Our Story
Hello from Shane and Karen Kelly. Here’s a little bit about us to help introduce ourselves.
We gave our lives to God in their mid teens. We were married in 2004, and have 2 beautiful children Toby and Taylor, who we love to pieces. As we grew in our relationship with God, we felt that God was calling us not only to lead a church community, but to start a new one. We always knew that we were going to one day move and gather people to do something significant for Jesus, and shortly after we were married we felt a call to move and start (plant) a new church.
We spent over 17 years serving and leading in different roles in the Vineyard Church, and then God began to make it clear that the purpose that had been on their relationship the whole time, was always to bring them to plant a church in Cork, and that had been God’s long game all along. Through events such as prophetic dreams, prophetic words, a variety of signs and increasing belief that God was calling us to Cork, and we decided to go for it. To be honest we felt more summoned and pushed than called from Belfast to Cork, with little more than a dream in our hearts that we knew we had to see in our lifetime or something within us would die. We left jobs that we loved, their family home of over 13 years, family members and friends to serve God by moving and planting Presence church in Cork. You will often hear us describing it as really exciting and equally terrifying, as we knew moving to plant Presence Church will change our marriage, our kids, our lives and our wee family forever.
However we are believing that God will change so much more through our family, and are excited to see what God does with Toby and Taylor in this new venture. Our hearts burn to see Ireland be flooded with the Presence of God so much that the Island experiences not just revival, but cultural reformation and transformation, and that we see Heaven on Earth in Ireland everywhere. We have given our lives for this, and are thrilled to be living in and walking into our God given dreams. To hear more of the story you’ll need to chat to us and listen to our vision and values talks, or come to one of our interest nights.
We are both qualified counsellors and love to see people’s lives change, heal and transform. We like to spend time with other people, and enjoy a variety of activities such as being with each other and are kids, reading, watching movies, eating good food, drinking coffee we don’t usually talk about ourselves this much. Honest 🙂
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