Ernest Smith

Since making the announcement that we are moving to Denver, Colorado to plant a new church, I have had a barrage of questions.  Some have been humorous, others serious, most of them deserving an answer.

Besides the question “Are you going to sell your golf cart?” (NO! We are keeping that thing and putting some awesome snow tires on it), the question we have received more than any other is…

Why Denver?

This is a legitimate question.  Out of all the cities in the world, well, really the US, why would we choose Denver, Colorado?  Some have taken their best guess…

“It’s because of the Broncos, right?” …well, there may be some truth to that.

“It’s because you want to live in the mountains!” …doesn’t hurt.

“It’s because they just legalized marijuana, right?” …maybe if I was 17 years younger, that one would count.

So, why did we choose Denver?

As Sara and I were praying about where God wanted us to plant, since we didn’t feel a specific tugging to one specific city at that time, the best advice we received was “Choose a city you want to live in the rest of your lives.”

This was great advice because our plan is to live in Denver for more than just a couple years, so we wanted to make sure we chose a place that we would enjoy living.

Therefore, one evening, while eating dinner and looking over the Charleston harbor, Sara and I made a list of values that we wanted in a city.  I am going to lay out these five values within this post and then have a follow-up post explaining why Denver over the other cities that matched these values.

5 Values We Wanted In a City (I will list these in order that we said them, although that doesn’t mean these are in order of importance. These were all important to us. Sara went first)

1.   Warm Weather (Sara said the coldest she would go is Denver, Colorado…although there is a drastic difference between the “wet” cold of Charleston and the “dry” cold of Denver).

2.   A city large enough to support at least 2 professional sports franchises (Not just because I love sports but because I love large cities…large cities = lots of people who need to meet Jesus.  Denver has multiple sports franchises)

3.   Water (Although Sara would love to have a beach, Denver has lots of water…the frozen kind :))

4.   A city that has an un-churched population of 85% or higher (Denver is 88-95% depending on where in the Metro area)

5.   A city that does not have a lot of mega-churches OR many, healthy church plants (although Denver has a lot of GREAT churches, and some are really large, I have also been told that it is a church planter’s graveyard.  When people say this they mean many church plants don’t succeed)

These were the five values that drove our search for a city.  These were the 5 values that helped us answer the question “Why Denver?”