“Wilderness Road”

We’re just getting started here with a blog presence for the progress on renovating the old North Cove School. It used to be an “all twelve grades” kind of school, and was most recently only an elementary school. They built a new one down the road, and then put this one up for auction (not on eBay:-) and my parents bought it for the use of God’s Kingdom. Praise God! God is really in control–there were several stories of people that intended to be there that couldn’t for one reason or another.

This isn’t the first act of the play, though. Probably the farthest back that would be good to start with is when we moved back to Marion, North Carolina from New York City, where we were helping with the FIRE School of Ministry branch in Manhattan. When we first came back to this area, we had several things on our hearts from the Lord: to be a house of prayer, to train and equip the saints, to be a missions outpost, and to do some work on “the land” with my dad.

We went through several different seasons trying to implement these things, with varying degrees of success. We had been connecting with Bob Gladstone from FIRE, and God was speaking to him also about training on land in Western North Carolina at the same time as us. As we tried to fulfill all these things, some aspects–particularly the “building” aspect–never came through. We had quotes from various builders that we accepted, and then it was like they just fell off the map. God was working out many things in us personally and collectively.

The first act of establishment, sort of a driving of a tent peg, was to place a monument that states the text from Psalm 127–”Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it…”

The purchase of the school was way out of the ballpark of anything we were considering in terms of size, but God had it in store for us. Since the purchase early last year (2006), we have been renovating classrooms into residential areas: a house for us, a hotel-style room, dorm spaces, and we’re working toward more soon.

I’ll try to get some details of the process and photos up soon.

Bless you,

Neill