By Sharon Kraemer. A core group of 150 adult believers? Sunday afternoon worship and Sunday school? Becoming an “organized church” only ten weeks after the first worship service?”Somebody doesn’t have their facts straight,” you’re thinking. “New churches just don’t begin like that.”

But Christ Community in Franklin, Tennessee, was not your ordinary mission church, and God had been preparing Scotty Smith for a special challenge. To set the scene, the North Carolina native moved to Nashville in August of ’79 to become Cortez Cooper’s youth pastor at First Presbyterian. Fifteen months later both men withdrew from the EC.U.S. Within nine weeks Cooper and Smith were called by approximately 700 adults to be the pastors of what became Christ Presbyterian, PCA five months later. Most of the people had been mem