Covenant Church, Grove City, worships in its new building. 8 | February 2025
From Portable to Permanent, The Long Road Home
By Stephanie Heading, managing editor
Covenant Church, Grove City, has quite literally been a congregation on the move. Since launching in 2010, the church plant has been portable, meeting in various rented facilities over the years. All that changed on Sunday, January 5, 2025, when Covenant Church gathered in its new building --right in the middle of its mission field. “It’s good to be home,” said Lead Pastor David Palmer. Palmer was a member of the team that launched Cove- nant Church and has seen the plant grow from a launch team of 25-30 to a congregation of 700-800 in atten- dance each week. He and his wife Jara felt called to help plant a church while in grad school. “We moved here for the purpose of planting the church,” he said. “We grew up in Wooster so we’re Ohio people. We were living in Lynchburg, Virginia, as we prepared to plant. We were both in grad school down at Liberty University.” Despite Covenant Church moving from location to lo- cation, Palmer and his wife Jara, have grown to call Grove City home. “It’s weird to think about,” he said. “I lived in Wooster for 13 years and now it’s been 15 years in Grove City, so I’m more Grove City than I am Wooster.” However, Grove City wasn’t originally the target area, according to Palmer.
“You sort of say ‘yes’ to God before you know where he’s going to send you,” he noted. The launch team spent a year trying to figure out the who, what, where, and when of launching the church, and a survey from Send Network helped point them toward focus cities to consider. “Some of the focus cities were Boston, Portland, and Columbus, and so we prayed about all of those cit- ies,” Palmer said. “My wife and our families had fingers crossed for Columbus.” The launch team visited all three cities as they tried to discern God’s will for the new work. While driving around Columbus, the Lord led them to Grove City. “At one point we just turned off on the Stringtown Road exit, probably because it was exit 100, and started driving down Buckeye Parkway seeing all of this de- velopment taking place, looking left and right, and real- izing that there were no churches in the midst of these neighborhoods,” he said. The area is home to families with children, many of whom are experiencing milestones in their lives. “You hit some of those points where you’re more spir- itually open than others,” Palmer said. “You have kids or you get married or you move, but you’re spiritually open at those points. That was our thought – there’s a whole bunch of people here that we think we can reach. We felt like this was a mission field. And so we targeted Grove City and we moved here in 2010.” Story continues on the next page...
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