Kara said many churches are built on how together they are, how good they look, how together the members are. “Within our new congregation, four people have cancer, one woman’s aunt was murdered, another was robbed at gunpoint, five were in the fire and one woman lost her home. So, our little community has really taken a beating.”

When Jason Tippetts was hired by Village Seven Presbyterian Church to start a new church a year ago January, he and his wife Kara had five different parts of town from which to choose to live and raise their four children. For some reason, they kept feeling called to the Rockrimmon area, so they moved in, and their lives changed – for better and for worse.

They moved from North Carolina, and in six months closed on their new home in Rockrimmon. Ten days later they fled the Waldo Canyon Fire along with their new neighbors. Two weeks after they returned to their new home, Kara found a lump in her breast that turned out to be malignant. Experts say that life’s biggest stressors come in the form of a job change, a move, a natural disaster, and/or a life threatening illness, among other things.

For the Tippetts family, one or two of those things would have been enough. Arguably, they got more than their share. In March, in the midst of Kara’s cancer battle, Jason delivered his first sermon at the Westside Presbyterian Church in the cafeteria of Eagleview Middle School. The congregation that included the group of 70 people that had come together to start the church grew to nearly 150 people that day and the community began to bloom.

“The neat, neat thing is, because we are so broken as a family right now, this church is built on everybody helping,” said Kara. “On Sunday morning, you see all these people coming together to set up the sound, to make the coffee, to run the nursery, to take care of the children. (Our family) has nothing to do with it, where before we would have had our hand in everything.”

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