When I think about how much God has moved in and shaped our lives over our five years in the Triangle and now as we are sent to be a part of the Atlanta church plant, I can say that God had to be working. There are plenty of seemingly random acts that I can’t explain away by chance.

• I heard about the Summit through a completely random interaction. I work at a public accounting firm, and when we moved to the Triangle from Syracuse, New York, my first client was in Winston-Salem. During the audit, I needed a haircut and realized that there was a salon in the building I was working in. The husband of the woman who cut my hair was a pastor in Winston-Salem, and she could not stop talking about how great this church in the Triangle was called the Summit. At the time, we lived in Willow Spring, and there was not a campus on that side of town. A year later my wife Rachel got a job working at Duke, and we bought a house at the intersection of 70 and Miami, not knowing that the church the hairdresser had told me about was only five minutes from our new house. We started attending the Summit soon after.


• Shortly after moving to our new house, we felt called to attend Starting Point. There, we met David Talbert, the Summit’s small groups pastor, who lived in our development. We were in his small group for two years, and having him in my life has been critical in getting us off the sidelines, being active in church, and listening to Christ’s call for our lives.


• The CEO of the company I have been auditing for the past five years attends the Chapel Hill campus. He has a passion for the gospel and is unapologetic about his mission to use his platform as CEO for Christ. This past year I finally spoke to him about the direction I felt God was pushing me toward, and he ended our conversation praying that Rachel and I would have guidance on God’s mission for our lives (this does not happen to auditors).


• We started volunteering in 2016 at Starting Point at the Brier Creek campus, which Pastor Aaron Turner was leading. We developed a relationship with the Turners and learned about the Summit’s Atlanta church plant, where Pastor Aaron now serves. We are now preparing to move to Atlanta in September to join the Turners and Image Church.


• In May my company asked if I would move to Boca Raton, Tampa, Orlando, Memphis, or Nashville. I told them that I was not interested in any of those cities but that I would consider moving to Atlanta (to be part of the church plant), but there were no openings in Atlanta. The next day, a position opened in Atlanta working on the Coca-Cola audit.

This is just a sample of the ways Christ has been moving in our lives. But this is just the start! When we got baptized at the Summit, we took it seriously to go anywhere we were called and do anything that Christ has called us to do. While we will miss the Summit, we know that God is going to use Image Church to achieve great things for his kingdom. Pray with us that it will be so!

by Patrick Dunn