Our Story
Seven years,
five rooms
A living room. A school cafeteria. An ice cream shop parking lot. A downtown storefront. And now a hundred-year-old mill.
Know · Grow · GoFive rooms, and the same thing happening in every one of them: people meeting Life, being formed by Him, and getting sent from Him.
God has never once given us the room we asked for. He keeps giving us the one we needed next.
November 2017
A living room
in Concord
Before there was a church, there were two people and a couch.
Corey and Betsy Alley started SOJO in their living room in November 2017. The plan was small on purpose: house churches inside apartment complexes, reaching people who would never drive to a church building.
There was no stage, no band, no budget. There was a conviction — that a church shouldn't exist for itself, and that if it closed its doors, the city around it should notice.
The Alley living room · Concord, NC
2017 · The living roomWhere it started. No stage, no band, no budget — just people in a house.
2018 – March 2020
New Life,
then a school
cafeteria
Before Weddington Hills there was New Life Church — and then twenty-five people who decided to go together.
The living room outgrew the living room. We gathered at New Life Church while the thing took shape: worship in a fellowship hall, folding chairs, a serving window along one wall.
Then came the decision. Twenty-five people moved from New Life to Weddington Hills Elementary as a group — not a launch team assembled on paper, but a room full of folks who had already been doing this together and said yes to doing it somewhere harder.
First public service in the school cafeteria: February 24, 2019. Folding chairs on checkered tile. A rolling stage under a school mural. Setup crew in at 6am, tear-down finished before the custodian locked up.
The one-year anniversary landed on March 8, 2020. Nobody in that room knew it would be the last Sunday there. A week later the world shut down and we never got to go back.
New Life Church, then Weddington Hills Elementary · Concord, NC
New Life ChurchWorship in a fellowship hall while the thing took shape.
The twenty-fiveThe group that moved from New Life to Weddington Hills together. This is the church before it looked like one.
The cafeteriaFolding chairs, a school mural, a rolling stage. Set up and torn down every single Sunday.
Sunday morningHands up in a lunchroom. Nobody cared what the room was.
Always foodSome things have not changed in nine years.
That SOJO LifeThe early crew, in the first shirts we ever printed.
The tableBefore there was a building there was a table.
May – November 2020
An ice cream shop
parking lot
Drive-in church at Papa Robb's. Gravel, lawn chairs, a truck bed for a pulpit.
PC preached standing in the back of a pickup with his phone in one hand. People worshipped from car roofs, tailgates, and folding chairs in the grass. The sound came through FM radio and a couple of speakers that never quite behaved.
It was a scary season for the world. It is still, hands down, one of the most special seasons this church has ever had. Nobody came to a parking lot in July because the room was nice. They came because they needed each other.
Papa Robb's · Concord, NC
The pulpitA truck bed, a wired mic, and a phone for notes.
On the roofChurch happened wherever you could stand.
The tailgateSunday best, on a truck bed, in a gravel lot.
The parking lotLawn chairs, kids on hips, ninety degrees. They kept coming.
October 2020 – August 2026
848 Union Street.
Six years.
The first building SOJO ever got to call its own.
We walked into a bare downtown storefront in October 2020 — concrete floors, black pipe-and-drape, cables taped down by hand. Before the first service, people wrote Scripture straight onto the walls in marker. Psalm 133. Romans 5:8. Unless the Lord builds the house. Then we painted over it and built on top of it.
But the bare room is only year one, and it is not the part that matters. Six years happened in there. The chairs filled in. A kids wing appeared where storage used to be. Students who walked in during sixth grade left for college. People got baptized in a portable tank in front of everybody they knew.
Babies were dedicated. Marriages got put back together. Somebody walked in on the worst week of their life and walked out with people. That is what a building is actually for, and none of it shows up in a photograph of an empty room.
We are not leaving Union Street behind. We are carrying it with us.
848 Union Street S · Concord, NC
Year one · Unless the Lord builds the housePsalm 127, painted across the front wall by hand before the room was finished.
Year one · Six a.m.Somebody taped these cables down every single week until the room was finally ours.
Year one · Writing on the wallsBefore we painted, people wrote Scripture onto the drywall. It is still under there.
The room fills inBare concrete and every chair we owned — and then we needed more chairs.
Kids grew up hereA hallway a whole generation learned to walk down.
Later years · The tunnelWhat a Sunday morning became once there were enough of us to make one.
Later years · The tankBaptisms in a portable tank, in front of everybody they knew.
Later years · DedicationsBabies handed back to God in the same room their parents got found in.
Later years · Stories out loudPeople telling the truth about their lives into a microphone.
Later years · The next onesStudents who showed up in sixth grade, leading worship by twelfth.
September 2026
A hundred-year-old
mill
Sunday, September 6, 2026 — first Sunday at The Kettle Room at Gibson Mill.
Twice the space. Four hundred seats instead of two hundred thirty. Kids and youth rooms four times the size. And, by early 2027, a coffee shop with the doors open all week — so somebody who'd never walk into a church on Sunday can find us on a Wednesday afternoon.
Same brick somebody else laid a century ago. Same conviction we started with in that living room. We just keep needing bigger rooms.
325 McGill Ave NW, Suite 148 · Concord, NC 28027
August 2026The room as it stands today. Photographed, not rendered.
The planA rendering of the same room, with the chairs in.
Chapter six
Hasn't been
written yet
Every room on this page started with somebody deciding to show up once.