On Easter Sunday in the spring of 2019, a group of friends were camping in south Arkansas, and they decided to have a small and simple Easter service at the campground for anyone that might want to attend. Some call that the true start of Refuge church, but it wasn’t until later that year that things really started to take shape.

In September of 2019, we booked a pavilion at Burns Park in North Little Rock for a Sunday afternoon church service just to see who all might show up, and the turnout was both encouraging and a bit scary. It was immediately clear that there was a community of people that were interested in starting something new. We took the month of October off to think and pray about what God might have in store for us.

As fall turned to winter we knew that this small community of believers would need somewhere to celebrate the season of Advent and Christmas, so we asked our friends at the Innovation Hub if we could use their space for Sunday morning services, and they were happy to oblige. The holidays that year were filled with eager hope as we started to consider what the future might look like for this new church family.

In the spring of 2020, as the weather started to warm and our family continued to grow, we met a few more times at Burns Park pavilions, until the pandemic forced us to cancel all in-person gatherings until further notice. The momentum continued over Sunday morning zoom meetings, where friends and family joined us from all over the country each week.

Once it became evident that the pandemic would last longer than expected, we made plans for masked outdoor gatherings at Flyway Brewery in the fall of 2020, and we were encouraged to see that interest in our little church had only grown during quarantine.

In the meantime, talks continued about finding a more permanent location that would offer childcare spaces, restrooms, a proper sound system, and perhaps most importantly, a roof over our heads. As it turns out, we didn’t need to look any farther than across the parking lot from our temporary home at Flyway Brewery.

In the spring of 2021, we had our first meeting at the former home of First Presbyterian Church in Argenta, in a beautiful historic building with classic wooden pews, stained glass windows, and everything we needed to grow as a church. At the same time, we began putting together a leadership team and started filing all the necessary paperwork to make ourselves “official” as Refuge Church.

Since then, we’ve been trucking right along in our new home, and we are beyond excited about where God might lead us as a community. We believe that God has big things in store for his people, and we feel incredibly blessed to have the privilege of providing a refuge for fellowship, teaching, and community to all people everywhere.