Since 2009

Our story

How we started

In the fall of 2009, David Kim and nine other families started meeting in a rented room at Berry Hill Elementary. They'd all come from different church backgrounds — some hurt, some bored, some searching — but they shared a conviction that Nashville needed a place where honest people could ask honest questions and still be met with grace.

The first Sunday, twenty-three people showed up. Nobody had a plan beyond the next Sunday.

The building

In 2014 we bought the old Hobbs printing warehouse at 2145 Franklin Pike and spent eleven months turning it into a worship room, a kids wing, and a fellowship hall. Members did most of the demolition themselves. The mortgage is scheduled to be paid off in 2028, and the elders have committed that everything freed up goes to the neighborhood budget rather than to staff.

Franklin

By 2021 roughly a fifth of the congregation was driving up from Williamson County every Sunday. Rather than build a bigger room in Berry Hill, we sent them out: the Franklin campus launched in September 2022 in leased space on Mallory Station Road, with Renee Alvarez as campus pastor. It runs one Gathering at 10:00 AM and has grown to about 350 people.

Where we're headed

Three things in 2026: paying down the building so we can give more away, launching a foster care support ministry with two partner agencies, and hiring a second Franklin staff member. Updates come through the weekly bulletin and in Pastor David's State of the Church message each January.

What we've gotten wrong

We've been at this long enough to have a list. We grew our Sunday attendance faster than our group leaders for about three years, and a lot of people slipped through. We launched a Saturday night service in 2017 and closed it fourteen months later. We were slower than we should have been to put real money behind our neighborhood commitments. We say this out loud because a church that only publishes its wins isn't telling you much.