Association of Related Churches
Featured Partner
Association of Related Churches (ARC) was born in 2000 through Greg Surratt, Founding Pastor of Seacoast Church in Charleston, South Carolina, who had a vision that in every community there would be a life-giving church. He believed that God was asking him to be a part of planting 2,000 churches worldwide. But he didn’t know how to make that happen until he met Billy Hornsby.
Billy was fascinated by Greg’s “life-giving” weekend services that were attracting large numbers of unchurched people and saw them as a model to be emulated.
Now ARC is a cooperative of independent churches from different denominations, networks, and backgrounds who strategically resource church planters and pastors to help them reach people with the message of Jesus.
They help new churches get started and existing churches find their families and both thrive because ARC provides leaders with resources, relationships and opportunities.
Here is a story straight from ARC:
Walk a Mile in Your Guests' Shoes
By Josh Roberie, ARC
Pradeepan and Amreitha Jeeva launched Kalos Church in 2017 in the beautiful city of Bellevue, WA. Transplants from the Midwest, they share openly about their passion for the local church, which stemmed from their own upbringings.
“My whole existence is because of a pastor loving people.”
Pradeepan recounts how a local pastor helped rescue his parents, immigrants from Sri Lanka, who were about to end their lives together. Amreitha shares, “I really have a passion to give back what I received.”
Abandoned as a baby in India and adopted into a loving, Christian home in Kansas City, Amreitha attributes her passion for sharing the gospel to witnessing her parents’ being the church outside the four walls and being people who really believed the scriptures that God sets the lonely in families.
Gathering nonbelievers and building a multi-ethnic church felt like an improbable dream, but God placed it in their hearts, and they believed He would do it. Several months later, they have truly gathered the nations. Many of Mosaic’s congregation members do not speak English as a first language, and the church is full of accents, various cultures, and different socioeconomic backgrounds.
From their own context of what the church and loving pastors have meant to them, they are able to share the love of Jesus selflessly in the Pacific Northwest, an area known for having hurt and division, polarized by different views.
ARC is hosts an annual ARC Conference each year. Learn more.