City Church OTR Launches!
City Church OTR in Cincinnati officially launched on Easter Sunday! We celebrate with this church as they form a new community in the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood. Co-pastors Chris Marlin and Tyler Chernesky share: The theme of our Easter Celebration was "Not finished yet..." We felt this was reflective of
The Latest: April News
There is so much to celebrate about the work of church planting: leaders applying their God-given gifts, new people encountering the good news, local volunteers and staff being developed, and — of course! — new believers following Jesus. Church planting frequently brings about another wonderful occurrence: new churches that invest in new
Plan A: Living the Book of Acts
Header photo: Paris, where a new church has been established in recent years in partnership with Orchard Group. One of our favorite church planting passages in the Bible is in Acts 14:21-26: They preached the gospel in that city and won a large number of disciples. Then they returned
The Best Kind of Motivation
Right now, Orchard Group is backing several church planters who have left secure jobs at established churches in order to pursue a vision of planting a new church. Why would someone voluntarily trade security for fragility, or something known for something ambiguous? Church planting often requires these kinds of big
The Latest: March News
Header photo: Preview service at History Makers Church (Greater Miami) God continues to move in and through new churches that you are helping to establish! This month, we want to highlight some of the ways church planting leaders have been at work in Greater Miami and in Oakland: Greater MiamiOver
Orchard Group Report 2020-2021
It’s hard to think of very many aspects of normal life that haven’t been disrupted in the past year. Yet, one thing has never been disrupted, and never will be: God is still at work in our world!
"God has shown us once again just how good he is"
By Luke Greer, Director of Partnership Receiving truly good news is a delight — all the more so in the middle of a prolonged tumultuous season. As our team here at Orchard Group began preparing last year to publish our annual report, I was a bit apprehensive as to what we
The Latest: February News
It's hard to imagine a more unprecedented year than 2020. Yet, God's work through new churches remained constant. In 2020, thousands of people heard the good news about Jesus for the first time, hundreds came to new faith and were baptized, and local communities were creatively served — all through churches
Celebrating One Year at Community Church
This article is contributed by Lou Pizzichillo, lead planter of Community Church on Long Island. In his letter to the church in Ephesus, Paul wrote these words. If you stop and think about them for a minute, they’re pretty extreme. In Ephesians 3:20-21, he says... “Now to him
Why Church Planting?
Christian missions efforts have a rich history of creative and fruitful outreach across the world, and individuals and churches have an ocean of possibilities as they consider how to invest their resources. Why should church planting be an integral part of that mission? With so many good options, why choose
January News from Orchard Group - A Letter from Brent
Dear Friends and Partners, How many things in your life were disrupted in 2020? Maybe you had to stop going into the office for work. Maybe you lost your job. If you have kids in school, your routines were certainly interrupted. Maybe political strife unsettled your city or your relationships.
Christmas 2020: Not Foreign to the Christian Story
By Luke Greer, Orchard Group's partnership director. In many ways, much of what we have experienced in 2020 is not unlike the historical backdrop that Jesus was born into. In Jesus’ day there were entrenched interest groups, social unrest, competing ideologies, mutual distrust across ethnic lines, and profoundly different political