Evermore, Forevermore...
Where it all began... A snippet of Chapter 1 of 'Unmasking Wonderland'.
Voice of Cameron
The question became a constant refrain from Austin: “When are you finally going to move over here to join Evermore Church?”
Exiting our home church had never been part of the plan, but Austin’s logic was becoming impossible to ignore. The Ranger ministry was officially under the Evermore banner, and our lives were becoming a tangled web of devotion. We were living in a dizzying overlap—Saturdays at Evermore, Sundays at our home church, weekdays with Austin’s leadership team, and the mid-week drive down the mountain to our home group. We were exhausted, running between two worlds, but the gravity of Evermore was stronger.
The pioneering church was a nomad, moving from Austin’s living room to a scout hall, then to a shared auditorium on Saturday afternoons. It needed a footprint. It needed a home.
Kenna was the one who came up with the solution. Her own music classroom was housed in the old portables at the rear of the College—the “backblocks” of the campus, often shrouded in dust and caked in mud. There was enough room for a permanent church staff room and a private office for Austin. With volunteer labour, Kenna’s double classroom could be gutted and reborn as the Evermore auditorium and Ranger Hall.
With that signature exuberance that makes her unstoppable, Kenna did what she does best. She crafted a proposal so convincing that the College leadership couldn’t say no. Before we knew it, Evermore was moving onto the school grounds.
With the church now physically occupying the space where Kenna worked every day, the “choice” to join vanished. We weren’t just partners anymore; we were part of the architecture.
We had inhaled Austin’s vision so deeply that we were breathing it back out as fire. The “Disneyland” dreams, the marketplace influence, the radical future—it had moved from being a phone call to being our oxygen. We didn’t just see a humble portable in the mud; we saw a kingdom outpost.
It felt blessed. It felt inevitable. This was the “God thing” we had been waiting for.
Voice of Kenna
As the months bled into years, the nature of our devotion began to mutate. What had started as a passionate commitment morphed into a heavy attachment, then into a suffocating entrapment, until finally, it was a prison.
The “vision fire” we had once breathed so proudly began to turn. Our lungs felt scorched; the flames died down into rasps of bitter smoke and a disorienting haze. We were no longer building a kingdom—we were just trying to find enough oxygen to survive the next hour.
We looked for the emergency exits, but they were gone. Every door felt boarded up from the inside, and the thick smoke of the community kept us crawling low to the floor, blinded and gasping. We watched as others made their quiet escapes—faces that were there one Sunday and vanished by the next, slipping away into the night without a word.
But that kind of escape was closed to us. We were too visible, too vital, and far too deep to ever simply vanish.
We were the architects of our own confinement. This wasn’t just a church we attended; it was a structure we had helped build with our own hands, our own money, and our own reputations. Every person we had recruited, every dollar we had pledged, and every responsibility we had shouldered became a bar in the cage.
It was our doing. Our involvement. Our complicity. While the world outside moved on, we remained motionless—a family destined to stay lost inside the very walls of Evermore forevermore…
