“Coral Ridge was not Jim Kennedy’s church before, and it’s not my church now.”

Following the death of the first pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church came a bumpy start for the new pastor. But Tullian Tchividjian says things are now thriving since he became pastor more than a year ago.

Tchividjian, the grandson of evangelist Billy Graham, became the second pastor in the history of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church last March after the Fort Lauderdale church’s founder, Dr. D. James Kennedy, died at age 76 in September 2007.

Trouble began not long after the new pastor assumed his role when a small group of members waged a public campaign to force Tchividjian’s ouster because of differences in leadership and management style. He recalls that the first six months were miserable.

“When you go into a church where the church has had only one pastor the first 47 years of its existence, we anticipated that there would be some fallout, specifically from those who had been there a really, really long time and had only known one pastor and had only known one way of doing things,” he explains. “The church had been in pretty serious decline for the last ten years.”

But now, Tchividjian reports that things are turning around.