Adventures of a Church Planter's Wife

Together by calca

About the Author - Matt & Philippa Hatch

Matt started and leads Mosaic Church, Leeds. He and his wife Philippa moved to Leeds from Bedford with their young family in 2002.

This Article

Friday, 27 March, 2009 - 12:31

Matt Hatch has been involved in church planting for the last six years, and knows all too well what it costs to move a family to a new place to set up home. Here Matt introduces his wife’s testimony from her perspective of church planting. This article first appeared in the Newfrontiers magazine in July 2008.

‘You might think I am foolish for asking, but I thought it would be interesting to ask my wife for her honest reflections of the church planting adventure. What is it like to be the wife of a church planter starting from scratch? How do you adjust to a new home, new city, new life? So, after finding a babysitter, Philippa sat down at her computer with a strong coffee and began to recall her experience of planting a church in Leeds.'

Pioneering anything comes at a cost, and Matt and I felt the painful reality of this as we moved to Leeds in September 2002 to plant Mosaic Church. When we moved we didn't have jobs, a church planting grant, or a team. The church that was sending us had already planted several times, so those who were ready to ‘go' had already gone! We had a seventeen-month-old toddler and I was eight months pregnant.  Some family members thought we were crazy, but God had stirred our hearts and given us a vision to plant a church in Leeds that would not only impact the city but the nations of the world, and we were agitated to get going.

We assumed that Matt would easily be able to find work. After a fruitless six months, a British Gas call centre eventually beckoned, taking him out of the house from 7am to 7pm with a very low starting salary. This didn't cover our bills and each month we'd pray for what we needed; without fail money would appear through our letterbox. Matt worked there for eighteen months before the church was able to employ him full-time, and during that season I saw him faithfully and cheerfully working at a job he hated, snatching rare opportunities to evangelise his colleagues, all the while confirming in him the passion to build the church.

Battling loneliness
My greatest challenge upon arriving in Leeds was loneliness. One of my lowest points came a few months after our arrival. I was driving to a Mother and Toddler group, desperate to find someone I could connect with, and I just started to cry, barely being able to see the road through my tears. I was sleep-deprived, isolated and tired of building friendships that went no deeper than surface conversation. I would come home in the hope that someone would have called, but frequently the answer phone read ‘no messages'. I had a toddler who had entered the ‘terrible twos' early and a newborn with colic who yelled every night from 5-11pm for the first thirteen weeks of his life. At times I felt helpless. Yet there is a thin line between hope and despair, and at my lowest I would feel God gently pulling me to Him. During these times I would draw on the deep wells I had dug in the previous years, meditating on Scripture I had memorised, whilst scraping Weetabix off the walls or changing another nappy.

Having no friends, Matt and I knew we had to be hyper-relational. But we didn't want to just tell people about church; we wanted God to break our hearts for the people of Leeds. Our prayer was, and continues to be, for us to respond in love to everyone we meet. So we would talk and listen to anyone we could, whether that was the person we sat next to on the bus, the waitress serving us coffee, or the cashier in Sainsbury's.

In the following six months I started to make some deeply satisfying and fulfilling friendships in the Mother and Toddler group. Since I had so few Christian friends I would talk about what God was doing in me to my non-Christian friends, which often gave rise to some profound conversations and opportunities to pray for them.

Go to the people
We knew that people wouldn't come to us; we had to go to the people. This has been a great excuse to do things we love. Matt joined a five-a-side football team and found a fellow Arsenal supporter to watch matches with. I took courses in photography and creative writing, and went to the climbing wall. We both joined a gym (it's amazing the number of people Matt has got to share the gospel with in the sauna!) and we've had tons of people over for dinner.

I found that in this season of having small children (the third one arrived in 2005), I needed to get out of the house for some solitude. I therefore go away for 24 hours on retreat every six weeks. This is an oasis time for me where I often journal, pray, read and walk. Sometimes I just sleep for 23 of the 24 hours. Talking of kids, ours have thrived being surrounded by so many different people. I'm sure as they get older we will need to adjust our home life to respond to their needs, but at the moment they love the chaos.

This season of church planting has shown us the pressure of juggling full-time secular work and ministry, and so we now have more realistic expectations of what people are able to give. I clearly remember the sense of isolation in arriving in a new city, so I am always aware of people on the fringe of church and want to open my home to them.

We are now five years on and the church is just over three years old.  We have two full-time and three part-time staff, six Frontier Project volunteers and numerous other volunteers. We run an eighteen-month intensive training school for people wanting to plant churches in the UK and abroad, and we have moved venue five times as the church has grown. In January we moved into a rundown industrial warehouse in the city centre and on our first Sunday there we had over 350 adults. I stood at the back looking at the people God had brought to us, overwhelmed at their hunger for God, their generosity, their desire to become more Christ-like, their willingness to serve, and their yearning to run with the vision to see God transform Leeds and the nations. Church planting ... it's incredibly hard work but I wouldn't want to be doing anything else.

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