Following a week of preparation and meeting with a potential NCCd Campus planter/pastor and family, I wanted to take a few posts to unpack my thoughts. This is part 3 in the series. My first post focused on the idea that What We Intend To Do Is Good, my second post focused on How We Intend to Do This Being Good, this post begins a look at
Where We Intend to Plant Campuses:
While we are pretty wide open to planting locations, there are three Middle Georgia locations that we have immediately in mind: Milledgeville, Warner Robins, and Forsyth. This series of posts will give some basic info on each of those cities.
Milledgeville
Milledgeville is located almost 30 miles North of Macon. The city’s population is around 20,000. Add to that number almost 6,000 students at Georgia College and State University and 1,000 at Georgia Military College. One website listed the total population within a five mile radius of the city at 40,000.
Where the campus of Georgia College ends, the downtown area of Milledgeville begins. Downtown is a great mix of shops, restaurants, bars and coffee spots in buildings constructed in the late 1800s. The downtown area is beautiful and having 7,000 college students as a neighbor makes for a really great vibe. Downtown seems to be a pretty decent scene for art and music and hosts at least a couple of annual festivals.
New City Connections:
Brooks and Melissa Hinton – Brooks works in Milledgeville and he and Melissa are Missional Community leaders about 12 miles south of Milledgeville.
Heather Holder – I worked closely with Heather while she was with New Town Macon. Heather is from Milledgeville, is very involved in the downtown area as well as the community at large and is employed now by Georgia College. Heather is very familiar with New City Church and our work in Macon. I recently ran into Heather while visiting Milledgeville and she was visibly happy to hear that New City is looking to invest in downtown Milledgeville – she immediately began telling me about a great building that we could use downtown that isn’t on the market…
Josh and Megan Maloy recently moved to Macon to be a part of New City Church. Josh was the Campus Outreach leader at Georgia College and still has a lot of great student contacts at Georgia College.
Amanda Miles is a recent graduate of Georgia College and is also very involved at New City. She was our summer intern and like Josh, still has several contacts on the campus – one being her soon to graduate boyfriend Ben.
Because of Josh, Megan, Amanda, Ben and others we have actually had several students drive the almost 30 miles to New City Church…
Which leads to what we have learned from our Milledgeville connections:
While there is no short supply of churches in Milledgeville, there is a very short supply of gospel-centered, reformed, missional churches who are working to engage students and the city. In a conversation recently with one of the downtown shop owners, I asked about churches – she there were a lot of churches all around the city. I asked if any were really involved in the city for the good of the city – she paused – and answered, ‘No.’
So it seems, Milledgeville may be ready for a church like New City Church – and it seems it is in need of the Gospel.
