Gospel City Church: the Harvest plant of 2009

PLANTED FEBRUARY 2009 AS HARVEST BIBLE CHAPEL GRANGER · RENAMED FEBRUARY 2019 · 52277 HICKORY ROAD

One of the ground's congregations has already lived under two names: in February 2009 a new church was planted at 52277 Hickory Road as Harvest Bible Chapel Granger, out of the Harvest Bible Fellowship church-planting network — the network gathered around James MacDonald's Harvest Bible Chapel in the Chicago suburbs — fully autonomous and governed by a plurality of elders, in the network's pattern, with Trent Griffith as its founding senior pastor, a Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary graduate who had spent fifteen years as a conference speaker with Life Action Ministries before the plant. In the summer of 2017, as the Harvest network itself strained toward its founder's fall — MacDonald was fired by his own elders in February 2019 — the Granger church's affiliation with Harvest Bible Fellowship ended, its elders left to consider how to move forward on their own. In February 2019, ten years after the plant, the congregation renamed itself Gospel City Church, its leaders giving the reason the Chicago press carried at the time: "choosing a new name for our church allows us to be identified by our own character, values and impact." The church's own elders' update of February 16, 2023, reviewing a bylaws revision, is the document that carries this whole course in the congregation's own words — plant, autonomy, the 2017 separation, the 2019 renaming — and it is the strength at which the course is printed here. One directory ghost is disposed of in the entry itself: commercial listings have carried a "Cornerstone Community Church" at this same Hickory Road address, but no record of an independent Cornerstone congregation at 52277 Hickory Road exists beyond the aggregators' echo; the address's documented congregation is this one, from the 2009 plant forward, and the Cornerstone name is printed as a directory artifact, not a congregation of this ground.

Sources:

1. Gospel City Church, "Elder Update | February 2023" (mygospelcity.org) — the February 2009 plant as Harvest Bible Chapel Granger, the summer 2017 end of the Harvest Bible Fellowship affiliation, and the February 2019 renaming, in the elders' own words.
2. Federal exempt-organization record — Harvest Bible Chapel of Granger Inc, 52277 Hickory Rd, Granger, from February 2009.
3. Daily Herald (Chicago), February 13, 2019 — the MacDonald firing and the Granger church's name change, with the elders' stated reason.
4. FamilyLife speaker record — Trent Griffith, founding senior pastor of the Granger church, and his Life Action and seminary course.