Welcome

If you are currently active in a church, we thank God for that. If you do not have a church home, or are new to our community, we want to share the good news of Jesus Christ at New Hope Church with you and your family. We invite you to join us here for worship.

A message from our Pastor:

Thank you for checking our website. My name is Vernon Burrow and I have been pastor since October 2008. I was called out of retirement to lead New Hope Church because of my successful experience in new church development and re-development.

I was born and raised in the wide open spaces of West Texas. God called me to preach right after I graduated from high school and sent me to Bethel College to earn a college degree and then to seminary at what is now called Memphis Theological Seminary. I have been fortunate enough to serve churches where numerical growth was possible and I learned how to lead churches in growth. I availed myself of every learning opportunity that came my way to help my churches get stronger. That included training in Bethel Bible Series in Madison, Wisconsin, the Stephen Ministry in St. Louis, and Small Group ministry on the campus of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, and of course endless reading and study to expand my horizons.

All of the experiences mentioned above have enhanced my ability to serve as leader of New Hope at this stage of growth. But the main thing that helps me is that my call to the ministry is a strong as it was in the beginning, and my passion for reaching new people is stronger than it has ever been.

So the New Hope challenge is right for me.

If, during my time of helping to decide where to plant new churches, I had come to a geographical area like this, and I had stood where our parking lot now is, I would have said, “This is the spot to start a church”. It is almost exactly equidistant between Lebanon, Gallatin, and Mt. Juliet and the population is surely to increase. It is easily assessable via interstate to a much larger area.

So New Hope has a new future because it is at the right place at the right time to do something fine for the Lord. Everything is in place — ideal location with enough land; beautiful sanctuary that is paid for and large enough in which to grow; space for new Sunday school rooms. The Lord seems to be gathering a congregation that will do something really big for the Lord in the next few years. It seems that every new person that comes to this congregation has the sense of call to help make happen here what God wants to happen.

New Hope Church has an interesting history. It started as a frontier church, and continued as this area became a prosperous farming community. Now it is in a prime location for becoming a very strong church for future generations.

This geographical area has not yet formed a “sense of community”, and it needs to. There will be some developmental issues we need to face together. A sense of community will make for better living for us all.

So we think the Lord wants us to be the community church — a warm center of Christian love that brings people together. We want people around us to feel that this church is a symbol of community and that many things go on here that make the community better and more attractive to people who are thinking about living here.

And from the number of people who are coming from afar, the Lord may be looking to make us a regional church. God’s will be done.  -VB