Billie Silvey
| You Put the Line Out . . . God Brings the Catch --An Interview with Meredith McCollum A world-renowned trout river, the Battenkill, runs near the house of Gail and Mike Hadlock in Hoosick Falls in upstate New York. Their daughter Meredith grew up there. Meredith fished, but she preferred the more leisurely fishing for bass from a boat on a nearby lake. Gail, her mom, was the product of many generations in churches of Christ. Mike, her dad, was an Irish Catholic with no real relationship with Christ when he went to college and met Gail. Eventually, he converted to Christianity. Meredith and her sister Elizabeth grew up attending the church in Bennington, Vermont, just across the state line. Later they rode an hour Sundays and Wednesdays to worship with the church at Clifton Park, New York, where they could be a part of a youth group. Meredith was baptized at the age of 12 at summer camp. After high school, she moved across country to attend Pepperdine University, receiving a BA degree in theater arts. In college, she met and married Phil McCollum. They stayed in Los Angeles so Meredith could pursue an acting career, though they planned to move to a smaller town when they had children. They began worshipping with the Hollywood Church of Christ, and both fell in love with the church there. They felt God calling them to work there. When Phil and Meredith first visited the Hollywood church, it had thirty members. Now it has grown to over 100. They moved to Hollywood. “God was working on our hearts,â€� Meredith said. Dan Rodriguez, then parttime minister at the Hollywood church, taught Spanish at Pepperdine before joining the religion faculty. Meredith had studied Spanish in high school, then with Dan at Pepperdine. Dan has a heart for missions in the Spanish-speaking cultures. Phil and Meredith spent a summer living in Mexico to improve their Spanish. Phil began thinking about church planting five years ago with the inception of the Los Angeles Dream Team, comprised of people from Pepperdine and the Hollywood church who dreamed of planting churches all over Los Angeles. “But some things didn’t work out,â€� Meredith says. â €œPhil and I were young, headstrong. God worked to discipline and mature us. God wanted to use us, and he’s done a lot of preparing.â €� Currently Phil and Meredith are planning a church plant in East Hollywood. But they are not doing it alone. They are part of a group of people with a vision for beginning a church-planting movement in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, including members and leaders of the Hollywood, Conejo Valley and Hilltop churches of Christ, and Scott Lambert, former campus minister at Pepperdine, now network director for Kairos, an organization that offers important training as well as financial, spiritual, and emotional support to church planters. Meredith is struggling to define her role in church planting. Since the birth of their three children--Nathan, 4, Isaiah, 2, and Elijah, 6 months--her plate has been pretty full. However, she is gifted in one-on-one evangelism and other skills that can help in church planting. She enjoys looking in her daily life for people God put there to love and share her faith with. She responds readily and warmly to hurting, lost souls who are ready to meet her, whether sitting beside her on the bus or working beside her in a cubicle or sitting on a porch across the street. Meredith learned a lot from fishing. “It’s exciting to discern when people are ready,â€� she says. “You put the line out there. Youâ €™re never uncomfortable when all you’re doing is opening yourself and letting God shine. Doing that purposefully is the first step. You mention prayer, church, or say, ‘God bless you.’ You are ready and open, peppering your conversation with God words. It’s a little frightening the first time, but then you get a nibble, and the adrenaline starts flowing. It’s so exciting to watch when a person opens up. It rejuvenates your Christian life. Seeing a person God brought into your life turn to him does wonderful things for your own faith.â€� Meredith has learned to be patient and wait for God to prepare her for service, and to be patient and wait for God to work in the lives of those around her. Meredith has come a long way--from upstate New York to East Hollywood, from dreams of being an actress to dreams of planting a church, from fishing for bass to fishing for people who are ready to come to faith. Phil and Meredith’s church planting site in East Hollywood is just across the street from Los Angeles City College. People from many neighborhoods, ethnicities, and walks of life study there--from students fresh out of high school to adults taking ESL classes or learning a trade. Meredith wants to reach people who will take the message back to their neighborhoods and make it happen there. When the McCollums’ second child was born, Meredith suffered from postpartum depression. She felt that her world was falling apart, but God brought her church family to support her. “When you’re broken and something good happens, you can only say that God did it.â€� Meredith longs to be transparent. “When you’re raising and training new converts to start new churches, you’re doing them a disservice if you’re not real, if you don’t allow people to see God working in the weakness of your life. The Lord is disciplining me, but that means he loves me.â€� |
August 2005