has that are spiritual and hearing from God and getting a vision and casting that vision, he knew that he needed help in actually carrying out this vision. And he really felt like Chunks was the one for that.

So Amy and I were the first people that, you know, Pastor and Holly had asked to be part of this new church start. Of course, we didn't know what that meant, but at the same time he was asking us. I'd actually been online looking at houses in Florida and been interviewing at a clinic, you know, a physical therapy clinic in Florida. We were not only not understanding what a church plant was, but we were still struggling with wanting to be closer to home. I Mean, I didn't know what it meant to be on staff with a church. I didn't understand how to start a church, how to plant a church. I didn't really even know if I wanted to be on a church staff.

Stephen goes, we're going to start this church one day, and I don't know why you would even pass up this opportunity to do this with us. And in my mind, I'm like, this is a big deal. I mean, you're asking them to go and start a church somewhere in America, I think, is what we had said.

We talked about it a lot, and it was something we really wrestled with back and forth, back and forth. What are we going to do? And we knew he wanted an answer.

I honestly thought that if we were indecisive long enough that it might blow over and this church thing never would happen. There was a night where he told me this later that he had picked up the phone because he was so frustrated that I wouldn't give him an answer of whether or not I was going to do this with him. That he actually had the phone in hand and was dialing my number to tell me that he was going to make the decision for me.

It's kind of how he does everything. Like, fine, if you don't want to do it with me, I'm doing it anyway. Fine, forget it. I'll find somebody else to help me. I thought you were the one that God had for us, but whatever, forget it. And so. And I remember having lots of conversations telling him, you just gotta give him some time. I mean, babe, this is a big decision. Just hang on. They're gonna commit. And part of it was because I loved Chunks and Amy so much, and I wanted them to do it so much. I was just like, with all that I could, I was holding him back, just saying, just wait, they're gonna do it. Just give him some time. This is a big decision.

Finally, he gave me the ultimatum, and he was kind of like, I really need to know. I got to know by noon tomorrow if you're doing this or not. If I don't get an answer, then you're not. He was that passionate about what he was going to do, and he was also that passionate about moving on and not letting the first person that he's asked hold him back. And so we, you know, after a lot of thought and prayer, Amy and I remember us having the conversation. And I said, well, if we don't do this, we're always going to wonder if we missed out on God's. Best for our life. And so I called him at 11:59 the next day and told him that.

We were in once chunks and Amy committed and said, yes, we're going to go. We're going to start megachurch in anywhere America. The people that were closest to us in our lives at that time started saying, we want to be a part too.

Of course, Larry Bry was willing to sign on the dotted line the minute he was asked.

So when I heard that Pastor Stephen was going to go do this thing to start a church, I literally went and said, I'm coming. When? And then I had to go home and tell my wife.

The Phillips, they were, of course, had moved to Shelby because they were friends with Pastor and they were ready to.

Go wherever, wherever it was. Charlotte or Jacksonville or Indiana, Canada, Quebec.

We just wanted to England.

Anything would have been better than Shelby, North Carolina.

I remember when Tyler and Amy the Forge signed on.

We spent. I shouldn't say we spent a day thinking about it. We spent maybe an hour thinking about it.

John and Heather, the Bishops.

It was intense.

Mm.

I remember when the Harpers signed on.

It was not.

What do you think about it? No, it's. We're going.

One of the last couples to sign on were the Ravens, and we weren't actually sure if they were actually going to do it.

I'm in my hometown, where I grew up. I've got a great job, great family, great house, got a dad who's incredibly sick about to die.

It just blew my mind that they were all like, I don't care where you guys are going, we want to be a part of this.

Here I am with a decision. Everything in the world is saying to stay, but in my heart, God's really calling us to go.

Pastor. I think he was having difficulties describing exactly what type of church he wanted to start. And it was just so different than what we were a part of. And my background was so minimal and church. I think he wanted to see it. And he knew about a conference in Dallas that he wanted us to go to C3. There's a huge auditorium. I've never seen anything like this. Of course, I've seen TV church and this huge auditorium that was packed. It was 8am it was about to start. I didn't know what to expect. There was a countdown timer going across the screens and all of a sudden the lights came on. This kid came bouncing out on the stage singing U2. I freaked out. I didn't know what was going on. It was loud. My chest was thumping. I'd never seen anything like it before. I looked over at Pastor and he had this big smile on his face. I remember him telling me that this was the type of church we were going to start. We were going to reach people far from God and do whatever it took. When we came back, we basically met as a core group for the next nine months there in Shelby. Pastor bought this book. It had all of the demographics of every city in the country. And so he gave it to me and said, find us a city. So he kind of said, I think that we need to stay in the Southeast based on the type of people I think we're going to be best suited to reach. I took this book of cities and developed this list of, of the largest cities in the Southeast. We took the list and began to narrow it down by, you know, of course we knew that God had called us to start a large church in a large city. So all we knew was Southeast and big cities. So I began to look at growth projections and current populations and densities. And so we narrowed it down to Jacksonville, Florida, Raleigh, North Carolina, Washington D.C. kind of a far fetched one. And Atlanta. And then Charlotte was always on the list, but not really on the list because we didn't really want to go to Charlotte because it was so close. It wasn't an adventure. It was only an hour and 15 minutes from Shelby where we were. And the biggest thing was we knew that there were so many churches in Charlotte.

We were eating supper at Mi Pueblito, our favorite Mexican restaurant. You were pregnant and Holly and I were pregnant. And so we had been talking about the church all night at the table. And we pay for our check and we go out in front and Pastor just says, let's go right now, let's just go, let's just get in the car.

We loaded up in the car and we drove to Raleigh that night. We got to Raleigh around one o' clock in the morning and there was no hotel rooms. There was a big basketball tournament going on and we had to sit in the car till 2 o' clock until somebody didn't show up for a reservation to get that cheap hotel room that.

We shared that was so cheap.

Woke up Saturday and drove all around Raleigh. And I don't know, I mean, it wasn't like God spoke, don't come to Raleigh. We just, you know, it was the same thing that happened when we had gone to Jacksonville. It just wasn't. Nothing happened. So we, on the way home from Raleigh that weekend, we were driving through Charlotte. We Got to Concord. And I remember Pastor said, he said, drive around 485. This goes around the outer loop of Charlotte. I didn't even. I'd never been on 485.

So chunks was driving and Steven said, let's just take that loop. Let's just drive the loop around the city and let's just see. Let's just look at Charlotte. And I will never forget riding in the backseat of the car, seeing all of the rooftops.

I remember being in the car and looking at Holly and just feeling like.

This was our city.

This was it.

I remember looking and seeing, wow, there's a lot of people in this city. Look at this loop. Look at all these rooftops. And just like this overwhelming sensation came in the car that, you know, maybe Charlotte is where God's calling us to be.

We stopped at the Pineville exit and ate at Joe's Crab Shack. And I remember, you know, it was. We just ate. And I remember going to the bathroom. Pastor and I both went to the bathroom. And we were, I kid you not, this is how I remember this story. And I've confirmed it with him. We're sitting, we were standing at the urinals and he looked at me and said, this is the city. A man Charlotte, you know, supposed to be Jacksonville. And when I heard it wasn't Jacksonville.

I was like, Chunks was a vital team player from the very get go. And I was afraid that Jacksonville, when it was not going to be the place, was going to be the end of Chunks.

Larry Brown, when he was told, Charlotte's where we're going, you know what he said?

Once Charlotte was picked, Charlotte just became my favorite city.

Charlotte's my new favorite city. I'm the analytical one. I didn't quite buy in that quick. Then I was like, we got to. This is what God's called us to do.

So every Sunday night, these eight families are meeting together as our core team. And Pastor Stevens getting up in front of us and he's telling us over and over again, we're going to take this city.

So we started to have these meetings. We called them core team meetings. At the time, we didn't have a name for the church. And so I'm sure the meeting had some name because every meeting that my husband is involved in has some kind of name. But in my mind it was the core team meetings. And we were. Larry Brye would get there and he would set everything up like to a T. We walked in and it was very professional. Into the blue room, there were water Bottles. At every spot, there was a map.

$162 map. Larry Brow bought that map of Charlotte. You know, had a lot of vision behind it, and everybody was excited when they saw it. Meanwhile, I wondered, how much did this thing cost?

The tables were all right in line with each other, and there was packets at every person's place. And so it felt as professional as it could feel, considering we had no money. So we would do exercises like, I remember we read through Purpose Driven Church.

And we went through the Book of Acts, the early church. I remember. I guess Pastor knew that the best place to start was the Book of Acts in the early church. And so we basically went through verse by verse, Acts 2, and he preached from that.

It was kind of like the first day of school. It was like the first day of something where you had no idea what was going to shape up, but you knew it was going to be exciting, and you knew it was going to be big.

We all kept good notes, but we didn't know what we were doing. I didn't know what we were doing. I didn't know what it meant to plant a church. Here I was with the title of executive pastor of this church, and I had no idea what that meant.

So I think we all came into that room with just this, I don't know, expectation of, like, probably staring at pastor like a bunch of goons saying, all right, where are we going?

Honestly, my husband has just this ability to cast a vision to people that it's almost. Looking back, I would say it's almost hypnotizing, because somehow he had everybody in the room believing that this church that we were going to start was going to be a megachurch.

Do you remember sitting around Pastor's computer watching that baptismal video?

Yes, I do.

Stephen was like, we got to show this to the core team.

There was one little computer screen, and we all gathered around it.

Remember, we're all huddled around a laptop.

And it was this baptism video from Willow Creek. And, you know, we're all looking at it, and he had seen it, so he knew what to expect, but we didn't. And so we're all looking at it for the first time together. And we were just so emotional about it.

So we're all standing around watching it. Of course I cried because I cried every time I saw it.

We see these people being baptized, and we see just the life change right in front of us.

Larry, Bry, John, Bishop, Tyler Ford, they were just blubbering like babies watching this video of people getting baptized.

Baptism is an understatement. This video was nuts. They had this big lake, and they just were dunking people. It was like, one, two, three, go. And it was like 15 at a time. Dunk. And they panned the people, and it was just like at one after another after another, it was just like, could we ever do anything like that? You know, it was those early days in the Blue Room when, you know, we were writing out our purpose statement, our core values. I remember writing out this thing that we did. It was come, connect, commit. It was going to be our strategy to reach people. But in those early days, it's when we wrote out our purpose statement, and it was all about going to Charlotte to try to reach people who were far from God. For everyone that has been at Elevation for any length of time, they know that we name everything. And we learned that early on that names were important to Pastor because we, you know, we talked for literally weeks and weeks and weeks about what to name this church.

Originally, it was named Church Alive.

Yep.

I mean, Chunks had some kind of name for the church, too.

But I thought New Heights, the one.

That I had written down in my Bible was Church Alive. That's one we were praying through.

And so, I mean, I grew up in the Episcopal Church, and I was looking for it to be Saint something. Amy grew up in a small Baptist church, and it had to be something Baptist church.

And so I was thinking that it would be Mint Hill Community Church or something, kind of identifying the location.

I was in seminary with Pastor. We were in Greenville, riding in my truck, and he said, what do you think about the name Elevation?

And he says, okay, I'm thinking about the name being Elevation.

So he called me and said, I got the name. And he said, I've already run it by a few people that love it.

And when I hung up the phone, I said to Deborah, I said, that's the craziest name I've ever heard, Elevation Church.

And I said, I love it. Sounds great.

One by one, we all moved to Charlotte.

I remember the night before we moved, the whole entire core team came to our house and they helped us pack, and we packed up all the trucks and packed Larry Bry's trucks and the U Haul.

Right.

Remember everybody being, like, really super helpful because almost like it was a momentous occasion, like the first.

The first family was going to.

When we first came to Charlotte, we were moving, and we had, like a week to find a house. And so we had already planned to use the same real estate that everybody was using. Rene Enfinger Nobody knew anything about Charlotte.

We didn't know Matthews. We didn't know Pineville. We didn't know different areas of Charlotte. I just knew this one lady's phone number to call and show us around.

I got a phone call from a friend of mine that's a realtor in Shelby, North Carolina, and she told me that she knew of eight families that were coming over here to Charlotte. They were moving, they were selling their homes over there. They were coming over here to start a church. So I said, okay. She said, are you willing to work with them? I said, sure.

Here we are, gung ho. We've been meeting for nine months in the Blue Room, talking about the church we were going to start and the city we were going to take. And I'm just thinking it's going to catch on with people we meet. And so at the same time, Renee showing us houses, we're recruiting Renee to be our first church member because our strategy is to ask everybody we know to be a part of it. So I thought it would be easy. I thought Renee would latch on to the idea.

My first thought was eight guys, you know, and their families coming over here to start another church. You know, every street corner that I go to, there's a sign in front of a high school that says church meeting here. You know, So I thought, oh, okay.

Then we went to Sunday mornings and she kept coming, kept coming. And you know, to this day, Renee still, still attends Elevation Church every week.

Elevation Church has changed my life in ways that I can never explain.

We had our very first launch team meeting September 11, 2005.

The core group tithed to Elevation Church for almost a solid year. We didn't spend a dime. The first check that Elevation Church wrote was to have our 501c3, our non profit status. I did all of that in July of 2005. But we were saving up to buy our first sound system. We cleared the bank account.

Just before.

We were going to go to Sunday mornings and bought the first sound system. And a lot of people thought it was crazy, but we weren't paying salaries. We knew that we were going to value the worship experience.

I felt that it was irresponsible for Stephen to spend that kind of money, for the church to spend that kind of money on a soundboard. $28,000 on a soundboard. And I, I came unglued.

We're all feeling emotions at one level. You know, the core team, we've got this kind of mixed emotion of excitement, yet you've got this kind of Doubt, is anybody going to come? And then you've got this realistic side of you that's going, who is going to come? Nobody even lives here, to be real honest. I mean, half of the team that was launching the church didn't even live in Charlotte. So we weren't inviting anybody because we didn't even know anybody to invite.

I think of the very first meeting that we had and how nervous we all were and how like, literally basically no one came.

The community center days were roundtables, information meetings, telling people what we were going to do, casting vision for the church. We were going to be trying to set up the foundation for what we were going to build on. When we finally did get to launch Sunday mornings, a big part of Pastor.

Steven's heart is to make sure we create a welcoming, kind of over the top environment. So I took everybody who was there that night, all of the eight family. If you're not plugged in with Pastor Steven up on stage speaking, you're going to be out front. We must have had 15 greeters out.

There, people clapping and talking to me. And I'm not a talker. Like, I'm like, whoa, this is a little bit strange, what's going on? And I go in the room, and there's hardly any people in the actual room where people are meeting. There are literally more people in the hallway and out front opening the doors than there were in this room.

We set the bar real high and we set expectations real high for us to create a great experience for everybody coming in there. So we did everything we could. We just didn't know if anybody was actually going to show up.

There was a sense of a little bit of, like, isolation and loneliness as you move into this new neighborhood. And all of these people that have been your life and your family back in Shelby are now an hour away.

So when we first moved to Charlotte, we met this couple named Mike and Becky. And we were excited because it was the first people that we had met in the city, and we were excited to invite them to church. And so we spent a lot of time hanging out with them. We went to dinner a few times. Mike and I would actually go play racquetball every weekend at the Dowd ymca. And I remember Nicole and I talking about it, and one day I was going to tell him why we were here and what we were going to do and invite him to come along. So we were riding back from playing racquetball one afternoon, and I remember looking at him and saying, hey, man, listen. You know, we're here to start a church. There aren't really many people in the church. We're here to kind of start it and love for you and your girlfriend to come and be a part of it. Help us get this thing off the ground. And haven't talked to him since.

We didn't know anyone.

Then we kind of all started going. This isn't going so well.

Once we were a few weeks into these launch team meetings, we weren't seeing tons of people come, and I probably.

Invited at least 20 people. And I had one person out of 20 that actually tried it and, like, came, and she never came back.

There was no one coming.

And Pastor Stephen, he got pretty upset about it. He called the emergency meeting.

He looked at all of us as a core group in the eye.

He said, I want you to all pull out a napkin or a piece of paper right now and write down.

Five names of people you're going to invite this week. In fact, if you don't have somebody you bring back with you next week, don't show up.

It just was really. I think it helped stress the urgency to everybody.

I immediately went into action of listing out everybody I could, but there was also a part of me. I was already in Charlotte. I was sitting at Qdoba McAllister's Deli, and I was just. That was my mobile office. So I went into, like, hyper overdrive that week of anybody who would even, like, look my direction. I would, like, run at them and say, you're coming with me on Sunday.

And I think that, like, Oliver Twist was a play that was going on in the Matthews Community center. And we were so eager to invite people to church and didn't have any avenues to do it, that we had printed up these really. We thought they were great, but they were probably really terrible, like, invites to come and be a part of our information meetings. And we stood at the doors and handed them out to the people who were coming out of the play. And I just remember, like, 30 people in a row were just looking at me like, why are you putting this trash in my hands? And it was like, oh, gosh, this is gonna be hard.

Yeah. You know, we had laid out this plan, this audacious plan that we thought was just gonna flow. But then the music director backs out. The guy who's gonna be over the sound and engineering backs out. The very first family that Janet and I invited to be a part of this thing with us, a woman that Janet went to college with, they back out on us. And it kind of looked like, what the does this thing hold? This whole thing going to fall apart.

Pastor was going to continue to travel and speak some. It's going to be minimal because we were going to start to reduce that a lot so that he could continue just focus on the church. And he's going to be leading worship. He's going to be doing. He's doing everything. So we had a good plan. His salary was going to be paid for by the church that we were a part of. And he had a guy that had committed to pay his insurance for the family for a year. So he thought everything was set to the point where we felt comfortable with. When he moved to Charlotte, he purchased the home. But then everything kind of started falling apart. I remember he called me one night, he said, guess what? The church that had promised he and Holly a salary and health insurance called him and told him they weren't going to be able to afford to pay a salary and that he was going to have to come to Charlotte with no guarantee of any monthly income.

A lot of people see my husband as this great man of God and this great man of faith who stands up in front of a group of people and says, God's called us to reach the city and this is what we're going to do. And I'm the one that's at home with him, and he's going, is this going to work? I got that question so many times, Holly. We just moved a bunch of families to Charlotte. Is this gonna work?

I remember the first time that I really started to develop a deep, like, resounding respect for Pastor Stephen and for his leadership was when we were launching the church and he was going through a 40 day fast.

He came to me and he said, I think I'm gonna fast. For the first weekend, the launch of Elevation. And I, you know, I was like, okay. So then Sunday afternoon after church came and he said, I think I'm going to keep fasting. I may fast for like three days, I don't know, maybe seven days, but I feel like the Lord wants me to keep fasting.

He kind of just got two days in and decided to extend it to three and then extend it to 40.

That was a very long 40 days in our house.

So I kept asking myself, how much more can this guy do? He's driving to Greenville, South Carolina, once a week to go to seminary several times a semester. He's going to Louisville, Kentucky to take his classes and turn in projects. He's researching papers every single day. He's taking exams. He's planning a church. He's just finished a 40 day fast and they have a brand new baby in the house. It was a difficult time in his life.

Yeah, we were young as a church, but we were still changing lives. And then there was Erica Crozier.

Heather and John called me probably in July, and told me that they were moving to Charlotte to start a church. And it was almost like when they told me that and they wanted me to move there with them because they knew I was. They didn't know the specific details, but they knew I was at a really bad place in my life. And so ever since they asked me that, I completely ignored them. Finally, my sister called me one night, probably in August, and she was like, I'm gonna stop calling, you know.

Because.

I don't want to keep bothering you. But she was like, I just want you to know that I love you. And whenever you're ready to move to Charlotte, call us and we'll be here. The night that I finally decided, like, enough was enough, I had gone out and partied all night and stayed up all night because when you do coke, you don't sleep. And I remember just like sitting up and it was almost like God like directed me toward my phone to call Heather and John. I was just crying and I was just totally broken. And I was like, I'm ready to go. I had known that Heather and John had moved there to start a church, elevation. So I was pretty sure that they were going to drag me along to those meetings and things that they were doing because they were obviously very passionate about it. And I didn't really care. I was like, well, two days ago I was snorting coke and getting wasted and living this lifestyle that you guys have no idea about. So once you find out that about me, you won't want to have anything to do with me. Because Christians are judgmental, right? It was very uncomfortable for me to walk in a situation because it was like, all the white sheep are over here and they're perfect little flock and then here's the black sheep. But when I walked in there, they had this, like, love in their eyes that I have not ever experienced before. I can tell by the way that they looked at me and by the conversations that we had that they didn't care where I was 48 hours ago. The only thing that they cared about was that I was right there, right then and that they had a chance to share Jesus with me. I got a phone call in the afternoon from Pastor Stephen, and he was like, well, I wanted you to stop by at the house. Holly and I are going to be there and I just wanted you to stop by and I wanted to talk to you about some things. So I was like, okay, I'll be over there later. So as soon as I started talking, it was him and Holly and myself, I just completely broke down. And it was almost like God just like opened my heart and opened my emotions and everything just came out right there on their kitchen table. And I knew that that was the time for me to fully give my life over to God.

Erica came home and just. I mean, we just. I mean, obviously she had accepted Christ. And it was a. It's a real cool moment for our family.

If you know anything about the Levine Senior center, you know about Iris Devore. Iris Devore.

Iris.

She's a sweet lady.

A great cross between your grandmother and like a drill instructor.

It was kind of her life's mission to start the Levine Senior Center.

She really is the poster child for senior citizens in Matthews.

And so in order for us to get into the senior center, she had to approve it.

She was very passionate and very much protected. Protective of her beautiful, shiny new building.

Her prized jewel possession called the senior center.

Construction on the senior center was finally done. And it was a Saturday morning.

We're having our very first Saturday move in day because we're starting the next day on Sunday morning.

And we were gonna transform the place. And I don't know if that term had ever been mentioned to Iris or. And I'm sure even if it was, she didn't really have a picture of what transform meant.

They had these brand new hardwood floors, never been touched, brand new tile all through the lobby. It was really nice the way they did it.

Of course, we were coming out guns blazing.

Everything was new, paint was new. Even smelled like fresh new paint on the walls. And so we walk in, we're setting.

Everything up, and we're putting all the pipe and drape around.

Every picture's coming off the wall. We're replacing it with something elevation. Every piece of furniture is getting moved. We're replacing it with something elevation.

The stage has all these plants on the stage. And so, you know, we gotta move the plants. Cause we're having church the next day. And we had a contract, a six month contract to meet there. And so we moved all the plants into a separate room. And you know, this was Iris. You know, this was Iris baby. The senior center was Iris baby. She loved the senior center. I mean, it was all she had. And so we moved those plants and I Kid, you not. She saw us moving those plants. She lost it.

About 10 minutes after she got there. Chunks or Larry or someone comes out and says, tyler, come back here. We need you in the back room.

She started yelling at us, and we didn't know why. We hadn't done anything.

And I walk into the back kitchen, and sure enough, it's Pastor and Chunks and Larry and I, I think, and Iris. And she's got Pastor cornered, and Chunks, and she basically is kicking us out of the building.

Holy crap. So Iris is waving her finger in Pastor's face saying, this is not a church. This is a senior center.

And Iris has got her finger about 2 inches away from Pastor Steven's face, saying, you're not meeting here tomorrow.

I thought it was over.

She was basically kicking us out. And for a minute, we all stood there wondering, how are we gonna have church the next day?

Larry Brown is on the phone calling the janitor, the custodian down at the Providence High School, trying to see if we can get back in the atrium for tomorrow morning.

I don't know what exactly happened there, but I came back, and Pastor and Iris, they had worked it all out.

And all I know is Pastor went back in this little room where he met with iris for about 30 minutes. And I don't know what happened.

Something happened. Something shifted in there.

Things were okay. We were allowed to meet the next day. We kept going with our setup and, of course, had our first ever worship experience at the Levine Senior center the next morning.

We really. We weren't even planning, like, a big Easter event of any kind or anything. We had, you know, 150 people, probably, if that coming on the Sunday, the month before Easter.

Yes.

Very young. We've been doing Sunday mornings for what, six weeks maybe. And this thought came to mind. We should do something really crazy with Easter eggs.

What if we got a helicopter and dropped eggs out of the sky?

We decided to get as many people possible to show up to a football field with 50,000 eggs. Most of them dropped from a helicopter onto the field with prizes, candy. And a few of them would have a little coin in there that was redeemable for one of our grand prizes, like a T or an Xbox. That's all it was.

I remember very vividly when they were planning the egg drop.

We sat there as a staff, and by the time we left, Chunks had given his financial blessing.

We cleared the account for the egg drop, bought 50,000 eggs, and dropped them from the helicopter.

I felt it was irresponsible for him to spend that kind of money on an egg drop.

And we did it.

We put all of our marketing efforts into two things. We advertised on the radio on Kiss 95.1, and we had a big mass mail piece that was supposed to hit all the mailboxes. The Thursday before Easter, my husband had.

A speaking engagement, and Elijah and I went with him. We flew to Florida, I think we were in Panama City. We were gone the whole week leading up to the egg drop.

Well, we found out on Friday that those mail pieces were stuck on some truck and they weren't gonna hit until Tuesday.

Larry Bry picked Steven and I up at the airport, Stephen, Elijah and I up at the airport. And I remember we got in the car and we had this all little, you know, small talk conversation. How's everything going? Everything with the egg drop gonna go good? Yeah.

The big mailer that was supposed to hit thousands and thousands and thousands of homes telling them about the Easter egg drop was stuck on a truck somewhere.

So Larry says, well, pastor, we've had an issue with the mailer, and for whatever reason, it's not going to get in people's mailboxes. Before the egg drop, Pastor was depressed.

We were clearing the bank account to do the elevation egg drop. I remember we had $32,000 in the bank account, and the elevation egg drop cost $31,000.

You could just feel the devastation in the car.

It was all our chips pushed to the middle of the table, and our biggest promotional piece wasn't going to happen.

My husband was about to have a heart attack because we put all this money into this event, and we had no idea if anybody was going to show up.

Pastor went home, and he ate a whole bag of Oreos. He was depressed. I think he ate the Oreos, and the sugar rush might have got him motivated. He came over to my house. He said, let's go. I said, what are we gonna do?

Steven said, all right, we're gonna print up a bunch of flyers and we're gonna go hit Walmart parking lots.

We went to Kinko's, ran off 500 copies, and handed out flyers in the Walmart parking lot till it got dark. All he knew was he was gonna do everything he could do to make the event a success.

Whenever we do events like this, Stephen will start to ask me, are people gonna come?

And the next morning.

People just started pouring in like one person after another. The bleachers, the stands started filling up.

There were all these cars there and all these children everywhere. And I thought, how did all these people hear about this. How does this happen?

There are thousands of Easter eggs falling out of a helicopter in southeast Charlotte.

Charlotte Easter egg hunt ended on the ground, but it started in the center sky. A helicopter dropped 50,000 Easter eggs.

And they came and they came and they came, and it was crowded.

Elevation Church used the helicopter to drop 50,000 Easter eggs, and the children went wild.

It was so crowded, and it was so exciting. It was the first really exciting crowd that we had had.

I was in the parking lot, and we had planned for some cars to be here and some people to come. But the first car came, the second car came, people started coming and kept.

Coming and kept coming.

My boss came, his family came. I was coaching a little kid's soccer team. All the kids from the soccer team came. Their parents came, their families came.

There were so many people there. The whole stadium was full. I was blown away by how we pulled it off.

We were expecting a good amount of people, but I don't think we were expecting as many people who actually showed up.

That day was amazing. There was a lot of people. And I remember we were so excited because people having to park so far away and there was lines to get in.

They just kept coming, and before you knew it, we were across the street parking people.

Even my family can go back and.

Say, you know, we were there.

We remember that. When are y' all gonna do it again?

And they asked, are y' all gonna drop the eggs again? And so it was something as simple as egg drop to really make them see that what we were doing was actually meaningful.

And it really just kind of was our way to say, hey, Charlotte, we're here and we're not goofing around.

I think. I think, too, we were blown away. We were like, did that just really happen?

After the egg drop, we finally started to see some momentum. You know, it was. We were almost too big for one room, and that was time to go to a second worship experience.

When we first moved into the senior center, we truly thought, this is such a great venue. We could really be here for a while. We could be here for a couple of years and, you know, build. Get a critical mass of people, maybe get up to even, like, 500 people here. And we really felt like we were going to be there for a long time. And week after week after week, just more and more people would show up and. And the crazy thing was, it really started to build through the summer.

Summer's an awful time to add a worship experience. It's terrible to add a second service, but we knew it was time. And so, against all of the advice of any church planting expert, we went to two services on Mother's Day.

After Mother's Day, generally speaking of church patterns, things start to filter off. So we were expecting this pattern to hit Elevation, but it didn't happen. We grew every week.

I remember the last week that we were meeting at the Levine Senior center. We had over 500 people. And at the time, I just could not imagine ever seeing more people in a single worship experience or at a single church on a weekend.

So we thought that we would be in the Senior center for five years. And it ended up we were only there for about five months.

I remember Pastor came in with this idea. He said we were going to do staff Advance. I said, wait a minute, it's a staff retreat. He said, no, no, no. Retreat is not the word that describes what we're about to do.

I went to staff advance a couple months before I actually came on full time for staff here at Elevation. And I remember calling Ferris from this mountain cabin that we were having the meeting in to Saint Ferris. This is the most intense thing I've ever been a part of. I mean, it is. It's awesome, but it is intense. And just as soon as we woke up to when we went to bed that night, it was just constant vision, praying, planning, and we were praying and talking about some pretty audacious goals. And part of probably the biggest thing that came from that staff advance was God really laying it on our hearts that we were going to reach 10,000 people by the year 2010. Right out of the gate, I knew that the vision for this house was big. And I'd gotten myself into something that was much bigger than even I had anticipated. And I loved it. I loved every second of it. I loved hearing vision from Pastor Steven, and I loved knowing that we were going to shake the foundations of the city.

The day that we moved back to Providence into the auditorium was huge for us, especially for us, who were members of the corps team, because we had seen great growth at the Levine Center. We were very blessed to have that facility. But the dreams that we had had back in the blue Room at Christ's covenant of just seas of people walking into elevation, it happened on that first day of Providence.

I mean, something shifted, man.

It was like Pentecostal.

You could just sense that it was going to be different.

It was just like God flipped a switch balls out.

I mean, I can't even call it. It was crazy.

It was just incredible. I didn't know where the people Were.

Coming from the end of our first year, we saw over a thousand people showing up, baptized. 50 people on one weekend. We start talking about skyrockets through 1800. The growth of elevation was almost like a bomb went off.

We just started seeing God do outrageous things. I mean, it was out of control.

Rooms were full.

This was our vision from God coming to life.

It was just, it was nuts.

We started seeing lives transformed all in front of us. We started seeing dozens and dozens of people give their life to Jesus. We started to see people actually excited to be baptized. And we started baptizing people one over the other, over the other.

The momentum just wouldn't stop. I mean, we're baptizing people like crazy.

We started to see church planters from all around the country pick up the phone and call us in Charlotte, say, what are you guys doing? And I have to tell them. I said, we don't know.

Oh man. The pastor starts getting invited to all the Christian conferences that we used to attend. He actually spoke at Catalyst, the largest Christian conference, you know, one of the largest Christian conferences in the country. We actually took the core team. He stood the core team in the middle of his talk and 12,000 people are just clapping to see what God had done. Then we were able to go to C3. Pastor was able to speak at the conference that started it all for us. 2005. We were sitting there and the church was four people and we're just sitting there. I'm shell shocked because I had no idea. And this was the conference that really paved the way and helped start all. Now pastor's actually speaking on that stage. He's speaking at that conference. We've got new campuses that we're adding. The video preaching is actually working.

Do people really want to watch a sermon on video?

I don't know.

It was weird.

I mean, if I'm being honest, I'm.

Just gonna say it was weird.

I hated it at first.

It took a couple weeks for me.

To get used to that. I was raised with pastor at the.

Pulpit, you know, in the sanctuary. And when they would ask, so who's the preacher gonna be there? I would say, well, it's Pastor Steven. You're gonna see him on video. Most of those folks didn't even give it a chance because they didn't think it would translate. They didn't think it would work.

I really didn't think it was going to work.

If we can actually make multi site work, we can be a church that doesn't just reach 10,000 people. We can actually be a church that reaches 100,000 people and that really, there's no limit to the amount of people we can reach for Jesus through using technology.

Less than three months later, I made a decision to follow Jesus preaching the pudding.

For me, it worked.

We started seeing people just giving generously from their finances and really trusting God and putting them first in their finances.

We had overflow rooms that were completely packed.

We would bring dozens of chairs all the way down in front of the stage, all the way along the side walls, also along the back walls. Once we had that packed full, we then went to our first overflow, shoved it full, went to our second overflow. And then Usher started running up to me. Larry, what are we gonna do with all these people?

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Worship experiences.

We started to see kids in our children's ministry give their life to Jesus. And story after story about how a kid is bringing his friends. And then we got teenagers.

Students were coming from all over the place, and parents started coming and following them. Imagine that parents were following their kids to church, really, just to make sure it wasn't a cult. And they stayed.

Bringing mom and dad to church that had been out of church for years. And growth is going through the roof. One thing right after the other after the other. And we were praying these audacious prayers, and they were happening so fast. It was almost like God was saying, try to keep up with me.

It was just. It just didn't stop. God just kept pouring it on and on and on.

Probably one of the highlights for me was when we saw over a thousand people get baptized in two weeks.

I was one of over a thousand people being baptized in two weekends.

We baptized a thousand people over a two week period.

Person after person after person. Just like that Willow Creek video that we had seen. And just being so emotional at thinking, God, you. You really are making all of this come to life.

I remember there was this one girl and her story, it was just so powerful for me because she was undergoing treatment for cancer.

And so I got up and I went and went backstage and I thought of, like, all these ways that I could possibly keep this wig on my head. Finally I was like, it's just not going to happen. As soon as I get dunked, it's going to come off. That's going to be worse. So I took it off. Gene Lake was a staff member that baptized me. And, you know, he squeezed my hand. It was like a reassurance, like, you know, I can.

I see.

You know, obviously you're going Through a lot. And, you know, he baptized me. And when he. When he dipped me under, I literally felt like I was a completely different person.

When that person comes up out of the water and they hear this family, this church family celebrating their decision and clapping and applauding and celebrating, and they've been forgiven of everything that's behind them. It's an incredible, incredible place.

I mean, it was not easy. It's not easy to grow a church, but we were still seeing the growth now, I mean, the days of the community center, when it was so hard and it was so slow, now it was equally hard, but we were seeing the. The results. And then there was Sofa Express. So the church was growing and growing and growing. We're busting at the seams. Providence is full. Pastor's preaching four times. We've since added the Butler campus. And the place is, you know, full. We're bouncing pastor back and forth. Right off of 485 at independence was an old Kmart that had since been converted to the Ashley Furniture's distribution warehouse. Ashley Furniture had it. They were relocating and they were going to sublet that 45,000 square feet. Well, the location seemed to be ideal for us because it had proximity to 485. It was in between Providence and Matthews. Seemed to make the most sense. So I started meeting with leasing agent, got to the point where I drafted up a letter of intent to lease the space and actually make it our home. Everything was kind of coming together.

Everything just was just going right along as planned.

So we were going to tell our.

Leaders we were going to take them on buses from the senior center to this location. We were going to pray and we were going to tell everybody about it.

We had all the plans. Larry Bride the buses rented, and I went into work and I got a phone call at 9 o' clock Monday morning.

So I get this call from my husband. He says, chunks just came in here.

And told me Sofa Express is blocking our lease and we're not gonna be able to get to Matthews campus.

You could just hear the devastation in his voice. He went on to explain to me that there was another company in the strip mall that had a no contest that they could deny any leaser.

So I said to him, I said, do you want me to cancel the buses? And he looked at me, I would never forget this. He said, no, we're not canceling those buses. We're going to get in those buses. We're going to go down to that building like we were going to. We're going to Pray.

So he told me, we're still going to have the meeting, and we're going to pray. And I remember sitting on the front row of that meeting, just fighting back tears, because I knew that he had to break this devastating news to a group of people who were really excited.

We were there to celebrate. We were there to celebrate. Yeah, that the deal was going to go through.

I just sat there trying not to cry.

Pastor stood up in the Levine Senior center and said, you know, Matthews fell through.

It was a little unsettling in some ways, because we hadn't really experienced a big, like, stop sign like that.

Man, what do you mean, it's not going to happen?

He stood up there and he told everybody, and I need every one of.

You to get on the bus with me. We're right over to that dadgum parking lot, but we're going to play over there now. But as soon as we heard what the next step was, we said, well, let's get in the daggum buses. We piled everybody in those buses that didn't have air conditioning.

I don't know where Larry got them, but they were hot, no air conditioning, and it was so crammed with people, I actually had to sit on Dan Bancroft's lap.

And so we all got on the buses and in our cars and drove, you know, basically across the street to the loading docks of this warehouse.

We kneeled in those loading docks, and we prayed that God would open the door.

We loaded the buses, we went from the senior center down to Matthews to the loading dock, and we had a prayer service.

And we all got down on our knees on that rough gravel, and we just started to pray.

We're going to believe that God's going to provide for our church.

We claimed God. This is what you told us was going to be our first permanent location. We're standing firm on this, that this was the place, and we're asking you for it.

God had done everything else that he had promised, and we couldn't believe that he wouldn't do that here. We just couldn't see how it was going to happen. In the midst of all the emotions of that time, where we thought we were going to have the building, and then the disappointment of not getting it. Pastor Stephen was really steady. He believed that God had made us a promise that that building was going to be ours.

We drive by this building all the time, and every time I was in the car with my husband, and I guess every time he was in the car by himself, anytime he drove by that warehouse, he would Stretch his hand towards the warehouse, and he would pray, father, in Jesus name, that warehouse is ours, and we believe you for it. And we ask that you would give us that back. You promised that was ours. We asked that you would give us that back. And even if I was talking, we would be in mid conversation, and he would very rudely interrupt me, stretch out his hand and say, father, in Jesus name, that facility is ours. And the prayer was a little bit different every time, but basically the same thing. Father, in Jesus name, that facility is ours. And one day he came home from work and he said, guess what? And I said, what? He said, the furniture store is going out of business.

The store that blocked our lease, Sofa Express, went out of business.

Not just that one location, but all 77 across the country were out of business. And it was like, oh, crap. Pastor Steven just prayed this company out of business. It was almost like God put an exclamation point on the whole thing. When we had baptisms on the same loading dock where two years earlier we had prayed, we had knelt down on that loading dock and prayed that God would give us the building after we were told no.

I remember standing in the baptism tank.

My mind raced back to a year and a half ago. We weren't sure if we were going to be in this building.

I looked out, and there was a moment where I just happened to notice Jeremiah, my little son, and Heather sitting out there almost exactly where two years earlier we had knelt down and prayed.

And it was just such an incredible moment as families were gathered and literally.

Almost a thousand sitting there watching it, echoing celebration after celebration after every single one gets out of the water. Unbelievable.

And just like God does what should have been a momentum killer, God actually spun it, and it became one of the greatest things to propel us forward as a church. We're still feeling the effects of the momentum we have from seeing God come through and giving us the Matthews campus. You know, our story as a church is one promise after another being fulfilled. And I don't think there's a better picture of that so far than Easter at Tubernacle Warner arena, when we saw over 10,000 people in worship together under one roof. And I think back three years ago to when we were sitting in that mountain cabin and we were praying, God, we want to see 10,000 people reached.

You were really getting to see how we are, you know, our mantra and our vision to really change this city, Taking over a venue like that in the heart of downtown.

We knew the exact chair that was the 10,000th person.

And I just remember watching as this.

Place was filling up and it's coming around the upper bowl and that seat was filled.

Once we got beyond where that 10,000th seat was, I just began weeping. I said, God, thank you, thank you.

That I got to be here and see this.

There was just this sense of excitement. Again, an answered prayer.

I remember stopping and thinking to myself, like, I have to take snapshots, mental snapshots of this day so that I don't miss out.

And you hear these stories of lines wrapped around the building. You start to see, you know, Twitter photos coming in of all these people.

You know, it's not just about attendance numbers, but to actually think about all the people's lives that have been changed through this church and to know that behind every number, behind every statistic is just a story.

I just felt like God had delivered on a promise that he had spoken to us, and especially that this is a long term promise. This is something he's going to do.

For a long time.

God is at work in Elevation Church, and it is worth it. It is worth the struggle. It is worth the second guessing and praying and seeing God use those two kids in an incredible way.

I'd look behind me and ram me.

To see the seats filling up and to see all of those people and.

See that child just overwhelms me. It was just a promise from God that he's always going to take care of us. And I almost missed my opportunity.

But.

Thank God that I didn't and got to be part of this move of God. And I remember in the middle of the baptisms, while we were singing, I.

Just remember standing there and.

A lot.

Of emotions built up.

At this point, again, working really hard.

And wanted the presentation to just be perfect.

And we get to this moment where the last person is baptized and the whole arena stands on their feet and they're clapping and cheering. And we have.

Over 100 kids on.

Stage from some outreach partners, some inner city kids, some of our Elevation kids are making this choir on stage. And it's just this moment of, like, I know that what God's called us to here is real. And I just know that this is.

Just the beginning and this is just the foundation.

Sa.

Daddy.

How are you? Good.

Give me love.

Give me fire.

Love. How do you feel? Good. How's your ear? Good. Is it better?

So ready? Get a big piece.

Come on, bubba. Let's see who can be the best broccoli eater.

Welcome to Elevation. If this is your first time here, you are our vip. I can't find broccoli. One time God told to Jonah, go to the city of Nineveh. You don't have to find the right page.

There you go. That'll work.

God sent a big fish to swallow Jonah up. So God made the whale spin out on dry land. Then he headed the way to Nineveh and told all the people to do the right thing.

Yay.

Goodbye. Now what?

What do you mean now?

Sam Sa.