"Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen."
Ephesians 3:20-21
In 1999, God gave a group of godly, like-minded men a vision to start a new church that would impact the entire northwest Montgomery County region with the life-changing truth of God’s Word. These men shared a passion to do God’s work God’s way as well as a conviction that the Bible is the final authority for what to believe and how to live.
We stepped forward in faith trusting God to guide us and provide for us. He graciously provided Montgomery Elementary School as a place to meet and 150 people attended the first worship service of Lakeside Bible Church.
The enthusiasm during that first year was electric as everyone pitched in to make church happen every week. We set up the nursery in the hallway, used folded lunch tables to create Sunday School classes for the kids, the teenagers met in the foyer, and we utilized any quiet corner we could find for our adult Equipping Classes. Every Sunday after church people would pull their trucks and vans up to the front doors and they would load all the equipment, supplies, and resources and take them home and store them in their garages during the week. Somehow it would all show up again the next week. In time we were able to buy a trailer and slowly but surely things got more and more organized.
It didn’t take long, however, for us to realize that the school wasn’t going to work out as a long-term meeting place, so we began praying and looking for another place to meet. There were very few options to choose from, but we saw a large building under construction called Haven’s Landing (now KOA Campground). Several of us would regularly stop by and walk through the framed up building and pray that God would allow us to meet there when it was completed. When we approached the owner about renting space for their Sunday services, he agreed to let us meet there until we were able to build a facility of our own.
In the meantime, our young body, convinced that the church was not a building but a group of people who have committed their lives to follow Christ, learned to be creative and content in the use of rented facilities. However, God honored our commitment to build people rather than buildings much sooner than any of us expected. In just four short years, through much prayer and the joyful, generous, and sacrificial giving of His people, God graciously provided enough money to purchase 12 acres of prime land and to construct a modest, but efficient multi-purpose facility that we were able to move into in July of 2003.
A few years later, however, we found ourselves once again learning how to be creative and content with space limitations and believed it was hindering our ability to reach and teach people as effectively and excellently as we desired. So we introduced a two-service format on Sunday mornings to accommodate our growing attendance. We purchased a portable building to serve as a temporary meeting place for our Student Ministry in order to free up more classrooms for the Children’s Ministry to use on Sunday morning and Wednesday night. And we began to fervently pray and patiently wait upon God to provide us the necessary funds to build an education/activity center that would allow us to maximize our impact for Christ in this community and around the world.
God was faithful to answer our prayers and He enabled us to complete our new addition in December 2014 which now allows our entire church body to sing, pray, and listen to the preaching of God's Word together on Sunday mornings and provides extra space to reach out more creatively and effectively to our thriving community. From the beginning, we adopted the motto of the famous pioneer missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, who said: “God’s work done God’s way will never lack God’s supply!”
Like Taylor, we put to test the promises of God and trusted that He will prove Himself faithful in the future as He always has in the past and continue to glorify Himself here at Lakeside Bible Church by doing above and beyond anything anyone could ask for or even imagine for generations to come (Eph. 3:20-21).