Join us for Worship

We meet for worship Sunday mornings at 10:45am at Charlotte Presbyterian Church.

Patwa Care Team

Recently, one of our members, Amy Patwa was diagnosed with breast cancer; Hope is helping to coordinate care for Amy & Adam and their family as they travel this difficult journey.

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In December 2008, one of our members, Sydney Gaylord was diagnosed with a significant brain tumor. Hope is helping to coordinate care for Todd & Sydney and their family as they travel this difficult journey.

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Fall SS Class: The Call of Jericho Road - Living a Life of Mercy

Starts Sept 12th. Make plans to join us from 9:30-10:30am in the adult ed room as we explore the Biblical call to mercy and how we practically care for those in need without hurting them or ourselves.

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Hope's Story

Our Family of Origin

People with the vision to reach people through the planting of new churches sent Tom Hawkes out from Christ Covenant to plant Uptown Church in 1994. Uptown was intended to be the first in a series of church plants sent out to reach the city for Christ. The goal was for these church plants to form a family of churches cooperating in evangelism, joint worship, joint mercy projects and in the planting of new churches to join the family.

Initially, each church is a daughter church, given oversight by the parent church's elders through a special Church Planting Committee. Once a new church has its own officers it will then become a regular church, part of the Presbytery of Central Carolina.

Hope was the first daughter church to come out of Uptown as a part of this vision for a community of churches. Since Hope was planted, Uptown has also planted our sister church Christ Central in the North Davidson area of Charlotte.

Hope’s Place in the Family

According to one recent survey, of the young professionals who live in South Central Charlotte and work Uptown, 32.5% of them claim to have “No Faith Involvement”. This makes them one of the most unreached groups of people in the entire Charlotte Metro area.

Hope was planted with the purpose of bringing the gospel to these postmodern urbanites, many of whom are church-damaged or skeptical of the Church and of Christianity.

Hope’s Birth

In June of 2000, Uptown Church hired Mark Upton to plant their first daughter church. Because of his passion and gifts for evangelism, Mark was Uptown’s Assistant Pastor of Outreach while he prepared to plant the daughter church.

Desiring to follow the biblical pattern of being sent out in two’s, Mark lobbied to have an Assistant Pastor at or near Hope’s beginning.

Matt Guzi was hired in the Spring of 2002 just as Hope was launching it’s first public worship. Matt’s gifts and passions centered on small groups and counseling and were a natural compliment to Mark’s. Because of their friendship and ministry history together, Matt was also intimately involved in forming the vision for Hope even before he considered joining Mark at the church.

Matt and Mark’s friendship together started when they were at Wake Forest University doing Young Life ministry together and even dreamed then about one day planting a church together modeled after Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Winston-Salem, NC.

The Formation of the Vision

As Mark and Matt began formulating and refining the vision in the Fall and Winter of 2001, the primary considerations were 1) what was biblical, and 2) what was most strategic for reaching postmodern urbanites in Charlotte.

Because single men are often the hardest people to reach among professional postmoderns, decisions regarding style and emphasis were made to reduce barriers for them and others who are disillusioned with the Church.

The Implementation of the Vision

Once the vision was formed, Mark began explaining the vision for the new church to the Uptown congregation during January and February of 2002. Gradually, a team of 46 people and their children formed around this vision. They began meeting to pray and prepare to flesh out the vision.

On April 7th, 2002, Hope Community Church met for its first public worship at the Park Road YWCA. Unfortunately, we accidentally set the date for our first worship service on daylight savings time and a number of people joined us an hour into the service!

As Hope grew, we held our first officer nominations in July 2003, 14 men were nominated for the offices of elder or deacon and after a long training period, 2 men – Chris Osborn and Jason Tuttle – were approved and elected on May 22nd, 2005.

In July of 2004, we moved into our office space at Park Towne Village Shopping Center (and out of camping out at area Starbucks all day).

In the fall of 2007, we began to outgrow the YWCA’s capacity and at the generous and gracious offer of the Korean Congregation of Charlotte Presbyterian Church, we began sharing their facilities at 701 Scaleybark Road in March of 2008.