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By Mandy Haggerson

For the Clemmons Courier

CLEMMONS — Like many children growing up as a pastor’s kid, Clint Little learned early about God and what it meant to be a Christian.

“It’s funny, though, because I didn’t think that I wanted to be a pastor myself when I grew up, but I knew from the age of 7 that I did want to do something to serve the Lord,” Little said. “It would take time for my relationship with God and through experiences to find out exactly what that would be.”

As an active child, Little spent time playing and watching most sports like baseball and football.

“They were big in Georgia, and I enjoyed them a lot,” Little, who has two older sisters, said. “It was also a way to form good friendships in the community.”

Family and community played a significant role in Little’s next steps after graduating high school.

“It had really clicked with me late in high school what it meant to really follow Jesus,” Little said. “I had learned so much under my dad’s ministry. I also began to have good friends that reaffirmed what it meant to be faithful followers of Jesus.

“I realized that God had given me the heart of a missionary. I wanted to work toward my master’s in divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was there that I met my future wife, Quinn. We had both worked part-time at the local YMCA while we were earning our degrees in seminary. We were married a year and a half after we met.”

After completing their degrees, Quinn and Clint decided to look for work in discipleship in churches in the United States.

“I found a position in Reidsville, North Carolina, and we stayed there for three years while I worked as an associate pastor of youth and discipleship,” Little said. “It really made clear a lot of passions that we had. It also revealed what we wanted to do to help others.

“We really felt that God was leading us to start a church by focusing on not attracting existing believers from other churches but taking the church to people that didn’t have one. We really wanted to focus on loving our neighbors as ourselves.”

While Quinn and Clint were deciding where that would be, they made some decisions to help get their goal in motion.

“My father-in-law is a contractor, and I interned under him for a couple of years, so we would be able to support our mission,” Little said. “I learned how to do construction on the side, primarily kitchen and bath remodeling.

“After gaining valuable experience, I started Tile and Bath Solutions about a year and a half ago. That was the same time that we moved to Clemmons. I have spent half my time working as a contractor and with planting churches in our community.”

Little said their goal has never been to take people away from their current church.

“There are many great churches in the area,” Little said. “We want to take the word to people who are disconnected from Jesus by loving your neighbor. We go out into neighborhoods and host Bible studies, cookouts or have coffee to encourage others to connect.

“When we had our first neighborhood cookout, we went to the nearest 50 houses and invited them. We had 35 people show up. Across the board, the thing that we heard most often was people expressing a certain amount of embarrassment that they didn’t know their neighbors. We were so grateful to connect with them and be part of their community. We were blown away (by) how just by extending a simple invitation how easy it was to connect with them.”

Little believes that COVID-19 didn’t help with many disconnects formed in the community. “One of the big things that we see is that the fabric of our society has frayed a lot. People are more isolated and disconnected than ever. COVID-19 has accelerated that problem with the fears and necessities of people needing to isolate themselves,” says Little. “We believe the church has the answer to that, though, by loving God and your neighbor as yourself. You can’t do that if you don’t even know your neighbor’s name.”

After the Littles saw the openness in their neighborhood, they decided to tackle 40 additional ones in Clemmons.

“We will do prayer walks in those neighborhoods,” Little said. “We would love to see Bible studies in all of those neighborhoods. We would love to have people adopt those neighborhoods to ensure those seeds of the gospel are planted. It’s really an organic approach to encourage people to open up their lives around them. To many people, we live a pace of life that is incompatible to that. The biggest difficulty is that there is a real cost to that. But we believe that value is much greater if they do.”

Now, as a parent himself, Little knows the stakes are even higher. As a dad to Jack (3) and Emmy (7 months), he knows change only happens when you do your part.

“We trust that God is going to use us in small or big ways,” Little said. “We want to see God move. If that happens under the banner of our church, King’s Village, in communities and neighborhoods, we are going to do everything possible to facilitate that. Our sole purpose of planting churches is that we want to make it a better place for our children.”