A boy from Wisconsin and a girl from California met at a Bible college in Portland. We married in 1999, eventually made our home in California, and spent the years that followed raising our family and serving the Lord in the local church. We raised three wonderful daughters, all now married, and these days we’re grateful to be grandparents to two grandsons.

For a long time, we never expected to leave Placerville.

But over time, we began to wonder if God might be leading us toward something new. We had talked about church planting for years. Maybe it was finally time to stop talking about it and see what God might do.

Part of that came through conversations with students at UC Davis. Both of us have always enjoyed teaching and investing in people, and we found ourselves drawn to these students and the questions they were asking. They were thinking deeply about their faith, wrestling with Scripture, and wanting to understand how what they believed connected to everyday life. In some ways, they reminded us of ourselves when we were younger.

Those conversations didn’t lead us to think we should start a college ministry. They simply opened our eyes to the possibility of a church community where people in different stages of life could know Christ, ask honest questions, grow in their understanding of Scripture, and learn to live it out.

Sacramento also wasn’t a completely unfamiliar place to us. Margo grew up there, where her father pastored a local church for more than 25 years. We still have family in Sacramento, people we love and could imagine serving and ministering alongside. It also seemed like a natural place where people from UC Davis, Sacramento State, and Sacramento City College could find a church community, without PORCH being centered around college ministry.

As we thought and prayed about it, the Land Park and Curtis Park area began to feel like a natural place to explore what this might look like. We didn’t have a perfect plan. We just began to wonder if this was something the Lord might be asking us to pursue.

We want people to have confidence in Scripture. Not simply confidence that the Bible is true, but confidence to open it for themselves, understand what it actually says in its context, ask good questions, and know how God’s Word speaks into the decisions and circumstances of ordinary life. We want people to be shaped by Scripture, to live out what they believe, and to be ready to give a reason for the hope they have.

We didn’t feel particularly qualified to start something new. We had plenty of questions about what it would look like, where it would happen, and whether we were even the right people to do it. So we began by asking the Lord what to do and how to do it.

Then a door opened.

Matt was offered a position with Sutter Health in the Sacramento area. What had seemed difficult, or even unlikely, suddenly became possible. We began to wonder if this was one of the ways the Lord was answering our prayers and making a way for us to take a step.

And so here we are.