The Church in Malvern

Harley Petty was a youth minister for 17 years before he decided to begin the process to learn and figure out how to reach out and connect with folks who had given up on the church or who had been hurt by the church.

“Maybe they had felt ridiculed or isolated or judged or singled out, many, many reasons,” Petty said. “So I began trying to figure out how we can connect with that person. That’s when I began this whole church starting journey.”

In 2005 he left student ministry and began starting several churches. In 2010 he started the Stuttgart Harvest Church and now Stuttgart Harvest Church is starting The Church in Malvern with Petty as the lead church planter.

Petty moved to Malvern in 2015 and thought Malvern was a natural spot for this kind of a church; a church for the people. “I saw a lot of similarities with Stuttgart, of course there’s a lot of differences too, but there’s a lot of similarities and people and we just began feeling like it was time to reach the same type of folks like us who maybe had given up at one point in time for various reasons,” Petty said.

The decision to bring a church to Malvern officially began in July of 2019. “We were in the process of growing a launch team around the fall of 2019,” Petty said. “Then COVID came.”

Petty and the rest of the launch team members decided there was no way to launch a new church with everything shutting down due to the pandemic. “So we put everything on hold,” he said. “But as we began seeing people move around a little bit more this fall, the launch team kind of began to grow again.”

Petty wasn’t a part of this new launch team because he had also put everything on hold at the time. “But they began to get a hold of me and say ‘what about this?’ so everything started rolling again.”

That was around September 2020. “I know it’s crazy to try and start something new in this new experience but everything just started coming together and we knew the time was right.”

When the idea to first bring the church to Malvern was forming the problem Petty and the launch team ran into was finding a space for the church. “The time we started looking back in the fall of 2019, I wasn’t aware of any space downtown and what was available had just been purchased,” Petty said. “We needed something that didn’t require something extensive.”

The search continued though and the launch team looked all over Malvern. “We looked and looked, I mean we looked everywhere possible that’s in Malvern,” he said. “This was in 2019, and we were like ready to pull the trigger and start way before COVID but we couldn’t find a place.”

In his experience, Petty was used to rolling up to a place on Sunday morning, setting up, holding a service, then tearing down and packing it all away until the next Sunday. “That space just didn’t exist in Malvern,” Petty said. “The COVID came and we’re like okay there’s just nothing we can do.”

Around September or October of 2020 a member of the launch team had discovered that one of the businesses on Main Street had closed. “We weren’t aware of this and they had been closed for probably a couple months,” Petty said. “So when we found out that it was available, we moved forward immediately.”

Petty said he had always wanted to start a church in downtown, noting that when they started the Stuttgart Harvest Church they had looked at downtown Stuttgart, but it didn’t work out. “The (Malvern) downtown just has so many, for people in the area, just so many great memories that go back decades,” he said. “From that perspective