The Church Planters Who Didn’t Want to Plant a Church

Drew Sodestrom didn’t like the idea of church planting. If you asked him to plant a church before 2013, he would have declined. He saw church plants forming from the wrong motivations rather than from a desire to advance the Kingdom of God.  

“Out of seminary, most of the church planters I knew were pastors who got fired or angry associate pastors who left their church to plant,” Drew said. “I saw that as an empire movement rather than a kingdom movement.” 

His wife, Jen, also didn’t like the idea of planting a church, but for different reasons. She had a supportive church family and didn’t want to walk away from that. 

And then there was the matter of their two-year-old son.  

Joy in suffering 

While Drew was a pastor at Richfield Community Church (EFCA) in Yorba Linda, California, he was working on his doctoral prospectus, writing on how becoming a parent affects your relationship with our Heavenly Father. Around that time, Jen recognized something was wrong with their son. Soon after, the doctors diagnosed him with leukemia.  

“We saw the church rally around us in a way that we never had seen before in any other circumstance,” Jen said. “I realized what authentic community is supposed to look like. And they didn't do it for [just] a week or two. They did it for years.” 

Drew and Jen spent four years in and out of a hospital, fighting for their son’s life, riding a roller coaster of joy and grief and pain through a recurrence and bone marrow transplant, and growing deeper in their faith through it all as they depended on God and saw Him working.  

That’s when a leader from the EFCA called Drew and asked him to plant a church. Drew laughed.  

“What are the odds you will plant a church in Northern California?” the church planting director asked him. 

“It’s not going to happen,” Drew said.  

Fast-forward six months, and their son was stabilizing. A church in Northern California asked Drew if he would consider being their senior pastor. He considered that offer but realized it wouldn’t be a good fit.  

“They wanted a young, energetic senior pastor and amazing Sundays, but they didn't want a disciplemaking movement to storm the gates of hell,” Drew said.  

Drew’s heart for disciplemaking started while he studied for his master’s thesis. Already serving as a pastor, he admitted his relationship with Jesus at the time was more about religiosity, obligation and duty. Then he read Jesus’ parable of the man who found the hidden treasure in the field, and he had an encounter with the Holy Spirit.

“It was like the Spirit asked me, ‘What would you sell in your joy?’” Drew said. He shed his sense of obligation and went on a journey to have more “joy in Jesus” every day. That became the underlying motivator for his focus on relationships and disciplemaking.

After deciding that the church in Northern California wasn’t a good fit, Drew’s lead pastor pitched the idea of Richfield Community Church sending them to plant a church. That's when his feelings about church planting slightly shifted. It wasn’t about an angry pastor leaving a church to make another one; it was about a church that believed in him to advance the kingdom in a new community.

For six months, Drew and Jen prayed about what God wanted them to do. For a while, it seemed like everyone else around them knew the answer but them. 

“Every assessment, every person we talked with as we processed, family members and even our oncologist, who was a hardcore atheist, all said this is a no-brainer. We should absolutely pick up and move our family 400 miles north and put our efforts into opening a church for other people. I was like, ‘This is insane,’” Jen said.  

In the end, they felt God calling them to plant a church. The support, love and care they received from their Richfield church family inspired them, and they wanted to share that kind of gospel-centered community with other people in other places. They set out to plant in El Dorado Hills, California.  

Relationships, not programs 

Between November 2012 and August 2013, while Drew and Jen set the foundation for the church plant, the “Sunday morning gathering" was the last thing on their agenda. Instead, they focused on building relationships in the community. They coached a kids soccer team, worked out at a local gym, made connections wherever they could and invited people to their house for dinner. They considered the front door of their home as the entrance to the church.  

“I'm just with people because that's what Jesus did. He hung out with people, ate with them and did what the Father told Him to do,” Drew said.  

The first year, their launch team included half a mix of believers in Jesus and a good amount of the half “yet-to-believe,” a term Drew likes to use because “he’s an eternal optimist.” The yet-to-believe wanted to plant a church to make a difference in the community, and they were curious about Jesus. In that year, many of the "yet-to-believe" members came to faith.  

As they developed their team, Drew and Jen felt convicted to launch life groups before they launched a Sunday gathering, against advice telling them to launch a Sunday gathering first. Drew and Jen saw it differently—they believed life groups would be the beating heart of the church.  

In September 2013, they launched their first life group with the intent of launching five more before starting a Sunday gathering, hoping this would weave a culture of relationship building and disciplemaking into the fabric of the church. 

They equipped their team with rhythms and disciplines taken from Jesus’ own way of doing ministry. They asked God every morning, “What are you inviting us into today?” They created a daily reminder at 9:38 a.m. to pray Matthew 9:38. They developed a “pray-watch list,” a list of people in their circle who were “yet-to-believe,” and encouraged each other to pray for those people, watch God at work and be ready to take a step when God opened a door to deeper relationship and conversations. 

In the fall of 2013, they began a launch team gathering in an office suite and called their church Vintage Grace. They prayed, developed ideas on how to serve the community and encouraged each other in praying for the names on their pray-watch list.  

Fighting against gravitational forces 

In the early years, Vintage Grace saw steady growth. They launched more formal Sunday gatherings in the Spring of 2014 in a middle school, and the conversation quickly moved toward building a church building. 

But Drew and Jen weren't comfortable with growing a destination church. From the beginning, the vision was about multiplying groups, disciplemakers and planting more churches.  

They often fought against these kinds of gravitational forces in the culture, pulling them toward growing in one place instead of spreading out and toward adding programming instead of creating disciples.  

When their current gathering space stopped becoming an option, they took steps to build their own building and went into escrow on 10 acres, but they canceled when they realized the cost would have crushed their focus on making disciples and planting churches. 

They continued to pray to God and watch Him work but felt trapped and unsure where to go next. That’s when God provided a solution—a nearby church of 40 people wrote them a letter saying they wanted to join the Vintage Grace family, come under their leadership and give them their building.  

A vision to scatter 

Like most churches, the COVID years were hard and full of challenges, bringing up difficult pastoral conversations. Still, Drew and Jen discovered their focus on life groups and personal disciplemaking allowed them to successfully navigate the difficulty of gathering in large numbers. In 2020, they baptized more people than ever before.  

They invested in disciplemaking movements, nationally and internationally, with the goal of giving 50 percent of their budget to missions (as of publication, they’re at 24 percent). Even in the early days of their ministry, they invested in multiplying communities of faith. They helped launch a church in Sacramento, and later, they partnered with another church planter to plant in Oakland; they also partnered with two existing churches to re-plant as part of the Vintage Grace family of churches—one in Mount Shasta and the other in Mother Lode.

In addition, two years after they planted in El Dorado Hills, they realized many people from Placerville were coming to their church—a 30-minute drive. So they launched a life group that eventually became three life groups, and they prayed about what it might look like to plant a church there.  

The problem was they didn’t have a pastoral candidate to plant a church yet, and they didn’t want a multisite, live-streaming model—they wanted someone in that area to disciple people. They waited until God provided the right person to plant that church, trained him for two years at El Dorado Hills, and in 2023, they sent him to plant in Placerville.  

God, what are you inviting us into today? 

Today, roughly 1,400 people attend Vintage Grace in El Dorado Hills on Sunday morning. But Sunday church attendance numbers don’t impress Drew. He cares more about what happens the other days of the week; he cares about who is on your prayer-watch list, who you are discipling and who you are seeing the Holy Spirit transform. Drew believes the best part about Vintage is that the average person sees themselves as an everyday missionary. 

He and Jen have watched God do powerful things through Vintage Grace, experiencing joy seeing people transformed by the gospel but also suffering significant grief and heartache serving in a broken world. Through it all, it taught them to be “desperately dependent” on Jesus.  

“Right before COVID, I felt God called me to run a literal marathon,” Drew said. “Running is dumb, and yet so much of ministry is a journey of endurance. That’s church planting. It’s trusting the good Father, trusting your rabbi, one step in front of the next.” 

For Jen, church planting revealed her insecurities and vulnerabilities, causing her to cling to Christ even more. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It has shaped a community. It even shaped my family. But it comes with pain points. I wish the Church would know that a pain point doesn’t mean you run away from it.” 

Drew, Jen and the rest of the Vintage Grace family are just getting started. Every year, their focus is on the Great Commission, building relationships and making disciples. And every day, they’ll keep waking up and asking God, “What are you inviting us into today?"