here in 2012 , I had been a creative and worship pastor for many years and had actually stepped down a few years prior to moving to the states . At that time , I was just freelancing as a mix engineer and producer , and traveling , leading worship and things like that . When we sensed the stirring for a couple years that God was sending us to Nashville , we really had no idea what that looked like , and we really just prayed to God and said , “ If we ’ re meant to be there , then you ’ ll make a way for us to be there ”. And a long story short , we quite miraculously got Green Cards in the lottery . Every year the U . S . Government holds a lottery and only gives away a certain number of permanent residencies for people from overseas . The year that we applied there were fourteen million people who applied , but they were only giving away fifty thousand Green Cards and just seven hundred positions to Australians out of those . So , the chances were very slim , and in fact when they drew the lottery , we didn ’ t get it , and it had been a shock to us because we had really felt quite strongly that God was going to make a way for us to be in the States . A few weeks later I received a letter from the State Department saying they had messed up the draw and that they were going to re-draw the lottery . Three months later they re-drew it and we were in the re-draw . It was just God saying this wasn ’ t up to chance . He made sure that He did what He needed to do to get us to where we needed to be .
So , long story short we wound up in Nashville in 2012 , and before we left , we prayed to God to ask , “ What have you got for us ? What are we going to do when we get there ?” And we got the sense that He was just quite clearly saying to us that , “ You can ’ t know until you go ”. I thought , that sounds amazing for all these mighty men of God that we read about in the Bible . But I need to know practically what we ’ re going to do when we get there . He just said , “ You need to go before you can know ”. So , when we ended up in Nashville , we had no idea . In fact , I had made a vow that I would never pastor a church , I never saw myself as a pastor . I was quite happy being a creative , and a youth leader , and a producer , and a mix engineer , and all of those things . So , the first few months we were here , I was going to mix a record and just get to know some of the people here in the music community , but I realized quite quickly that this whole group of people didn ’ t have a church home . Not that there weren ’ t enough churches here in Nashville . A lot of these artists travel on the weekend , but almost every church meets sometime on a Sunday morning . There were so many people who were involved in the Christian music world and in the country music world that were believers but had no home or church community because when they were home there was no church service available for them to be a part of .
So , after months and months of feeling this agitation and realizing these people were like sheep without a shepherd , we just realized that we needed to open up a home and at least give these people a community to worship together . That was kind of how our church started , and for the first year we would meet in our basement