In an email sent out last week, founding pastor Jeff Noble announced his resignation from Journey Church. Jeff started Journey in January 2003 as a small group began meeting in the Noble’s living room to pray and envision a new church for Monticello.

Jeff will be the new pastor of Northstar Church in Blacksburg, Virginia. Its founding pastor, Bob Jackson, retired last year. After many months of searching the Northstar pastor search team invited the Nobles to visit their church the last weekend of May. Jeff preached May 31 in view of a call.

Here is the text of Jeff’s resignation letter:

Dear Journey family,

We spent the last weekend, as you all know, in Virginia at Northstar Church. We had a wonderful opportunity to meet the people of the church, leaders, spend time in discussion and Q&A as well as preach in their services Sunday. They voted to call me as their pastor.

We told them over the weekend that we could not make that decision in the “heat of the moment.” Who wouldn’t say “yes” after being treated like royalty all weekend? We needed some time to get home, process and pray more.

It is with a mixture of intense emotions but great confidence in the direction the Lord has placed before us that I communicate to you that I will be resigning as pastor of Journey Church to go to Virginia and serve as pastor of Northstar.

We plan to be with you through June and the Poland mission trip, and after that, we will be packing and moving. Sunday morning, July 12, will be my last Sunday as your pastor. These next few weeks are extremely important for us as the people of Journey. I will be assisting the leadership team in creating a transition team. They will be the group that seeks to determine the direction for Journey into the faith-filled future.

I’m excited about worshipping with the people of Journey for the next several weeks. This Sunday, we will have our regularly scheduled Leadership Team meeting and Core Group meeting. On Sunday, June 14, at 5:00 Dave McClung will meet with the leadership team to assist us in this future transition process. Dave is on the Missions Team of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. His role is to aid contemporary and innovative churches across our start. He is a great guy, and he will be a huge blessing and asset for us.

I’ll be sharing more about our journey this coming Sunday, but for now, I want to say how much the Nobles love you all. Anything I could write in an email is insufficient to communicate our respect, gratitude and joy in being your spiritual shepherds.

In His hands,

Jeff

Jeff will be helping the Leadership Team of Journey develop a transition team and process as they begin their search for a new pastor.