How We Got Started

In April 2003, a month after his 50th birthday, Larry Bolden found himself on sabbatical struggling to figure out who he was and what God wanted him to do vocationally. 13 years into pastoral ministry and 3 years into a season of facing brokenness in his life, he was left with few financial resources and not much time to make some decisions.

Larry headed to the mountains of North Georgia for 12 days of prayer and fasting, desperate for God to meet him there. This is how he describes his experience:

Amid shattered dreams, I was coming to grips with the ways I had negatively affected the people around me. It was painful.

I had been walking with God for almost 45 years. I rationally knew about the beauty and glory of his eternal purposes, his love for me, his desire to love through me, to reveal himself through me to the people I loved the most. I had preached all about those themes. I had seen God use me in some wonderful ways in the lives of many people, yet in the midst of the pressures of life, ministry, and family, something was wrong.

There was a disconnect between what I thought I believed and what I really believed. Somehow the truths of the gospel had not penetrated to the depths of my being to close that disconnect. Yet now, as I faced the pain, the depths of my heart were being opened to actually, viscerally, in my gut increasingly know God’s love, his comfort, and his presence.

As I did, I began to dream again. What would it be like to build a place where men, women, business leaders, and ministry leaders could go beyond the surface of their lives and relationships, to let God break open the depths of their hearts and in their brokenness actually know the love of God that “surpasses knowledge.” (Eph 3:19)

Wellspring Group began with a vision to communicate, in depth, the transforming truth of God's love, and grace. God’s love is most transformational when we trust Him enough to walk into the pain of our lives - in the moment or in our past. The deepest place of pain is our deepest place of potential healing and redemption. Yet in evangelical Christianity, we tend to run from pain, or medicate our pain. God is calling us to face the pain and embrace the way of suffering, crucifixion, and death, that we may experience resurrection life, in the glory of God.

As our ministry got off the ground, we were thrilled to see men and women experiencing the fullness of living from their whole hearts, discovering who God created them to be. And unfortunately oftentimes, they would return to churches that were not safe, transforming communities of God’s love, truth and grace.

So God gave us an even bigger dream to see the body of Christ, the local church, move from leading and living out of independence, insecurity and isolation to actually leading and living in authentic, vulnerable, biblical community. Increasingly, we are seeing the church recapture its birthright to be a safe, healing environment for people to honestly come into the light of God’s life changing love.