We are a mission church of the Central Carolina Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America. We began public worship in East Charlotte, North Carolina on September 7, 2014. We are the fifth daughter church from our mother church, Uptown Church. So, how did this church plant come about?
Tyler Dirks graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary in 2007 (if you are wondering what is meant by “Reformed” then go read Acts 17:11; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 2:8-10). He was an intern and a longtime member at Uptown Church. From the Fall of 2007 to the Summer of 2013 Tyler was the campus minister for Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) at Johnson & Wales University in Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. In the summer of 2012, Tyler & Carrie and their kids worked with Kilkenny Presbyterian Church in Cill Chainnigh, in Kilkenny County, Ireland. It was during their service with this Christ-centered, means of grace reliant, Gospel-rooted, rural, blue-collar, and diverse church community across the Atlantic that God began to definitively transition the Dirks family into the missions work of church planting.
Upon arriving back in the United State of America Tyler began to have rigorous conversations about the nature and logistics of church planting with trusted men and women whom the Lord had providentially and sovereignly placed in his life. The more Tyler and Carrie processed and percolated on God’s calling to church planting the more they desired to discern where the Lord might be calling them to plant a new Christ-centered, Gospel-rooted church.
Around October of 2013 Tyler began having substantial dialogue with Jason Piteo (who was just about to graduate from Reformed Theological Seminary). Jason came to Charlotte in 2010 to begin his seminary journey (with church planting already in mind) and, with his family, became members at Uptown Church that fall. Tyler and Jason became acquaintances and eventually friends during their shared tenures at Uptown Church, and that friendship grew as we debriefed with each other on how we were individually discerning the Lord’s direction and call on our lives, particularly as it related to church planting. We began to realize that our directions and calls might, in fact, be converging in East Charlotte.
In Spring 2013, Jason invited Tyler to contemplate the mission of planting a new Christ-centered, Gospel-rooted, church in East Charlotte (a blue-collar, and exceedingly diverse area of the world). One of our foundational meetings happened on March 11th, 2013 when Tyler & Carrie Dirks ate Italian food with Jason & Jill Piteo, and talked about planting a Christ-centered, Gospel-rooted, church in East Charlotte. In April 2013, the session (elders) of Uptown Church unanimously voted to approve Tyler & Jason for the work of planting a church in East Charlotte. Tyler & Jason labored for one year as church planting apprentices at Uptown Church before being sent out into the mission field in Summer 2014. Core group meetings began in April 2014 with roughly 25 adults. Apart from that, our history is in the future, so stay tuned (and come worship the Lord with us)!