Church Planter Runs Miles for Annie Armstrong, Church Planting

Aaron Taylor hates running. Period.

“My church knows how much I despise running,” he said. “It’s kind of a running joke. No pun intended.”

However, as the church planter of Living Hope Church, Columbus, and a Church Planting Catalyst for Send Network Ohio, he has a true passion for church planting and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering.

During a spring break vacation in March, Taylor decided to run for two causes – to raise money for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering and to bring awareness to church planting efforts across Ohio and North America.

With his wife’s approval, Taylor created a graphic explaining his intention to run during April for Annie Armstrong. For every 25 dollars donated to the offering, he would run one mile. His goal was to run 75 miles during April breaking the runs into one or two-mile segments twice a day.
 
“A couple of days before April started, I threw it out there to see if people would be interested in contributing to my disdain for running,” he said.

And people started giving and kept giving.

“It kind of became a game,” he said. “I would get down to like, five or six miles to go and then someone would make another donation and bring me back to 15 or 20 miles to go.”

In total, he ran 80 miles and raised $2,000 for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering.

Even though Taylor disdained running, he loved the spotlight it created on church planting.
“This was just a way to also raise awareness for church planting, not just in Ohio, but also across North America at the same time,” he said. “It’s been kind of neat. I’ve made connections with people from my past that I haven’t seen in ten-plus years.”

People have reached out to him from different parts of the country, asking questions and seeking his input on the best practices for church planting as well as other things he learned along the way in his own church planting experiences.

Over the 29 days of running, people followed Taylor’s journey through his daily video posts which put Annie Armstrong and church planting in the public eye.

“It just raised awareness and got people hopefully praying for church planting efforts,” he said.
More than anyone, his church members enjoyed seeing him run daily. He updated the church regularly throughout the month and used the opportunity to share about church planting in the Columbus area.

“I’d say, ‘This week we raised this amount of money, and also this church launched on the east side of Columbus,’” he noted. “So as you’re giving to my demise in running you also just supported a Congolese church starting or just supported a church in the suburbs getting off the ground.”

Taylor’s also been surprised by the number of people who saw his running videos on social media. As he went to places outside of his church, he had people come up to him and comment about watching and enjoying his nightly posts.

“That’s the goal,” he said. “It’s not about what I’m doing, but by seeing those, they’re thinking about church planting and that’s what my desire was.”

One special supporter of his efforts was his youngest daughter, age 7. “She wanted to start going with me, but she was calling it ‘riding her bike for church planting,’” he said. “So I would run two miles and then my youngest daughter would ride her bike alongside me. She felt like she was giving back.”

After 80 miles of doing something he hates for something he loves, Taylor believes he will probably run for Annie Armstrong again next year.
 
“I think I just saw, even in a small way, the awareness that it raised around church planting and even just assisting in getting the brand of Send Network known on a little broader scale.”