THE BRIDGE, a Mission Igniter Church Plant, launching April 28th!
After a season of church planter residency at Rainier Avenue Church, Pastor Fred and Aretha TenEyck are launching a new church plant on April 28th in Kent, Washington, to share God's love in this community. Join us in praying for them as their continue to form their new team and raise funds.
As one of the newest additions to the Mission Igniter community, I have the honor of introducing myself and our vision to you. My name is Matt Taylor. For those who may not be acquainted with my story, I certainly do not have the usual “Free Methodist pedigree.” I recently retired after 23 years with the Detroit Police Department, where virtually my whole career was spent in some sort of critical incident/emergency response role. Most famously, I was in charge of the Bomb Squad for many years. Yes, I wore the armored suit, drove the robot, cut the wires, all that jazz. Alongside that, I was active for many years with the Detroit Free Methodist church as “the senior layman.” You know the type: conference delegate, Sunday School teacher, tech support, snow shoveling, and lifting heavy things.
The Lord orchestrated a big change in our family recently. I retired from law enforcement, and we have moved to the historic small town of Marshall, Michigan, where my wife and her family have deep roots. I have started a small computer business, and my beautiful first grandchild is now about nine months old and lives a few blocks away. If you had tried to tell me in the summer of 2022 what 2023 and 2024 would look like for me, I would have laughed at you.
As there is no Free Methodist fellowship in our little town, we have begun the process of forming one, with a focus on healing prayer. This is traditionally the part where I share the stories and statistics on the big things happening in my little town. I’ve been seeking and finding opportunities to share the Kingdom through my small business and have even had some chances to speak of the Kingdom and a new fellowship with Marshall community leaders, but quite frankly there hasn’t been a whole lot going on externally as far as “souls saved and newsletter stories.” I am far from discouraged, however. It’s been readily apparent that the work the Lord Jesus is doing here in this season has focused squarely on me. I’ve been participating consistently in the coaching process as we flesh out our vision for the new fellowship. More importantly, though, I have greatly deepened in my personal intimacy with our Lord and in my practice and understanding of prayer. I don’t want to tell people Jesus Christ is Lord of Heaven, Earth, Time and Space; I want to show them. We’re not just believing for “big things,” we’re believing for the miraculous here in Marshall, Michigan.
We’re looking forward to a formal launch later this spring as we wind down the initial phase of the coaching process. Our first steps will involve an online/social media launch with in-person meetings to follow as the fellowship grows. We will emphasize a non-traditional format with gatherings focused on healing prayer and candid discussion of spiritual things. Think “Tuesday Evening Group Therapy” rather than “Sunday Morning Sing-Along.” The long-term goal is to mature into a fully-formed Free Methodist Society. I look forward to sharing the stories of God’s Mighty Hand at work here. In the meantime, I ask you to pray for continued clarity and guidance for me and our tiny fellowship as I transition from sirens and explosions to prayer and healing.
The Tacoma Church
A new church plant launching in Tacoma, Washington
For years Annie and Adam Roberts have had a growing love and burden for the city of Tacoma, WA, and recently sensed a clear call to plant a church there.
Once a place to be feared—torn apart by gang violence and poverty, it’s now experiencing a renaissance and was recently ranked as the 3rd most desirable place to live. Tacoma is hopping with activity and life—full of new business development, education, vibey coffee shops, green spaces, and new housing.
Yet, despite its economic resurgence, the spiritual climate hasn’t followed suit. Fifty percent of the people in the city are under 40 and Tacoma ranks as the 10th most unchurched city (no faith) and the 3rd most dechurched city (left their faith or untethered from a church) in America. But these numbers are not intimidating to God. We believe that the city of Tacoma is ripe with Gospel opportunity and is poised for a spiritual renaissance and cultural renewal.
We long to see a generation of people who are burned out, broken and bored, transformed by Jesus, connected into authentic community, and empowered to be a force for good.
Annie and Adam Roberts
City Free@ Chalet
A Fresh Expression of Church in Jackson Michigan
“City Free” brings the presence of Jesus into any Jackson community (harbor) where God leads us – beginning in the Chalet neighborhood. This is a low-income housing development. These harbors are transformed into safe communities where love and life flourish. That’s a piece of our vision picture, and God has given us favor.
These are our friends, this is our kingdom community. We’ve baptized 5 people recently (yayyy!!) – one of those in a hot tub loaded on a truck. Kids have put on a play, we enjoyed a Chalet Big Table Thanksgiving, did Christmas kazoo caroling, and so much more! We have a blast together and are becoming a church together.
Please pray for us as we are launching a City Free@ Chalet youth group. Pray for fruit in changing the trajectory of individuals, families, and a neighborhood with the gospel!
Pastor Tim Flickinger, Jackson Free Methodist Church
THE GATHERING PLACE
A CHURCH PLANT JOURNEY IN NORTH SEATTLE
On November 4, 2018 a handful of former Lakeview Free Methodist members (Seattle, WA) joined together for the first meeting of The Gathering Place. We began with the mission to “offer Christ’s hospitality to the world;” and the long-term vision of opening a coffee shop.
With the arrival of COVID 19 all plans were re-imagined as we, along with the rest of the world, adjusted to life in the pandemic. In 2022 we were struggling to move beyond the world of Zoom and back to meeting in person. Our leadership began praying for discernment, part of the answer to that prayer came in the form of the Mission Igniter training offered in Longview Washington. After attending the training, pastor Jodi began working with a Mission Igniter coach. After spending the first months of 2023 focusing our Sunday gatherings on the series, “We Are A People Who…” God began moving mountains that had seems immovable. Pastor Jodi asked our group to focus our prayer on God’s provision, discernment, and boldness. This prayer began to be answered immediately as we started meeting in the Maple Leaf Collaborative facility and were indefinitely loaned a mobile coffee trailer by Epic Life church (a Southern Baptist church that has opened a successful coffee shop).
After taking possession of the trailer, we began working to refurbish and set it up, but ran into a problem with electricity. We continued to pray for provision, discernment, and boldness. In October our leadership team met with the PNWC Grant board and presented our vision for both The Gathering Place and Gathering Grounds Coffee. Once again God answered our prayers and we not only received the grant, but the conference agreed to take care of our electricity problem.
As we begin 2024, we are excited to open Gathering Grounds Coffee and seeing how God is going to use us in the coming year.
Prayer requests:
1. Leaders (especially leaders with business experience)
2. Obtaining permits and necessary licenses to open for business.
3. God to use this ministry to bring transformation to people and the community.
4. God’s continued provision, discernment, and boldness.
Jodi Gatlin, Lead Pastor and Teri Gent, Executive Pastor
LOVE DETROIT, A church planting initiative under Mission Igniter
Executive Director Mark VanValin
D. lives in an old RV in the driveway of an abandoned house less than a mile from where I live. Over the past year, he has been my main set-up and tear-down helper for our dinners at the park. He is always glad to help. He started attending our Detroit Redford Church last summer. He also attends my Friday Bible study at a nearby Wendy's. He suffers from alcohol abuse. He wants to be free and get his life in order. The mountain is steep. D. faces a myriad of choices that are needed to lift him out of his predicament. I encourage him one step at a time and pray with him. He needs the power of the Lord in his life and is growing close to surrendering his life to the Lordship and saving grace of Jesus. I helped him apply for work and also loaned him a space heater for his van to help get him through the winter. His only close family was his aunt who recently died.
I think of all the ongoing support throughout my life that I too often have taken for granted. I am rich with family, friends, and extended church family around the world. I am so blessed, and yet there are times when I still feel alone and discouraged. I cannot imagine what it must be like to wake up every day alone in a cold RV.
Psalm 68:6 says that the Lord sets the lonely in families. The church is His vehicle for doing this - the unremarkable bodies of believers in out of the way spaces who open their hearts and lives to the lonely, the strange, the awkward, the broken, and the addicted. The real cost of doing church is not in buildings or utility bills or staffing or programming. The real cost is to love - to enter the vulnerable spaces to do life with the most broken.
Mark VanValin, Director, Detroit Initiative
The mission of the Detroit Initiative is to partner with what God is doing to bring His Shalom to Detroit by multiplying disciples through the multiplication of leaders and churches.
We celebrate a new church plant in Mallot, Washington , launched on October 22! After attending a Mission Igniter Church Planting Essentials training in October, 2021, Pastor Mike McCune from Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Omak, began praying about what it would look like to plant a church in their community. After much prayer, many conversations, location considerations, the Lord miraculously brought about a team to plant. The Lord led Pastor Mike to two other pastors in the community, Jaime Mesa and Max Meadows, who were excited about the opportunity to join Cornerstone in this planting endeavor.
With the answered prayers of the two pastors, and a facility coming available, they still needed a target audience. After looking through the families from Cornerstone, Pastor Mike noticed a number of them that drive out of their community because there is no church available to them in the Malott community which totaled between 25-30 families. This was enough that could assist with the church plant. While Cornerstone will miss these families, they are sending them out with their blessing to be a part of this exciting adventure.
Cornerstone was the last church to be planted in this community which was 80 years ago! They were able to announce this new church plant at their 80th Anniversary celebration in September. It was exactly two years from the time Pastor Mike and his team sought the Lord at the CPE training until the Lord moved them into this church plant opportunity. Please keep this Mallot Christian Fellowship in your prayers!
The first time I met Al was at the 4th Street Laundromat in Central Point, Oregon. He had no idea that he had stumbled upon a free laundry day or a church plant that primarily functions out of a laundromat. The Fold, a fresh expression of church, is demonstrating God’s love by offering a practical and meaningful service to our community. It's a simple act — asking someone their name and loading their washing machine with quarters — but the impact is incredible.
We often encounter people that are navigating many challenges, things like housing and food instability, addiction, unemployment, mental health issues, and lack of transportation to name a few. Al was dealing with a variety of these problems on the day we met. He was living in a tent, estranged from family, and wondering how he had gotten to this place in his life as a 72-year-old-man.
We believe that one of the tasks God has given our church is to affirm and nurture a sense of belonging within the family of God. In just a few short months Al has found his place in our community and is now using his gifts on our team. In the past month alone Al has shared his testimony at a Free Methodist Church in our conference, started having daily devotions with another houseless community member, is leading prayer time at the laundromat, and is offering insight to our leadership team that makes us more culturally competent.
All of our stories are unique and sometimes that uniqueness can lead us to the erroneous conclusion that we don’t have much in common with the people around us. But it turns out that we all have laundry to do and every one of us is on the lifelong journey of becoming like Jesus, and these are beautiful ways we can relate to one another.
A laundry ministry located in Central Point, Oregon!
The Lord is at work in the Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, through Jiran Collective, a Mission Igniter ministry seeking to make Jesus’ love tangible to Arab refugees and immigrants. At one of their recent gatherings, after the story was told about Jesus healing the daughter of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15, a Muslim man stood up and asked, “Does Jesus still heal today or was that only for 2000 years ago?” To answer him, Pastor Raouf asked the question to the congregation, “Is there anyone here who has been sick or known of anyone sick and you prayed to Jesus and Jesus healed?” Several stood up and told personal stories about how they had prayed for Jesus to heal someone they loved who had a sickness or an injury and their loved ones were miraculously healed. This was a powerful time when the presence of God was so wonderful.
Pastor Raouf shares, “It was like Jesus opened the door of the church that evening and just came in. Everyone was on the edge of their seats, listening how Jesus still heals.”
For the first time, many Arab seekers at the gathering heard about the healing power of Jesus! This has opened up amazing doors of opportunity for further conversations on healing and on prayer.
Please keep Jiran in your prayers as the Lord opens doors to share about the love and hope of Jesus! They offer opportunities to serve in various ways, especially in their kids ministries. If your church would like to know more about ways to serve, contact Pastor Raouf.
Pastor Raouf and his family raise their complete support through donations. We invite you to partner with them in their ministry in Dearborn, click on this link: Partner Financially with Pastor Raouf & Jiran Collective
Jiran Collective holds regular gatherings, worshipping and building community, in English and Arabic. Praise God for the 75 who attended their last gathering!
A special prayer request:
Because of the Arab population in Dearborn, the unrest in the Middle East has caused much emotion and stress to this community. Would you join with us in prayer in the following ways:
Pray with Jiran as they connect regularly with the Arab community.
Pray for Jesus love to be made tangible, for violence and killing to stop on both sides, for help for those who need it on both sides and for restoration and reconciliation to be a reality.
Pray for God to silence and thwart aggressors and empower the oppressed on both sides.
Pray for the Prince of Peace to manifest His peace in supernatural ways and for the Church to be a force in peacemaking.
Movements Start with Prayer
Mission Igniter longs to see “an expression of church for all people in all places.” In short, we desire to participate in a church planting movement in America. In "Leading Church Multiplication," Tom Nebel and Steve Pike contend that church planting movements require the following “essential systems:” spiritual dependence, recruiting, assessment, coaching, training, funding, and helping churches plant churches. To that end, Mission Igniter has developed eight core systems to serve and support our planters. While each of our systems is important, spiritual dependence is most important. Nebel and Pike also identified a “greater interest in prayer and intercession” as a critical indicator of a movement’s spiritual condition.
As we look upon the landscape across our contexts, communities, and country, we recognize great brokenness and spiritual darkness. John Wesley referred to the pervasiveness of sin as “complicated wickedness.”
Planting new expressions of church in hard times and hard places seems like a daunting task, and that is because it is. We must, therefore, recognize right from the start that we will never see transformation in our communities unless we are utterly dependent upon the redemptive work of Jesus, and one of the primary ways we express our dependence upon God is through prayer. In 2 Chronicles 7.14, we read, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” When we humble ourselves, seek the Lord in prayer, and turn from our wickedness, God brings forgiveness and healing. Prayer is essential to God’s mission of healing our communities and world. While personal intercessory prayer is important, it’s worth noting that these words, and much of the Bible’s teaching on prayer, are directed at a community. Let’s pray that God would use church planting movements to heal our world, but let’s do it corporately as well.
Mission Igniter hosts a virtual prayer call twice a month, where our planters bear witness to what they see God doing in their context, and then they share requests and pray with and for one another. These are simple yet sweet times of intercession together. We invite you to join us on the first and third Thursday of each month from 9:00-9:40 AM EDT. You can join us here: Mission Igniter Virtual Prayer Time. Let’s humble ourselves, pray, and seek the Lord’s face together, trusting Him to use our churches as agents of healing in our communities and our world.