The seeds of BayLight Church Community were planted some time in the cold Chicago winter of 1999 when Mike and Leslie were winding down their Masters of Divinity degrees at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Interestingly enough, Mike had recently filled out a placement questionnaire ranking church planting as the next to last thing heíd like to do! Church planting, he reasoned, was for the entrepreneurial heroes of faith — of which he was not a card-carrying member.

But the Lord spoke — in an authoritative, yet quietly inaudible voice: "Mike, I want you to plant a church — and I want you to plant it with Ted Kim." Needless to say, Mike was alarmed: alarmed that God was asking him to do something that he did not want to do and moreover do it with someone that he hardly knew. Maybe it was bad pizza, but Mike and Leslie concluded that it probably was not the Lord.

Then in the summer of 1999, God met Mike and Leslie at a youth retreat where Mike was the keynote speaker. There, God injected them with a fresh infusion of faith and restored their confidence in His power. They still didnít believe that they could plant a church. But they now believed that God could. It was absolutely crazy. And they knew it was God.

But one last piece had to fall into place, and his name was Ted Kim. Ted had recently taken a worship pastor position at a Vineyard church in Seattle. He was happy and invested in his ministry there. So, Ted said, "sounds like fun, but no way." Despite the initial rejection, a close friendship blossomed between Mike and Ted. And one year later, the Lord made it clear that Ted was indeed called to help Mike plant this church.

And so the real adventure began. In August of 2001, knowing only a handful of people in the Bay Area, Mike, Leslie and Ted packed their bags and journeyed into the unknown. They didnít know how they would eat, who they would meet, and where they would live (in Ted's case). But what they did know was that God had called them to do something that could only succeed if He was to breathe His favor on it. And as an experiment in faith, they decided to take the risk to see if God indeed would.

So, here we are, BayLight Church Community: living proof that God is alive and powerfully at work among his people. We hope in today's service that you experienced that power and saw a testimony of his grace to us.

BayLight Church Community is part of a bigger association of churches called the Evangelical Free Church. Historically, the EFC began in 1884 as a group of missions-minded, warm-hearted, Bible-believing Scandinavians whose main passion was to worship Jesus. While the days of Swedish-speaking EFC churches are over, the EFC has become a diverse group of churches embracing many different cultures across the world. Still, their commitments remain the same: they are still missions-minded, warm-hearted, Bible-believing people whose main passion is to worship Jesus.

The EFC is a solid denomination that prides itself in majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors. In a world where it is offensive to point out the truth, the EFC unashamedly clings to the Bible as the source of truth. Yet it does so with freedom, choosing not to micromanage grey areas in the Bible concerning church practice. It avoids the red tape of bigger denominations by allowing each church to establish its own leadership and make the calls on those grey areas. So in areas of doctrine and governance, the EFC is a breath of fresh air.

BayLightís association with the Evangelical Free Church is born out of a desire to embrace that same legacy and be part of a movement thatís bigger than its own walls.