Julie Wilding

Julie Wilding

Minister, Senior Director, Next Gen Ministries

Life Story

I was raised in a Christian home with a very rich Christian heritage. It’s the kind of heritage you don't even realize you have until you are a little older and wiser. It is an amazing and humbling thing to look back and see generations of believers in your family. The Lord saw fit to save me at the very young age of 5. I never struggled with belief in God or His existence. I knew I was a sinner and that Christ paid for my sin and the sin of the whole world. I most certainly had a childlike faith.

Although I had faith, I also held some incorrect views of God and my relationship with him. I began to live my life under the assumption that God was happy with me when I did certain things and unhappy with me when I did others. I worked very hard to be a good girl who made good choices. I was a slave to my moral code and terrified of breaking it. I also felt like anything bad that happened in my life resulted from my failure and was condemnation from God. I lived most of my life as a believer thinking God the Father was a disciplinarian who couldn't possibly love me as much as He claimed. After all, I didn't always do the right thing.

It wasn't until 2009 when my husband and I came to The Village that I began to hear the gospel in a way I had never heard before. God loved me. He loved all of me, and His love did not depend on my morality or my goodness or on me at all! The Lord revealed to me the truth that when all is said and done and I stand before the Father, all I have to claim is the cross of Christ. All else is as filthy rags. It has been so liberating to cling to the cross rather than my morality and deeds. I have stopped looking to myself for salvation, and instead I look to the One who saves.

Hope for The Village Church

My hope for The Village is that we would be a body who seeks to be genuine in all we do and say. Additionally, I pray that we will be protected from a spirit of entitlement and instead seek Christ as enough.