I’m Josh Hutchins. I am one of the pastors at Overland Church Midtown in Fort Collins. Our strategy is that multiplication needs to be part of our DNA as a church. And so very early on, we sent out Overland Church Durango. We’ve done it a second time with Overland Church North.
Our strategy has always been to send out our best and not to hold anyone back, but as the Lord calls people, to send them out, even though it’s often very painful.
I’m Brandon Despres. I’m one of the pastors at Overland Church North, and we just planted and launched this Easter 2026. We started praying about church planting and saw North Fort Collins as a target area.
Fort Collins is growing tremendously. In the next 10 years, there’s going to be 15,000 homes being built, and it’s all up north. And if you look on a map, there’s virtually no churches up north.
And so the Lord started to impress upon me a need for church planting in the north. I love Fort Collins. I love the people of Fort Collins, and I truly believe that to love someone is to share the gospel with someone. And so that was a driving factor of why we chose to plant here in North Fort Collins.
Earlier this year, we sent out Overland Church North to the other side of Fort Collins, and these were a lot of the people that made Overland Church Midtown Fort Collins what it was to me, as someone who came in two years ago as one of the pastors. And just the people that I was used to seeing every Sunday morning that I loved serving beside, and to just give them to the Lord and what the Lord was doing in their lives in order to reach a part of town where there are a lot of needs, a lot of houses, and very few churches.
That was just something we had to do as a church, was to make that sacrifice and to say goodbye, knowing that we have an eternity together as a family. Here, we can let go and trust the Lord.
We saw the open-handedness of our sending church saying, “You can take anybody and anyone.” And we were praying for up to 100 people to leave our sending church to go plant north. And we ended with around 70 people on our core team to go and plant Overland North.
As people have been sent out, there’s a need that other people are stepping up into, into roles that maybe they weren’t originally feeling like they could fill. But the Lord has gifted them, and we’ve trained them, and it’s created that space for people to do more for the Lord than they expected that they could.
Colorado Baptists have been connected to this church plant even before many of them fully understood it. Last year, during Serve Tour in Fort Collins, we had prayer teams walking through North Fort Collins, praying that the Lord would open this door, and now He has, and we see the fruit of that.
I’m reminded of Jesus’ famous last words. Before He ascends into Heaven, He says, “You’ll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And I think those two things go together, and we, as Christians, we’re either goers or senders.
Those are our only two options. And I would encourage people, before they just consider themselves as a sender, to really prayerfully consider if they themselves are a goer, if they might be a part of a church planting team, because we want to make disciples of all nations. That’s a commission for all of the believers, and so we all fit into that plan.
Every single person from Overland Church Midtown Fort Collins has been a part of sending out Overland Church Durango and Overland Church North, whether that’s through our giving, but even more importantly, through the prayers that we’ve been praying constantly for those church plants and through the feeling of loss that we all experience as we send out our best people, the people that we love, in order to plant these churches.
There’s not a single person, man, woman, or child, at Overland Church Midtown that hasn’t been an active part affected by sending out people to plant churches.
