YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY

Springfield, MO

Log in Subscribe

Heather Mosley | SBJ

No Ceiling Season 3 Guest: Christie Love

The Connecting Grounds

Posted online

Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.

Christie Love is my guest on the fifth episode of No Ceiling, Season 3. She leads The Connecting Grounds, a church with a mission to clothe, feed and care for those in need with compassion. Christie admits she was an unlikely candidate for full-time ministry. She grew up in church, but struggles in adulthood caused her to wrestle with her faith. She says it was in studying theology that she saw the potential the church had to reach out to the least of these and build meaningful relationships. Her church, TCG, is known for advocating for the city’s unhoused population. In this episode, we discuss Christie’s faith journey and her vision for the modern church.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Christine Temple: I want to start with a book that you published in 2021, “God of the Gaps.” The dedication is to anyone who has struggled or questioned or wrestled with their faith. What inspired this book from your life?
Christie Love: I often say my life and my early childhood was shaped under stained glass and steeple. One of the things that happened for me was I grew up with a lot of privilege, and I recognize that now in hindsight. I didn’t necessarily experience struggle until I was older, and when those struggles started to come, one of the first things that I really began to wrestle with was the authenticity of my faith. I realized that my faith at the time was very much a carbon copy of everyone else around me. It wasn’t necessarily what I had wrestled with and therefore clung to. For me, there was a long season that I call the gap, kind of being in these in-between places where there was a problem and a solution. Inside of that gap, I had to struggle. I had to ask hard questions like, why do I think this is true? For people who have had the courage to ask those questions in hard spaces, there is something born in that place. That was who I was writing to.

Temple: The work that you do every day is working with people who struggle in many different ways. But I imagine that the empathy you developed has to come from that struggle that you talk about. What happened in adulthood that caused you to question and wrestle with that faith?
Love: There was a broken marriage, my first marriage. That was definitely a struggle, being thrust unexpectedly into single motherhood and trying to raise kiddos, which came with economic hardships. And then there came some custody battles, which were messy and hard. I remarried, and my husband … was in construction in 2008 when the market crashed. We ended up losing our house. He lost his business for a season. There’s definitely empathy from my own experience of knowing what it’s like to have the bottom fall out when you don’t expect it to. When systems let you down when you don’t expect them to. There’s a lot of those pieces that I pull from every day with the work that we do at TCG.

Related: No Ceiling from SBJ Podcasts

Comments

No comments on this story |
Please log in to add your comment
Editors' Pick
From the Ground Up: Republic Intermediate School

The Republic School District is on track to open its Intermediate School for fifth- and sixth-grade students for the 2025-26 academic year.

Most Read
Update cookies preferences