People in the Gutter

On holding a God-sized dream with open hands when the how is still forming

📖 “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” — Luke 14:23 (NKJV)

🕯️ I sat with Elias last week — or rather, I sat with his questions. He has this way of asking the simple things, the things you think you know the answer to, and somehow you find yourself reaching for words that don’t quite come yet.

What are your plans? 🤔

I mentioned TENx at the Speakers Tribe Gathering in May, applying for the mini TENx in June, writing the book, the Learning and Community Hub, the studio, the healing gatherings, the encounter groups, the leadership training — the vision of being outside a church building so the wounded, the overlooked, and the ones in the gutter might still encounter the love of God in a space they can enter. I was simply answering. I didn’t realise the ground beneath the conversation was already moving.

✍️ When he asked me what my ideal world looked like; I didn’t hesitate for even a breath.

The Community Hub would be up and running and lots of people would be getting healed.

Just like that. No rehearsing. No searching for the right thing to say. It came from somewhere deeper than my thinking — from the place where God has been writing this story long before I understood I was a character in it.

Just like that. No rehearsing. No searching for the right thing to say. It came from somewhere deeper than my thinking — from the place where God has been writing this story long before I understood I was a character in it.

That’s the thing about a God-given vision. It doesn’t need embellishing. It doesn’t need impressing. It just is — clear and certain and quietly insistent, even when everything around it is still in process.

🕯️ We’ve gone back to the original vision — and I say “back to” with intention, because sometimes returning is the most forward thing you can do. We’re not in a church building. We were never meant to be. The people I’m called to reach aren’t the ones already sitting in pews on a Sunday morning. They’re the ones who’ve decided, for a thousand painful reasons, that God’s house has no room for them. The ones sitting in the gutter of grief, shame, addiction, and loss, convinced that the door is shut to people like them.

So we went to them.

We started in my studio. Paint parties and encounter groups, eight or nine at a time, small enough to be sacred. No stage, no programme, no performance — just people, and presence, and the quiet, relentless love of a God who has never once waited in a building for the broken to find their way to Him. He goes out. He always goes out. Into the highways and hedges, compelling, inviting, making room.

🪨 I am not building a ministry. I’m building a movement — and the difference matters more than I can easily put into words. A ministry centres on one person doing the work. A movement multiplies. It invests. It equips. It releases. The big vision isn’t for me to run more groups or grow a bigger room — it’s to raise up the people already in my studio and send them out to run their own. To see encounter groups spreading across the Shore, across Auckland, carried by men and women who were once the ones sitting in the gutter, now standing at someone else’s side saying, I know this road. Let me walk it with you.

That’s kingdom infrastructure. That’s the multiplication model of Jesus — not gathering crowds to watch Him work, but forming twelve, and sending them out to form more.

🕊️ Clive carries the leadership training piece, and I love that about this vision — it was never meant to rest on my shoulders alone. The Hub, when it has its own space, will be a gathering place for leaders. A monthly rhythm. A place where the ones who are equipping others get to be poured into themselves. Every leader needs someone further up the road. Every healer needs to know how to be held.

For now, though, the studio is the incubator. The Hub is the next horizon.

There’s something both humbling and strangely freeing about saying that out loud. I’ve grown so accustomed to holding this vision with such certainty — the what of it, the why of it, the deep, bone-level knowing that this is what I’m here to do — that I sometimes forget the how is still forming in the hands of the One who gave it to me in the first place.

The Community Hub isn’t a new idea. It’s the original one, a kind of soup kitchen for the soul. The one I kept coming back to even when I tried to lay it down. The one that survived every season of stripping back, every closed door, every moment of wondering if I’d misheard.

I hadn’t misheard.

✍️ So when he asked what it would take — the finances, the venue, the strategy — and I paused, I want to be honest about what that pause held. Not because I didn’t know the answer — but because the honest answer surprised even me as it landed in the room:

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

It wasn’t uncertainty about the vision. It wasn’t doubt. It was something closer to reverent acknowledgement that there are things I can see clearly and things I’m still waiting for God to illuminate. The what is His. The how is unfolding. In an ideal world I would love to have someone who has done this before to mentor me through the process. My job, right now, is to be faithful with what’s already in my hands.

The studio. The people. The leaders forming around the table.

📖 “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.” — Habakkuk 2:2–3 (NKJV)

🌱 The vision is clearer than the road beneath it — and I’ve made my peace with that. Roads get built one step at a time. Faithfulness goes ahead of financing. The right relationships, the right partners, the right doors — those come when the foundation is solid, and we’re still laying it. Not slowly. Just carefully. The way you build something you intend to last.

I don’t need to have it all figured out. I just need to keep going back to the gutter — to the highways and the hedges — and keep compelling people to come in. That’s the assignment. The rest belongs to God. He will send generous people to contribute time, energy and resources in due time.

💡 Reflection

• When someone asks you what it would take, what’s the honest answer — and is there any fear hiding inside the pause? 🤔
• Is there a gap right now between your what and your how — and can you trust that gap to God? 🤔
• Who are the people already in your circle who are being quietly formed into leaders? Are you investing in them intentionally? 🤔
• What would it look like to be faithful with what’s already in your hands, today, rather than waiting for the bigger vision to be fully resourced? 🤔
• Where is God asking you to go out rather than wait for people to come in? 🤔

🎺 Affirmation

I am a carrier of God’s original vision, and that vision has survived every season because it belongs to Him. I don’t need to have every answer to take the next faithful step. I am called, equipped, and held — and what God has commissioned, He will also resource. The people in the gutter are not forgotten. Neither am I.

🙌 Prayer

Lord, thank You for visions that are bigger than my strategy — for dreams that outpace my planning and land me back at the feet of trust. Thank You that You don’t commission what You won’t resource, and that the road is being built even when I can’t see it beneath my feet.

Help me to be faithful with what is already in my hands. The studio. The people. The leaders forming around me. Let me invest in them the way You have invested in me — with patience, with presence, with a love that doesn’t rush what it’s growing.

Where I’ve been waiting for the how to be clear before I move forward, give me the courage to take the next faithful step in the direction of the vision. Where I’ve been afraid to say I haven’t figured it out yet, remind me that You have — and that my not-knowing is simply an invitation to trust You more deeply.

May the Community Hub be built on the right foundation to create safe spaces for Healing 💔heARTs 💖: Your presence, Your people, Your provision, and Your timing.

Send me out into the highways and the hedges, Lord. I’ll go where You go.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

🕯️ The vision was never mine to manage — only to carry. So I’ll keep carrying it, faithfully, one studio evening at a time, one leader at a time, one life stepping out of the gutter and into the light of a God who came all the way down to meet them there. The Hub is coming. The movement is forming. The road is being built.

I just need to keep walking.