User:Wantwater4u

Highlands Fellowship, Jimmie Davidson 

A different kind of church." Throughout the 80's, this was a repeated comment as Jimmie and Lori made visits to their hometown during their years in Kentucky and Texas. With each trip, Jimmie saw how Abingdon was growing rapidly and he could see a need. Never had it occurred to him that God just might use him and his family to meet that need. At least not until that day in '94, when his wife looked over at him and for the first time replied, "Why don't we do it?"

It's amazing to me how I could not see the possibility that God may want us to plant a church. It was always, "Somebody else should do it. That day, God spoke through my wife Lori and opened my eyes." Jimmie's first reaction was, "We can't do that!" The very next day at Grundy Baptist Church, he laid face down in his study and asked God, "Do you want us to begin this new work?"

"My answer came with the joy I felt as I began to realize after all these years, God had prepared us for this very moment." One thing was clear from the very beginning, this was going to be a God thing. God was simply inviting the Davidsons to join him in what He wanted to do in the region. "God's word to me in the very beginning was this work would attract and reach thousands of people for Jesus Christ. As Isaiah said, it would be like streams in the desert.

Even though the young couple knew God was up to something, they had no idea what the new church should look like. Jimmie grew up in a traditional Southern Baptist Church and graduated from a Baptist College and Seminary. "It was at Rosedale Baptist church that I learned the importance of reaching people for Christ," he says. Jimmie knew only one way to do church until someone told him about Saddleback in Southern California. "I asked, 'What's a saddleback?' I soon found out that Saddleback was a seeker-sensitive church committed to doing church in a new and fresh way." When Jimmie contacted the church, they sent him a tape on the story of Saddleback and he cried through the whole message. God had given Pastor Rick Warren his plan for our generation, and now Jimmie knew that God had the same in mind for the church in Abingdon.Jimmie studied the model of Saddleback Church for over six months, preparing him to do church in a different way based entirely on the principles found in Scripture. In December 1994, an open house was held to invite the community to come and hear the vision for this new kind of church. By March, there were 40 to 50 people preparing for Virginia Highlands Christian Fellowship's first public worship service, to be held at the Coomes Recreation Center. This small group hand-addressed over 8,000 letters to the community, and Easter weekend 1995 brought 156 people in attendance at the first worship service of Highlands Fellowship.A few months later they moved the Sunday services to Abingdon High School, where they continued to grow until reaching an average attendance of over 700 in 2000. On Easter Sunday of 2000, they moved into their new 46,000 square-foot Worship Center with an attendance of 1,200 people. Highlands is now a multi-site church which now averages over 2,500 in weekend worship with multiple venues. On Easter 2006, more than 6,000 were in attendance (in a town of 7,800 people). To date, 1,500 people have become members and 1,117 have been baptized since the church began.