New church plant overcomes the anxiety of possibility and avoids burnout
Ormewood Church in Atlanta thrives in a location where another congregation had closed
ATLANTA — “The hardest thing about church planting is what we call the ‘anxiety of possibility,’” said the Rev. Jenelle Holmes, organizing pastor of Ormewood Church in Atlanta. Holmes, who has been leading this new worshiping community for eight years, passed on a piece of advice which she received from a mentor with experience in church planting — “act your age as a church.”
“When you are a new organization, there are so many possibilities. There are so many things you could do. There are so many ideas on the table. And if you go after all of them, you're never going to know who you are,” explained Holmes, who described this state as “when we feel overwhelmed by potential.”
In 2017, Holmes was called by a group of invested residents of the Ormewood Park neighborhood in Atlanta after another congregation closed in 2016. The Presbytery of Greater Atlanta was in charge of discerning what to do with the church property, which also housed a thriving preschool on its lower level and playground. Between the closure of Ormewood Presbyterian Church and the starting of a new worshiping community, the Rev. Dr. Lindsay Armstrong, executive director of the presbytery’s New Church Development Commission, spent months engaging neighbors with community organizing techniques and in meetings before gathering the group of invested partners who would call Holmes as the organizing pastor.
“The community had already said ‘no’ to the church that was here,” said Armstrong. “Just starting a new one in the same place was not a given that it would work.”
The pastor nominating committee that called Holmes included only one Presbyterian, but some of its members ended up joining the new worshiping community when Holmes arrived. Katherine Clevenger lived next door and called the campus “the heartbeat of the neighborhood.” Clevenger said she had been “church-hopping” when the discussions about what to do with the property began, so she joined the process and the committee that called Holmes.
Other members agree with Clevenger that since the location of the church is the center of the neighborhood, its mission is tied to being at the heart of the community and its gatherings. “The name of the neighborhood is Ormewood Park, but there is no park,” said Manning Kent, who agreed with another member, C.J. Clark, that “a lot of people consider this church to be ‘Ormewood Park.’”
Ormewood Church offers a green space for kids to play and dogs to roam. Its parking lot is a safe place for teens to learn to skate or to gather for Halloween celebrations and family pizza nights and festivals.
Joslyn Jackson, director for Children’s Ministry and Community Connections, leans into Ormewood Church’s identity as a central gathering place as she creates partnerships with local enrichment groups to offer after-school programming and evening adult classes on the grounds and markets the renting of the church’s space, renovated with the help of grant money.
“There are so many directions you could run, and you’ll probably just exhaust yourself, and you’re going to burn out really quickly,” said Holmes, who advised “choosing and experimenting in very intentional ways.”
Resolved
As a new year begins, individuals, groups and organizations often feel called to start new habits and programs. For individuals, new year’s resolutions have a low success rate. According to Columbia University, only 25% stay committed to their resolutions over the first 30 days, and less than 10% reach their expressed goals each year.
With so many options to grow or experiment, organizations and churches can fall into similar patterns of good intentions that lead to burnout if taken on too hastily. To protect against this, Holmes and other leaders of new worshiping communities have received support of trainings and grants through the New Church Development Commission in their presbytery and through 1001 New Worshiping Communities of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In 2022, Holmes received a sabbatical grant through 1001 NWC, which seeks to fill the gap of new worshiping leaders who are not eligible for grants available to pastors of traditional congregations.
With the support of the neighborhood and the presbytery, Ormewood Church has grown in size, programming and outreach. The church’s leadership team is currently in discernment over how and when to charter as a PC(USA) congregation.
Armstrong described the new church in Ormewood as “alive on Sunday mornings and on all the other times everybody gathers.”
“People come and find friendships here,” said Armstrong. “They find relationships here with God and with one another.”
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
