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Free Boutique Blesses People – And Connects Them With Church

A Free Methodist congregation in Louisiana has nearly quadrupled in size after establishing the Blessing Boutique last year to show love to people and help meet their material needs.

Martha’s Chapel is a country church near Deville, Louisiana (population 1,007). Along with a small population from which to draw people, the church’s location poses a challenge to growth.

“The church is in a hidden area back in the country where a lot of people don’t just pass in front of it,” Pastor Gladys Miller said. “Our challenge is getting people to come to the church, because nobody is going to pass by here and say, ‘Oh, ther5e’s a Methodist church. I think I’ll stop.’”

Before arriving at Martha’s Chapel a year and a half ago, Miller was a retired United Methodist pastor but still preaching almost every Sunday for different pastors who were away from their pulpits, but she was not pastoring one congregation. Then she was asked to fill the vacant pulpit at Martha’s Chapel — an hour’s drive from her home — for a couple of Sundays. She soon heard from then-Superintendent Darrel Riley: “The people at Martha’s Chapel love your preaching and want you as pastor.”

When Miller became the pastor at Martha’s Chapel, the church had nine people attending. Now a typical service has attendance in the “high 30s/low 40s,” Miller said, and a recent homecoming service drew 82 people. The congregation has switched from discussion of possible closure to consideration of how to handle rapid growth.

“I get emotional a little bit when I think about how God is moving. People are coming in, and that’s what we want,” Miller said. “It’s not just the numbers in the church. It’s the number of souls that we can win for the Lord.”

One of the reasons for the growth is the Blessing Boutique, which is held once a month — typically on the second Saturday.

Miller learned of the concept from Sunrise Church, an independent church near her home. With Sunrise’s blessing, she presented the idea for a boutique at Martha’s Chapel to her receptive congregation that began hosting the Blessing Boutique last March. Miller printed a banner that said, “Shop free at the Blessing Boutique at Martha’s Chapel,” and word began to spread in the surrounding area.

“I had no idea when we started it that it would blossom as much as it has,” Miller said. “I was amazed at the amount of donations we had — that people were bringing quality items.”

Martha’s Chapel started the boutique in a small portable building but soon expanded it into part of the church’s parsonage.

The Blessing Boutique has caused the hidden church to become well-known in the area.

“We started doing this, and now they’re coming far and wide to see the church,” Miller said.

After visiting the boutique, some people take an interest in what the church has to offer spiritually.

“Slowly but surely, these people are beginning to come to church,” Miller said. “We will be taking in four new members that have come just because of the Blessing Boutique.”

Martha’s Chapel previously had no children attending, but the boutique has helped change that.

“It’s the best outreach I have ever done to bring people into the church,” Miller said. “We don’t have to beg them to come or anything like that.”

Miller said she is 73 years old, “but I’m a young 73,” and health challenges haven’t stopped her ministry. “I do have Parkinson’s [disease], but the Lord has blessed me. I take medication that controls it most of the time.”

Some boutique shoppers ask Miller if she is Martha because of the church’s name, which was inspired by a founding member named Martha. She tells them, “No, I’m not the original Martha. I’m Gladys.”

Praying + Partnering

Free products may have been most people’s initial attraction to the Blessing Boutique, but the boutique also attracts people seeking prayer.

“People are coming in, and we’re praying with them,” Miller said. “I just walk around all day and have a conversation with these people who have come to shop, and then they will start sharing with me.”

The shoppers often share that they don’t go to church but know that they should. In addition to praying with Miller at the boutique, people now call the church with their prayer requests. Some boutique shoppers now call Martha’s Chapel their church even if they don’t attend regularly, and that is leading their friends to visit church services.

“It’s just spreading, and, of course, that is what we want to do. We want to increase the kingdom of the Lord,” Miller said. “I’m just a simple woman. I preach a simple message, but God is using it.”

The Blessing Boutique introduces people to Christ while also connecting Martha’s Chapel members to other Christians in the area.

“We’re getting people from other churches who are coming to help us,” Miller said.

Variety and Value

Boutique shoppers appreciate the variety of items that are available, and some express shock when they learn the items are available at no cost.

“We have everything. We have shoes. We have clothing. We have toys. We have bedroom articles — sheets. You name it, we have it,” Miller said. “When people come in, they start shopping, and they say, ‘What does this cost?’ We say, ‘It’s free. Freely we have received, and freely we give,’ and that amazes people.”

Miller said that some people offer financial donations after receiving the boutique items, and Martha’s Chapel members use the donations to purchase toiletry items such as toothbrushes, toothpaste and deodorant that are then added to the boutique.

“Every month that we’ve had it, it has picked up in number, and the last time we had it, we had over 100 people that showed up,” Miller said.

Blessing Boutique volunteer Katy Price said that number is a big deal to Martha’s Chapel, which she has attended for 48 years.

“We’re in a very rural area,” Price said. “A hundred may not seem like many to people who live in town and have people going by their church all the time, but for people to come to our location, it’s three or four miles from the nearest store.”

The isolated church is now an important destination for people seeking help along with people wanting to donate items.

“It has just expanded almost beyond having enough room. It’s unbelievable,” Price said.

Ensuring Quality

Although the boutique is held one day a month, volunteers work throughout the month to sort donations left in front of the church building or parsonage.

“It’s hard work though,” Miller said. “People bring us a lot of things, and we have to go through every stack and weed out things.”

Price agreed. “It doesn’t come easy,” she said. “It’s an ongoing process. Someone has to go through the bags and boxes and totes.”

The faithful volunteer said that Martha’s Chapel members want to ensure boutique items are in good condition, and she and other volunteers sort “mountains of clothes” to remove unsuitable clothing.

“We go through it and try to weed out the things that are not good. We don’t want to put anything out there that is dirty,” Price said. “No matter how needy you are, you want nice things.”

Volunteers inspect every donated item, and only items determined to be clean and in perfect condition are put in the Blessing Boutique to give away.

“We have many articles that are brand-new and still have the tags hanging on them,” Miller said. “We had a $150 men’s shirt that was donated. It still had the tag on it. We had several jackets that were $400 or $500 apiece donated.”

One area store is instructed by its corporate headquarters to throw items away when they don’t sell, but the store sets them outside and lets the boutique volunteers know.

“When people come, they know they’re going to get quality things, and we know that God is in this because of the huge amount of donations we have,” Miller said. “It’s been amazing. People say, ‘These things are new.’”

The December boutique especially drew people seeking winter clothes amid falling temperatures.

“We saw real needs met,” Price said. “There were people who really needed warm clothes, and we were so glad to be able to have those things available to them.”

Spreading

News of the boutique is spreading far beyond Deville.

“Because of our church putting it on the Internet, I’ve had churches as far away as Arkansas call me and talk to me about it,” Miller said. “They’re doing it in other areas now.”

The Blessing Boutique concept has spread to the NOLA FMC church plant in the New Orleans area, and Miller hopes free boutiques will open in many other locations.

As Martha’s Chapel members bless others, they find their congregation receives blessings.

“You never know where you’re planting the seed,” said Price who expressed hope that “in the future more will come and join us and become part of the church family.”

Jeff Finley is this magazine’s executive editor. He also serves as a delegate for John Wesley Free Methodist Church in Indianapolis. He joined LIGHT + LIFE in 2011 after a dozen years of reporting and editing for Sun-Times Media.

Living Bravely, Vulnerably and Hopefully

Alyssa Galios lost her husband, Nick Magnotti, to cancer at age 27 when their daughter was only nine months old. While facing intense struggles and doubts, she eventually found renewed faith in God along with an unexpected relationship with one of Nick’s longtime friends, Jay Galios.

Alyssa, now a 32-year-old mother of three, is helping thousands of other people through her book, “Made for Brave: A Journey Through Devastating Loss to Infinite Hope,” along with sharing her story on podcasts and in other venues that don’t typically host Christian authors. Amid her busy schedule that includes running Made for Brave Fitness and Coaching, Alyssa graciously spent an hour on the phone answering LIGHT + LIFE’s questions about her life and her writing. Space constraints won’t allow this magazine to share many of the ways God has worked in her life, but the best way to learn more of her heartbreaking and inspiring life story is to visit alyssagalios.com and to order “Made for Brave.”

You may have seen Nick — who died on Jan. 7, 2014, of mucinous adenocarcinoma (a form of appendix cancer) — in a popular November 2013 video, “Young Man Battles Cancer With A Smile,” that is available at fmchr.ch/nickvideo via YouTube where it has more than 1.1 million views. The video was uploaded by Alyssa but never monetized to receive money from advertising. She has received multiple requests from media companies seeking permission to republish the video (some of which have added subtitles in other languages), and she doesn’t charge them to use it. Nick was still alive when the initial requests came, and he wanted the video freely available to spread hope.

“It’s been really incredible to see it go so far and so wide,” she said. “You never know how many lives you’re impacting for the better, and that is such a testament to Nick and the life that he lived and the faith that he lived up until his last day.”

Shifting Priorities

Early in “Made for Brave,” Alyssa writes about “working insane hours in those first several years of marriage.” Alyssa told LIGHT + LIFE that instead of having an “eternity mindset,” she initially had a “here-and-now mindset that I needed to achieve certain things as fast as I could and that included getting a great big house, buying the right cars, wearing the right clothes.”

She said that when Nick was first diagnosed “with cancer and had his subsequent surgery and was declared cancer-free [before the cancer unexpectedly reappeared], that was really a wakeup call for us on how little time we had spent together. We had been married for three years, and our only vacation time had been our honeymoon. We had been working our tails off, each working 60-plus hours a week, and we both loved our jobs. We loved our clients, and we loved our community members, but, at the end of the day, we weren’t spending any time intentionally on our relationships with each other and not even close to enough time building our intentional relationship with God.”
The couple began making church attendance and weekly date nights priorities, and they examined their career goals and spending priorities.

“We realized when Nick got sick that all of the things we’d been working toward, suddenly didn’t matter,” said Alyssa, who recalled conversations from Nick’s hospital bed in which they discussed “how many hours we had spent just earning a paycheck to pay for a house we were hardly ever in because we were always gone because we were always working.”

Career advancement suddenly wasn’t as important.

“We made a complete shift when he first got sick, and that was an incredible two and a half years of my life. I was able to work from home almost right away,” said Alyssa, who took a new position doing content creation for a local startup. “I actually left my position as the chief operating officer of an incubator here in Seattle because there was no way to balance those hours.”

When she started dating Jay, she let him know, “I don’t live my life according to money. I don’t live it to try to earn a paycheck. I buy most of my stuff secondhand. My focus is on God, and my focus is on my family, and then it’s on taking care of other people, and eventually I want to build my business better.”

Sharing Openly

The book also reveals Alyssa’s own battle with Behcet’s disease, a rare autoimmune disorder causing blood vessel inflammation throughout the body.

“I’ve had so many incredible conversations with people who are going through their own chronic pain and chronic illnesses,” said Alyssa, who thankfully has not had an attack in four years.

“I choose to believe that I am fully healed in Jesus’ name,” she said. “Every once in a while, I have something that hints a flareup might be coming, and I use the tools that I’ve learned about anti-inflammatory eating and exercise, and general stress and anxiety care.”

Along with her health challenges, Alyssa discusses mistakes she made when she moved from Washington state to Florida for a year and dated a man who was part of a church worship team.

“For me it was very important to share about my experience in Florida, because I think there’s a popularity in choosing what looks to be correct to the rest of the world. There’s a popularity in picking and choosing things from the Bible, and the outline that God gave us for His version of our best life. We like to pick that apart and say, ‘Well, this one doesn’t make sense. Not sleeping together before you’re married, that doesn’t actually make sense in this day and age,’ and it’s really easy to fall into that trap,” Alyssa said. “I’ve lived that life of trying to put my own lines in the sand and change them from where Jesus has put those.”

She said that sometimes she finds it scary to share openly about personal experiences, but then she thinks “about those private messages I get — and I honestly get them almost every day — of someone who reaches out and says, ‘Me too. I’ve been there, or you’ve finally put words to something I’ve been experiencing, or I’ve been having these same thoughts, but I’ve been scared to approach it, and now I’ve read it and know that I need to make a decision.’”

Alyssa sensed God calling her to write the book in a way that shares her life story without telling other people how to live their lives.

“When I first started writing the book, I considered putting all my opinions in there,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people sharing their beliefs. I think that’s so necessary, but I feel like I have been called specifically, for whatever reason, to quell my quote-unquote ‘opinions’ and instead show people my experience that led to my opinions without overtly stating them, so that people can really put themselves in my shoes and understand where I came from.”

Alyssa said she has seen a lot of judgment — especially among Christians — about widows, remarriage and “what grief is supposed to look like versus what it actually looks like.”

Pastor Eric

A recurring character in the book is Pastor Eric who provides spiritual guidance and even career advice. For example, she writes, “After I got home, I touched base with Pastor Eric, letting him know I’d made it back to the Pacific Northwest. He knew I still had questions, but he had been undeniably happy when he heard what God had revealed to me, or rather what I had finally accepted, in Florida.”

Alyssa told LIGHT + LIFE that she first met Eric Spangler during her teenage years when her family began attending Lakeside Community Fellowship (now LifePoint Church), a Free Methodist congregation in Lake Stevens, Washington.

“He was a big part of my family, and I consider him honestly like a dad to me,” she said. “When Nick and I got married, he did our premarital counseling and married us. Then he did Nick’s celebration of life and was there the day Nick passed away. Then he did Jay’s and my premarital counseling and married us.”

Spangler told LIGHT + LIFE, “I remember one of the first times Nick and Alyssa walked through my office door. They had come for premarital counseling. That smile! I’ll never forget that defining, boyish, inviting smile! As a pastor, I’ve marked ministry over the years by watershed moments that open the door for the Father’s presence. Walking with Nick and Alyssa through the most challenging moments of life while at the same time sensing that powerful presence was defining for me, not just as a pastor, but as a follower of Jesus.”

The couple’s former pastor recalled Nick telling him, “God’s told me that I won’t die from this.” In his mind, Spangler heard the words of Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26 NKJV).

He later realized, “Nick was absolutely right. And when I sat with him days before his passage into eternity, I asked him what he wanted me to say at his memorial service. Just a few weeks later, I passed that message on: ‘Tell them I’m blessed, I have no fear, and that they should trust in God. God’s got this.’”

He said “Made for Brave” is not only “about Alyssa’s extraordinary experience of faith and trust or Nick’s indelible confidence in Christ, but it’s also about the Savior who stared death in the face on the cross so that we might all share in the hope of resurrection life.”

The Galios family is now active in RockCreek Church, a Free Methodist congregation in Marysville, Washington.

“Alyssa is passionate about helping people get healthy and staying fit but also integrates her faith in every aspect of her business. Her story of loss, grief and redemption will encourage your heart, fill you with hope and ultimately help you trust God in greater ways,” RockCreek Lead Pastor Bryan Rees said. “Alyssa and her husband, Jay, are incredible leaders at RockCreek Church, and we’re so thankful they are a part of our community.”

Together for Good

The book is selling well. After its release in November 2019, it became the best-selling new release in Amazon’s “Christian Death & Grief” category. Alyssa is not profiting from the book, however; all of the net proceeds are donated to organizations fighting cancer.

“That was a total surrender decision — not one that I made easily,” she said. “I just had this feeling in my heart, that still quiet voice that said, ‘I want you to donate the proceeds. I don’t want you to have the money from this,’ and I fought Him on that.”

Other people also tried to talk her out of the decision, but “it didn’t matter what anyone else said, because I knew what God was calling me to do.”

The book closes with Romans 8:28, “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (CSB). The book lists its publisher as Romans 8:28 Books, but when asked by Light + Life whether the dual use of the verse was intentional, Alyssa said the connection “wasn’t planned. It was a divine coincidence if you want to call it a coincidence.”

She explained that “Made for Brave” was picked up by Redemption Press, and the initial draft of the book listed the publisher as Redemption. However, the company surprised her by later deciding to publish her book under its new Romans 8:28 imprint that was established last year for higher-selling titles such as a devotional book for the movie “Unplanned.”

“Made for Brave” is one of the publisher’s best-selling books, and Alyssa said, “It’s been unexpected for me to see how far it’s gone and how many people are willing to get behind it and help spread the message of hope even in hopeless situations.”

The author is more excited by messages she receives from readers than she is by sales figures.

“There are so many people who are suffering and so many people who are scared right now, and I think that if we can allow Him to make good of it and take what the enemy meant for evil and turn it into good, then we have so much more potential as Christians,” she said.

“We can trust God no matter how hopeless it looks — no matter how bleak or how dark — to turn even the worst tragedies in our lives into opportunities to get closer to Him and into opportunities for good and opportunities for His glory. That understanding for me has allowed me to live through so many additional hard things.”

FM:Infuse Director Shares Insights on Youth Ministry

Zach Fleming is the new director of FM:Infuse, the national youth ministry effort of the Free Methodist Church – USA, but he’s not new to youth ministry or the challenges that youth pastors and volunteer youth leaders face.

“There was this feeling, especially when I first started, that I was supposed to have it all together, and I was supposed to know everything,” said Fleming, 40, who has served as the pastor of student ministries at the McPherson Free Methodist Church in McPherson, Kansas, since 2005 and will continue in that role while directing FM:Infuse. “The longer I do this, the more I believe in the wisdom of being able to ask for help.”

FM:Infuse is a resource that equips, encourages and supports Free Methodist youth leaders across the denomination regardless of the size of the church, whether they’re volunteers or paid youth leaders, or whether they’re in an urban or rural context. He doesn’t want the conversation about youth ministry to be limited to leaders from large churches with more resources.

“There is value and importance and kingdom work being done in small rural churches with maybe a mom or dad volunteering. … It’s no less important and it’s no more important than somebody who is paid by a local church,” said Fleming, who added that the COVID-19 pandemic is shifting the perspective of what it means to do youth ministry in 2020. “As all of us are figuring out how to go smaller and go more intimate, I really think right now that we should be listening to the youth workers in smaller contexts.”

Youth ministry has suddenly shifted to Zoom calls, which can make youth group meetings seem more like students’ recent online school classes. Fleming told LIGHT + LIFE that youth leaders are now learning what bears fruit in our changing world and what may not be a good use of their time.

“We can burn ourselves out easily trying to produce content,” Fleming said. “What my students need right now more than anything is relationship. My best energy right now is spent in handwritten notes to students and, as things are beginning to open up, interacting with students face-to-face when possible.”

Fleming becomes director after serving on the FM:Infuse team for 10 years. He joined the executive leadership five years ago, and he was heavily involved in planning and hosting the Free Methodist Youth Conference three years ago. Teens and youth leaders who participated in FMYC 2017 may remember him from his creative antics onstage as an emcee alongside Chadwick Anderson.

“I’m really excited about the opportunity to be able to serve the denomination in this way. I love the Free Methodist Church, and I love and am called to youth ministry,” Fleming said. “I am so thrilled, honored and humbled honestly to lead and serve in this way.”

He recently was asked by the Board of Bishops to lead FM:Infuse after being recommended by outgoing Director Jeremy Lefler. Fleming studied youth ministry in McPherson at Central Christian College of Kansas and, while serving at the McPherson FMC, later earned a master’s degree in youth ministry leadership from Huntington University.

Fleming said he sensed a call to youth ministry a little later than the typical youth pastor.

“I graduated high school in 1998. I really came to know the Lord and accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior when I was 20,” Fleming said.

After his conversion, he began serving and volunteering through the local Youth for Christ organization. He felt God calling him to youth ministry and began to look into where he could receive more training. A Yahoo search changed the course of his future.

“Central was one of the hits that popped up,” said Fleming, who liked that the college would allow him an experience somewhere other than his hometown of Mattoon, Illinois. “I felt like a fresh start was really important and met with Lenny Favara who was teaching youth ministry and was the campus pastor at the time. I really connected with Lenny.”

Favara is now Central’s president, and Fleming is now the longtime youth pastor at the FM church bordering the Central campus.

“I came to McPherson in the fall of 2001, and I’ve been here ever since,” Fleming said. “I didn’t know what a Free Methodist was until I came to Central. I had no idea.”

Fleming soon developed a love for the Free Methodist denomination. He even met his wife, Suzanne, while they were both college students serving as summer staff at Sky Lodge Christian Camp, a Free Methodist campground in Montello, Wisconsin. They married in 2005, and they now have three children, Isaac, 11; Karis, 9; and Bella, 8.

Fleming emphasizes the freedoms of Free Methodism to students, and he and other FM:Infuse leaders believe FMYC is key to students understanding and connecting with the denomination.

“For any church, you have so many options for what to do with teenagers for a week during the summer,” said Fleming, who described FMYC as “distinctively Free Methodist in that we want to create an environment that helps our Free Methodist students know that they’re part of something bigger than their local church, that they’re part of a larger family that’s a global family.”

FM:Infuse leaders are currently planning the next FMYC to be held from June 28 to July 2, 2021, on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“We’re so excited with some of the things that we see being birthed for FMYC 2021 especially as it relates to helping teenagers identify calling, identify gifting and how to lean into that gifting,” said Fleming, who added that instead of merely using the resources of the Fort Collins community and then leaving, organizers are looking at ways to incorporate elements of service to the community that reflect “the heart of Free Methodism.”

More information about FMYC 2021 is expected soon. Follow the event’s Instagram page at instagram.com/fmyc2021 for updates.

“I Always Called Out to God”

The Rev. Dr. Sheila Houston has been interviewed on national television and on the stages of megachurches. Her expertise and courage have attracted the attention of politicians, journalists and scholars.

But Houston’s early life occurred far from the spotlight. She grew up in a family of 14.

“I barely knew my father as a child before he disappeared,” Houston said during a LIGHT + LIFE interview in which she recalled her father giving her a yellow pleather coat. “After that, I don’t remember my father being there as a child. However, throughout my adult life, I encountered him three times briefly before he died. I longed for my dad all throughout my childhood and teen years. ”

In a Superman-jumping contest with her siblings, she jumped the farthest, crashed through glass doors, and was taken to the hospital.

“I ended up messing up my eyesight, and wearing glasses, and not only did I end up wearing glasses, I had to wear thick glasses.” She was mocked and called “four eyes” until she eventually stopped wearing her glasses even though she couldn’t see well.

As a teenager, while walking home from school with friends, she felt something hit her head, and blood ran down her face. She later learned a shot from a BB gun was lodged in her head, and the doctor said the location of the shot nearly killed her.

“Throughout my life, I almost got killed 13 times, but God…” said Houston, who credited God with protecting her.

Her mother went to a Baptist church most Sundays, and she occasionally went along, but the visits were not helpful.

“Every time my siblings and I showed up, it seemed like the pastor never had a message,” she recalled. “When we came, he just talked about us, and so that was definitely not encouraging.”

Teen Marriage/Trafficking

Her mother would tell her as a teen not to get pregnant, and she would reply that if she got pregnant, she would marry the baby’s father.

She began dating an older teen, and he bought her a gray leather coat.

“After he bought the coat, then he wanted more,” she recalled. “I thought he was a nice guy. He wanted to be together, and so we ended up being together, and after that, we ended up getting married.”

She was only 16 years old as a pregnant bride in the courthouse, and she and the groom had an unusual wedding night.

“He went to his mother’s house, and I went back home to mine,” she said. “We did not move in with each other until one of my older sisters got us an apartment.”

Her husband, who was a couple of years older, eventually decided he wanted to quit his job, and he became violent.

“He began to talk about how we needed money, so that’s when he wanted me to start working the streets,” she said. “We didn’t call it human trafficking then, but that’s what it was.”

She began to work in the area of Seattle where men drove around to purchase sex.

“I never liked it, and I can remember that something on the inside of me just did not agree with this lifestyle,” said Houston, who added that like many other human trafficking victims, she told herself that she loved her husband who was selling her and that she was creating a better life for her family. “That’s what most victims of sex trafficking say.”

One night, a man picked her up, took her to his apartment, and raped her with a gun to her head. When she left the man’s home and told her husband, he gave her a butter knife and told her to go back to the streets.

“I walked the streets all night crying. I didn’t try to meet anyone,” she said. “I always called out to God.”
She wasn’t yet a Christian, but she appealed to God for help.

Her husband decided they would move to Phoenix with their son, and he promised a new life for them.

“We go to Phoenix. As soon as I get there, he puts me out of the car and says, ‘Go to work,’” she recalled.

A man picked her up, held a knife to her throat, and tried to rape her. Something more powerful than herself rose up on the inside, and she began to fight for her life through her words. The man let her go. He drove her back where he picked her up.

She eventually convinced her husband to let her and their son return to Seattle to avoid the Arizona heat.

“I went back to my mother’s house, and I never lived with him again,” she said. “But did my life get any easier? No, I went from one bad relationship to another.”

More Trauma

At age 25, her sisters convinced her to date a man whom they said was a good guy with money. He became “the most horrific man in my life story.” The Vietnam veteran tried to push her out of a moving vehicle and throw her out of a high-rise hotel room.

She moved into a domestic violence shelter but eventually “went back into that violent relationship, because I had nowhere else to go.” She tried to commit suicide by taking pills, but a voice — whom she now believes to be the Holy Spirit — immediately told her to drink coffee. She then told her abuser what she’d done, and he took her to the hospital up the street where the staff didn’t believe she’d taken the pills. He continued his abusive behavior.

She tried another shelter and then she — and the three children she now had — moved to Oklahoma with a woman she met at the shelter, but her abuser tracked her down and forced her and the children to return to Seattle. On the way back, however, he decided to leave her in the desert to die. After he left her, she cried out to God. She didn’t know God, but she cried out, and the man returned and picked her up.

In Seattle, she and her children escaped the man. A lawyer helped her obtain a restraining order to protect her from the man, who never bothered her again.

Finding Jesus and George

Friends and family members all around her began becoming Christians. While walking one Sunday, she saw the sun shining out of heaven on a church building that was down the street past another church building.

“It was seriously like Paul talked about,” she said. “I knew on the inside that I had to go to church. I ran home and I changed my clothes, and I told my kids, ‘I’ll be back.’”

She went into the church the sunlight had hit, and she realized, “All that time I have been calling out to God, it was Jesus that I needed, and I had no idea that in order for me to get to God, I needed Jesus. That day, I received Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and my life was changed. Since that day, I have never been the same.”

A few weeks after attending services at the small church, she was asked to help with the children’s ministry.

“It was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. God began to teach me how to teach the children. That’s how I learned to study the Word of God,” she said. “I would just feast on His Word and take it back to the children’s ministry.”

Through a dream, she later sensed God leading her to another church, but she hadn’t heard of the new church’s name apart from the dream.

“I went to the phone book, and I began to look,” said Houston, who found the church and began attending. “That church that He sent me to was such a loving church. That’s where I found love.”

She also embraced teaching opportunities in the new church. In addition, she felt a call from God to begin cleaning the church building that was also home to a Christian school where her children started attending and she began working.

“One day, there was going to be a wedding, and God said, ‘Clean it,’ and I cleaned it for this wedding,’” she said. “I didn’t know when I was cleaning that church and that school, that was sowing a seed for my future.”

One day, she saw a young woman on a street near her home in Seattle’s High Point neighborhood.

“I went over and talked to the girl. I could tell she was being trafficked. I said, ‘If you ever need somebody, I live right over here,’” she said. “In less than a week, she knocked on my door probably at about 1 or 2 in the morning. I opened my door, and the Lord said, ‘Feed her and let her sleep.’ She woke up late that afternoon, and the Lord said, ‘Feed her and tell her about Me.’ I used my flannel board and shared how Jesus loved her and died for her. I led her to salvation, and then she showered and left.”

She eventually felt God leading her to a third church where she met George Houston, who is now her husband. Her previous church ultimately closed, and her then-church purchased and moved into her previous church’s building. George and Sheila asked permission to hold their wedding and reception there. She said they were the newly relocated church’s “first marriage in the church that God made me clean for a couple of years, so God is faithful.”

After her mother went home to be with the Lord, she decided to return to school and get her GED diploma because she had never finished high school. She didn’t plan on higher education, but she then heard a church testimony from one of George’s cousins who was the student body president at a local community college. After the cousin sat down, the pastor asked, “Who has fear of education?” Sheila stood up. The pastor prayed to break the stronghold off her, and she heard God telling her to go to college.

She attended the community college and earned an associate’s degree. Then she went to Seattle Pacific University and earned her bachelor’s degree in organizational behavior with a minor in communication. She then enrolled in Seattle University where she earned a master’s degree in executive nonprofit leadership, a pastoral leadership certificate and later a post-master’s certificate in transforming spirituality and a doctorate of ministry.

Houston was offered a job as a director of the Late Night Outreach program of New Horizons Ministries that works with victims of sex trafficking and young people experiencing homelessness. At a women’s retreat before coming to New Horizons, she had a dream of snatching women out of trafficking and helping them return home.

“Now before my second interview with New Horizons, I had another dream. I could see myself helping young women come off the streets from trafficking,” she said.

She accepted the job with New Horizons to help women escape sexual exploitation and human trafficking. She and her teams would stand on street corners every Friday and every other Saturday night and reach out to women.

God didn’t just place a burden on her heart for the women. She also thought about the men she encountered on the same streets.

“Would you think that God would not care about these young, broken men? Why are they out there doing this?” she asked. “The Lord put on my heart to start a ministry working with young men involved in pimping.”

As the mother of three sons, she said, she knew the men “didn’t need another woman hollering at them. They needed men.” Free Methodist Pastor Deryl Davis-Bell became the leader of a group of male volunteers reaching out to men who facilitated human trafficking on the streets.

George and Sheila started a church in Renton, Washington, and affiliated with the Free Methodist Church.

“We didn’t want to be a church out there by ourselves. We wanted to be a church that had accountability,” she said. “We wanted to be a church where we could go and get strengthened as we do the work. That’s why we became a part of the Free Methodist.”

Their church plant ultimately closed, and they became part of Living Hope Christian Fellowship (now the Renton campus of Timberlake Church, the nation’s largest Free Methodist congregation). Two and a half years ago, they moved to the Detroit area for George to become the lead pastor of Stone Haven Free Methodist Church in Troy, Michigan, and for Sheila to serve as associate pastor.

She became the interim pastor of the Detroit Free Methodist Church in November 2018 following the death of longtime Pastor William Mulwee, and she officially became the lead pastor in June 2019.

“One of the things I’ve learned through the years is that God has a plan and purpose for every person. It doesn’t matter your status in life, your income level or how educated you are. All that matters is your willingness to accept His call,” she said. “One of the biggest things I’ve been trying to instill in the people of the church in Detroit is that God has need of them and their importance to the body of Christ. Their gifts and talents are needed to bring deliverance, healing and love to the Detroit community and our world.”

Mayoral Honor

Even though she’s now a Michigan resident, she returned to Washington state in January to receive an Anti-Trafficking Trailblazer Award from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan. Durkan honored Houston as part of the Human Trafficking Awareness Day, and the city government credited her with “being directly involved with over 2,500 victims” and making “a difference in the sex trafficking world by leading outreach and victim support teams to work with survivors of trafficking.”

When she received the call asking her to receive the award, she decided to accept the award at Seattle City Hall as a testimony of a Christian living out her faith and also as the only African-American recipient. Visit fmchr.ch/shouston to learn more about the award.

‘My Blind Eyes Led Me to Christ’: From Child Soldier to Church Planter

Notre Dame Magazine might seem like an unlikely place to read an in-depth article about a Free Methodist pastor and church planter — especially considering that pastor, Heritage Murinda Munyakuri, isn’t an alumnus of the prestigious Catholic university that publishes the magazine. Munyakuri, however, isn’t a typical pastor, and award-winning journalist Abigail Pesta (a Notre Dame alumna) was drawn to his extraordinary life story.

In the article titled “The Lord Is His Shepherd,”  Pesta recounted how Munyakuri, a native of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, “escaped a childhood of war, in which he was snatched up to serve as a child soldier for rebel groups — three times. Twice he was forced to fight; the third time, he refused to pick up a gun.” Pesta noted that Munyakuri “could have emerged a furious person. Instead, he changed his fate. He became a pastor and now runs his own church in Rochester, where he welcomes other immigrants and refugees.”

Pesta also interviewed Bishop Linda Adams who served as the pastor of New Hope Free Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, when Munyakuri and his family, who were Free Methodists in the Congo, moved to the United States 13 years ago and learned of New Hope from a taxi driver. Adams recalled how Munyakuri translated a message from his father, “We are orphans. We have no mother, no father, no motherland, no fatherland. The Free Methodist Church is our family, and you are our mother.’”

Adams also described Munyakuri as a “prayer warrior” who “would come and pray for eight hours at a time, processing what he had been through, crying, praying, sometimes shouting.”

There’s more to Munyakuri’s powerful life story that hasn’t been published previously. In a recent interview with LIGHT + LIFE, Munyakuri shared more about what has happened since his initial abduction and about his role as the founding pastor of El Shaddai Free Methodist Church.

Seeing and Praying

The lyrics for the hymn “Amazing Grace” have a literal meaning for Munyakuri — particularly “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”

One aspect of his life that hasn’t been reported is the physical healing he experienced following the bodily damage of the intense brutality he experienced.

“When I was captured by the militias in Congo, when they cut me with machetes, they hit me in my eyes, and my eyes were bleeding, and I became blind for almost five years,” Munyakuri told LIGHT + LIFE. “My blind eyes led me to Christ.”

A doctor instructed Munyakuri to drink five gallons of water every day, which he did faithfully without a change.

“Nothing happened, so I said, ‘I need God. I need something that maybe will heal me,’” he recalled.
He started attending church, accepted Jesus Christ and decided to fast for two weeks.

“I keep praying. Nothing happens, and then one day I walk through the church,” Munyakuri said. “The pastor was preaching, and he started talking about somebody who was blind in the church, and he said, ‘God is going to touch you, and God is going to heal your eyes.’”

Munyakuri said he closed his left eye and moved his hand across his right eye, which had been completely blind. To his surprise, he saw his hand.

He told a friend in the church, “I’m no longer blind. I’m healed,” but the friend didn’t believe him. The friend covered the other eye and asked Munyakuri to read the Bible with his right eye. The friend then said, “For real, you’ve been healed.”

Munyakuri notified the pastor that he had been healed, and the pastor handed him the microphone to tell the congregation of his healing.

“From that day forward, I loved prayer, because it makes a difference, and nothing can stop your prayers,” he said. “When you pray, it may take a long time to happen, but God will deliver in His own time.”
Munyakuri’s restored eyesight wasn’t the only healing he received. He also was supposed to have his right hand amputated at one point, but he declined the amputation.

“I kept praying, ‘God, will you bring a doctor who’s going to heal my right hand rather than taking it off?’”

He finally met another doctor who said, “I don’t want anyone else to touch this man. I’m going to just be the one taking care of him.” Munyakuri added, “He did all he could. He saved my right hand, but that was through prayer.”

As Adams told Pesta, prayer is key to who Munyakuri is.

“If there is no prayer in my life, I won’t be the person that I am today,” he said. “I’ll be lost. Prayer helps me first connect with God.”

He follows the call to personal prayer found in Matthew 6:6.

“I take some time alone where nobody else sees me, where nobody will clap hands for me, when I go in my secret room and I pray with just God who sees me and hears my word and takes it,” he said. “It makes me develop my relationship with God. When I’m praying alone, it’s just me and God.”

Prayer has helped him through the difficulties of his life.

“When I pray to God, it’s like I’m communicating to Him. I’m speaking to Him, and He is able to listen to what I’m saying through the Holy Spirit,” Munyakuri said. “When I pray, I feel like God is standing next to me.”

Munyakuri also understands the importance of group prayer reflected in passages such as Matthew 18:19–20, Acts 4:31 and James 5:14–15.

“There are times also when we need other people to pray together,” he said. “It’s like they sharpen me. … I hear something that will lift me up.”

Suffering and Joy

Munyakuri offers a personal testimony of God’s faithfulness through the hard times of life, which he said God uses to shape us — not abandon us.

“I’m a living testimony that you can be in suffering, but sometimes God uses suffering to bring joy in our hearts,” he said. “I usually have a lot of joy, not because I have everything, but because I went through some hardship, and God came to my help.”

When asked what advice he would give for people going through hard times, he said, “You may cry through the night, and the joy will come in the morning. There was a time in my life I used to cry in the night, but through my prayers and my devotion to God, and in my journey of faith and keeping hope in the Lord, the Lord never left my side. He declared through Moses, He said that He Himself will go before us and will always prepare a way for us. He will never leave us or even forsake us.”

Munyakuri added, “Even if you are in your darkest time in life, I know that God is able to take you out of there.”

El Shaddai

The Munyakuri family’s 2007 arrival led to increased diversity among Free Methodists in the Rochester area.
“There were no other people from Africa there. We were the first to arrive at New Hope. Then other people kept coming,” Munyakuri said. “I invited them. They all loved New Hope. Then it came to the point where people wanted to worship in their own language.”

Munyakuri eventually became New Hope’s assistant pastor, and then-Lead Pastor Michael Traylor (now co-superintendent of the River Conference) asked him to lead an afternoon service for African immigrants.

“We started the service as a New Hope service, and it kept growing and growing,” Munyakuri said.

Munyakuri said that after Scott Sittig arrived as New Hope’s pastor, Sittig suggested that the afternoon congregation could become a new congregation with Munyakuri as the lead pastor. El Shaddai Free Methodist Church launched in 2017. El Shaddai means “God Almighty” or “the Overpowerer” in Hebrew.

Services are held in two languages, Kinyarwanda and English. According to the National African Language Resource Center, Kinyarwanda is spoken by 20 million people who live primarily in Rwanda and portions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

“Most of the people are first generation here. They are very blessed to have a service in their own language,” Munyakuri said. “Because we also want to make sure we adapt to American culture, I start preaching in English every Sunday, and I have someone else translate it.”

Cultural adaptation is not the only reason for the dual languages in worship.

“We don’t want to be the church for just Africans,” Munyakuri said. “Our worship team is now singing songs in English so that we can invite other people who don’t speak our language. … We came here not only to bring the good news to the African people but also to reach the people around us.”

Unlike Munyakuri’s family that was originally drawn to New Hope because they were Free Methodists in Africa, El Shaddai primarily attracts African immigrants who are new to Free Methodism.

“They just join because we invited them to the church,” he said.

El Shaddai members are becoming prayer warriors like their pastor.

“Prayer is one of our goals at our church. We emphasize prayer most to the people. We want to encourage them to learn how to pray, because when we pray, that’s when God moves in the hearts of the people, and that’s what brings revival to the nation, other places, and our heart,” he said. “We emphasize prayer is like the foundation of our church.”

Prayer and fellowship don’t just happen at Sunday services, and the church helps give its immigrant members a sense of belonging.

“Our small groups, when we meet house to house in prayer, encourage them. They don’t feel like there are foreigners,” he said. “They don’t have the neighbors like they used to have in Africa. So once you go to their house and spend time with them in prayer group and praying and reading the Bible, it makes a difference for them, and they enjoy that.”

Location Challenges

One area of prayer is for El Shaddai to have its own building.

After launching at New Hope, the church plant received an offer from the family of former Free Methodist Church – USA Board of Administration member Norman Leenhouts, the co-founder of Broadstone Real Estate LLC, to use space for two years rent-free in a building close to downtown Rochester. The building meant that El Shaddai could hold services on Sunday morning instead of waiting to hold them on Sunday afternoon at New Hope.

“They [the Leenhouts family] owned the building, and they wanted a Free Methodist presence there,” Munyakuri said. “We said, ‘OK, we would love to go to a place where we could worship in the morning instead of afternoon, because it would be better and the church would grow more if we had the space in the morning.’”

The church began meeting in the building in 2017 (the same year that Leenhouts died) and met there through December 2019 when the building was donated to Youth for Christ.

El Shaddai is now meeting at the Park Ridge Free Methodist Church in Rochester’s Greece suburb on Sunday afternoons.

“The building is nice, and the people there are very welcoming,” Munyakuri said. “The problem is for the people we are focusing ministry on, that’s not the best location for us.”

Some members work on Sunday afternoon and can no longer attend, and transportation is a major challenge since the move.

“On Sunday, there is no bus over there,” Munyakuri said. “We don’t have a way to get people to the church. … I can’t drive them by myself to the church.”

El Shaddai members hope to obtain their own worship space closer to where most of the members live.
“My desire is that we raise money and buy our own building,” Munyakuri said. “We think we will be sustainable in the long run if we have our own place.”

He envisions an area of the church dedicated to helping people apply for jobs and providing transportation to job interviews.

“When they come to us, we help them to adapt to American culture and find jobs for them,” Munyakuri said. “I usually have dedicated time to take people for interviews and applying for jobs for them.”

El Shaddai members are using fundraisers such as a dinner with African food to raise money for a permanent home, but they know that money alone is not enough.

“Even now as we’re seeking to buy the building, the best thing we can do and the best support people can give to us is that they can pray,” Munyakuri said.

Visit El Shaddai’s Facebook page at fmchr.ch/elshaddai for video of worship services and to learn more about efforts to buy a church building in Rochester.

Church in A Coffee Shop: Making Disciples in Downtown Seattle

Seattle is famous for the Space Needle and its technology companies, music, frequent rain and coffee — but what about its spiritual vitality?

The Atlantic magazine notes in an article titled “The Non-Religious States of America” that one-third of Washington state residents don’t claim a specific religious faith. The website of KUOW, Seattle’s National Public Radio affiliate, includes the headline “Don’t Believe in God? Move to Seattle” with a report noting 10 percent of Seattle residents describe themselves as atheists — the highest rate of any U.S. metropolitan area.

Of course, Seattle is home to many committed Christ-followers and a leading Christian institution of higher education, Seattle Pacific University, that has drawn many believers to the Emerald City. Five years ago, Brice Sanders followed his then-fiancée Tracey Tucker to Seattle for Tucker to earn a master’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology at SPU. The couple met at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where Tucker earned her undergraduate degree while Sanders, a native Texan, earned his Master of Divinity degree from the university’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and served as the seminary’s director of ministry placement.

Sanders researched SPU and discovered it is a Free Methodist university, but, as he recalled in a phone interview with LIGHT + LIFE, “I had never heard of the Free Methodists before.”

One of his Truett professors, who previously taught at Seattle Pacific, told him that his theology would match Free Methodist beliefs well. Sanders called Matt Whitehead, who was then superintendent of the Pacific Northwest Conference and now is the lead bishop of the Free Methodist Church – USA.

Whitehead and Sanders met for Thai food, and Sanders soon became the family pastor of the Shoreline (Washington) Free Methodist Church one month before he married Tucker. Sanders became an ordained Free Methodist elder and next joined the pastoral staff of Timberlake Church, a multisite Free Methodist congregation in the Seattle area.

Coffee on the Side

The newlyweds moved into Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and frequented the weekly Ballard Farmers Market but noticed it lacked coffee. They decided to start a coffee catering side business that would serve farmers markets.

“The goal was just to meet people. We felt like the city was pretty lonely,” said Sanders, who previously had worked at several coffee shops in Texas. “It was just something to do. Instead of playing golf, I decided to basically construct a cart and make coffee at the farmers market, and that went really well.”

The couple started a coffee kiosk in a workspace and then a roastery. In 2018, they leased their own space and opened the Cedar & Spokes coffee shop in Belltown — a popular section of downtown Seattle that is also one of the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods.

“The workspace that we were in was in Belltown, so we had a customer base there, and we really knew the area,” Sanders said. “I knew the people who were on the Chamber of Commerce and the Belltown Business Development Board. I knew a lot of landlords and business owners, and so keeping our Belltown community close seemed best.”

Church Planting

While serving at Timberlake, Sanders became familiar with leaders of the Association of Related Churches, a church-planting organization commonly known as ARC.

“All that ARC really desires to do is equip people who are called to church planting with a great plan for how to plant a church,” Sanders said. “It was really some of the ARC guys that kind of nudged me a bit and said, ‘Have you ever thought of this as an option for you and your wife?’”

He said no, but he eventually realized that church planting matched his calling.

“I really loved the message that ARC had, which was creating churches that were life-giving, creating churches where people felt like they could belong, creating churches that were looking to reach the uncommitted and the lost,” Sanders said. “The message that ARC had was resonating, and, at the same time, truly the Holy Spirit was doing something on my heart.”

Sanders said he eventually picked up the phone and called ARC, “and they put us through the ringer, and then I had a few mentors who put me through the ringer, and then the denomination put us through the ringer. …. It was never this huge moment of God knocking on the door and saying, ‘Go do this.’ It was a culmination of community speaking life into something that was starting to grow in our hearts.”

Plans began to take shape for a church plant, Sanders said, “but one of the things we had not nailed down was where we were going to meet.”

Then he received a call from Lawrence Fudge, a campus pastor from Mosaic (the Los Angeles-based multisite church led by well-known author Erwin McManus) who reserved Cedar & Spokes for launch parties celebrating Mosaic’s Seattle campus. Sanders said he entered his business during one of the launch parties and was “incredibly impressed by how they used our coffee shop to set up basically a place of worship.”

Sanders realized he already had a great location in which to launch Coastline Church. “We had in our possession the whole time the place where we were going to do church, and I just didn’t realize it.”

The decision to launch Coastline at the coffee shop was not easy for the couple, who had tried to avoid professionally mingling business and ministry. Now they had to figure out how to handle their church meeting in their business. They brought the idea to the board of ministry leaders they had assembled from around the country to guide them in planting the church, Sanders said, “and we all agreed it was going to be a great spot.”

The coffee shop offered a downtown location with storage and parking, but hosting Coastline Church also meant Cedar & Spokes would need to be closed for business on Sunday mornings — a key time to attract tourists visiting the nearby Pike Place Market. Still, they decided, “We’re going to close on Sunday morning, and we’re going to trust God with the finances of the shop.”

How would a church handle paying rent to a coffee shop owned by its lead pastor? Sanders said he and his wife decided, “Let’s make this not messy. This space is free. We can use anything in it [for Coastline], and the church will never have to pay a cent for using the space.”

Seeking the City’s Welfare

Coastline launched at Cedar & Spokes on Sept. 8, 2019, as the newest plant of the Pacific Northwest Conference. The church highlights Jeremiah 29:7’s call to “seek the welfare of the city to which I have carried you into. Pray for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Coastline’s mission is “to see the message of Jesus bring real and lasting change to people’s lives, and to the city of Seattle.”

One of the ways Coastline demonstrates its commitment to the city is by sharing its finances.

“We’re doing things like partnering with nonprofits to make sure the church is more than about itself,” Sanders said. “Twenty percent of our giving goes to our nonprofits in an effort to truly change the city.”

Thus far, the church primarily attracts young adults (including college students ) along with empty nesters.

“It’s a very transient group — young people who might want to live downtown for a year or just moved here and want to be close to work,” Sanders said. “We’re 10 minutes from Amazon, so we are attracting that group.”

Some of the people already have a church background.

“We have found that we are meeting Christians left and right who have just moved here and have not been able to find a church,” said Sanders, who added that Coastline leaders also are  meeting “Christians who are leaving the big churches and want to be part of something smaller.”

Of course, it can be unpredictable who will attend. On a recent Sunday, the 75 people in attendance included FMCUSA Bishops Whitehead, Linda Adams and Keith Cowart and their spouses.

The church’s website tells potential visitors to expect a casual atmosphere, vibrant worship and an engaging message. Sanders’ message typically lasts for 20 minutes, and preaching isn’t the only discipleship tool.

“I spend a decent time writing my message, but I don’t put a lot of stock in the message being the center of everything we do to drive people toward being better disciples. We meet with people constantly,” Sanders said. “I’m constantly raising up leaders where they feel like they have a group of 30 to 40 people to reach out to and minister to.”

Sanders said he has “about 15 people on my leadership team, and any of those 15 I would be glad to call them a pastor because we’re raising them up and teaching them how to love people and pour into people.”

Faith and Growth
Coastline aims for both numerical and spiritual growth.

“If we’re not truly, continually making disciples and leading people to Jesus, then, of course, we’re not going to grow,” Sanders said. “I don’t really pay attention to the numbers, but I do pay attention to whether people are engaging and choosing to take faith steps.”

Along with detailing the church’s beliefs and statement of faith, Coastline’s website emphasizes five values: “We are committed to the message of Jesus. We are committed to growing as a church. We are committed to the uncommitted. We are committed to raising the spiritual temperature of our area. We are committed to people’s spiritual growth.”

Coastline is attracting unchurched people along with people who stepped away from church, and it is moving them forward on their spiritual journey. The church offers baptism, small groups and the Growth Track.

“We’re doing six baptisms in three weeks, and we continue to encounter people who walk into our doors that haven’t walked into church in five, ten years,” Sanders said.

While some churches see small groups as in-depth Bible studies, Coastline’s small groups focus on connecting people, briefly discussing the church’s messages, and praying for each other.

One of ARC’s influences on Coastline is Growth Track, which meets after the Sunday church service with food and child care provided. Growth Track covers church membership and helps participants discover their redemptive purpose and how to life the life God created for them. Like going to the gym, Sanders said, people start to feel momentum each time they participate.

“Growth Track is a real game changer. It’s a four-step class that you can take in any order,” said Sanders, who added the flexible order is helpful because some people cannot attend every Sunday. “If it’s their first week in five weeks, they can take the step that day to grow in some way and walk out the door realizing that they have prioritized their faith.”

Dream Team

As people become involved at Coastline Church, they may decide to join the group of volunteers known as the Dream Team.

“We call it a Dream Team because we want people to catch the dream in effect — catch the dream that we are to seek the welfare of the city, and we do that by being an equipping church,” Sanders said. “They’re there to help push the dream forward of seeing a lifegiving church in downtown Seattle.”

Dream Team members serve in a variety of roles, and they are invited for a special time of worship earlier on Sunday mornings as members prepare for the morning ahead.

“We don’t want to put the wrong person in a serve role, but we want everyone serving,” Sanders said.

It takes work to make people aware of Coastline’s presence in a city of more than 740,000 people.

“We’ve done a lot of things to make it known that we exist. We have A-frames [portable signs] and yard signs everywhere. We do mailers. We’re pretty active on social media. We have a really aggressive follow-up and engagement process when we encounter someone,” Sanders said. “More than just doing good marketing, we’ve also been smart about what is the church supposed to be, and so we’ve gone into assisted living centers and senior homes. We’ve walked into apartments and said, ‘How can we serve you as the property manager?’”

As they walk the pavement of downtown Seattle, Sanders said, they find “we have lots of people who’ve been searching hard for a place to ask spiritual questions, for a place to encounter God, for a place to call home.” He added, “I don’t think this city is so post-church that it just hates the church, that it’s anti-church, that we’re getting fought hard on the opportunity to exist. I think what we’re finding is that the church has not met the needs of Seattle.”

Visit coastlinechurchnw.com to learn more about Coastline Church and to support its ministry.

Loving God and Building Hope

A focus on prayer and love recently led the Crossing Free Methodist Church to turn its vacant parsonage into an emergency shelter for people facing homelessness in Shiawassee County, Michigan, and it didn’t take long for word to spread. The Crossing’s efforts to establish the House of Hope quickly attracted an award from a community group and extensive coverage from regional news media.

Church leaders weren’t seeking publicity, however. They were just trying to live out Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–34 and Luke 10:27.

“Our key scripture is the two commandments: love God and love your neighbors as yourself,” Pastor Lisa Lahring said. “That’s just our total foundation.”

Before the House of Hope even hosted its first resident, the Shiawassee County Homeless Coalition presented the shelter with its Building Hope award on Nov. 12. The award coincides with Homeless Awareness Month, and the coalition selected the House of Hope “in appreciation for supporting the community through recognition of need, assessment of situation, and building hope.” The award came as a surprise to members of the small but growing congregation in Durand, Michigan.

“I was kind of stunned because we weren’t even open yet,” Lahring said. “We’re humbled. We’re honored. We want to serve, but the main thing is just getting the word out that there is a need for homeless shelters. There is a need for prevention of homelessness.”

The Crossing went through the denomination’s Recalibrate process in 2018, and from January to April, Lahring’s sermons focused on prayer. Lahring said church members also went through a 20-day prayer reset while reading the book “Reset: 20 Ways to a Consistent Prayer Life” by Bob Sorge (who wrote the Connecting Points article in this issue), and, a few months later, the Crossing hosted Brett Heintzman of the National Prayer Ministry.

“I know prayer is the key absolutely to anything we do,” said Lahring, who also emphasized the decision to “take the church through confession and repentance.”

Members of the Crossing understand firsthand that homelessness isn’t just a problem in big cities. People also lose their housing in rural areas and small towns like Durand (population 3,400).

That was true for the Crossing’s John and Dena who previously received help from the church after John’s illness and job loss resulted in them losing their home. John and Dena have housing now, and John will help others who face homelessness by overseeing the House of Hope.

Lahring said the House of Hope is not a typical homeless shelter with many beds and multiple staff on-site. The house is a temporary emergency shelter.

“It’s like a rental home without us receiving rent,” Lahring said. “We’re not going to staff it, but we will be overseeing it.”

The House of Hope isn’t meant to be long-term housing for anyone.

“We want to make sure they are aiming toward permanent housing,” said Lahring, who added the House of Hope is for people who are actually homeless, not for a person or family wanting a nicer place to live. “We want to make sure we get somebody who needs the roof over their head.”

In recent years, the Free Methodist Church – USA has highlighted a strategic priority to “partner strong” through “mutually beneficial relationships” with “likeminded ministries.” The Crossing has done exactly that by developing a partnership with Light of Faith Fellowship, a nondenominational church in Durand that provides financial, spiritual and physical support to the House of Hope.

“Their church people have come over and helped volunteer in the house and getting it ready,” Lahring said.

Light of Faith Pastor Don White and his wife, Debbie, serve on the shelter’s committee and are available to provide counseling if needed. A social worker from the Crossing also is a key part of the House of Hope committee.

“We come together as the body of Christ. It’s not about me. It’s not about my overseer,” Lahring said. “It’s about all of us together, coming together to be able to help people through the love of Jesus Christ.”

The House of Hope is not just about keeping people out of the cold.

“Our vision is to help restore hope in the midst of the chaos of homelessness through the love of Jesus Christ,” said Lahring, who emphasized that people have physical, mental and spiritual needs. “It’s not just about housing but their whole self.”

Along with shelter, homeless people need transportation, food and clothing, and they also may need help with overcoming addiction, setting goals or learning how to create a budget.

Area newspapers have covered various stages of the House of Hope. The Argus-Press in Owosso, Michigan, provided indepth coverage with staff writer Sally York’s Nov. 29 article titled “Durand church members see shelter as ministry.”

Lahring received a call to ministry in the late 1990s. She became the Crossing’s associate pastor in 2009 while also working bivocationally as a nurse, and she transitioned to lead pastor in 2013. Because she already had a house, she didn’t need to reside in the parsonage, which made it available for the House of Hope.

One of the catalysts for opening the shelter was a ministry grant from the East Michigan Conference that helped fund the renovation of the parsonage. Lahring expressed appreciation for Superintendent Brad Button’s support.

The Crossing is increasingly becoming an intergenerational congregation with people of different ages doing ministry together. This past summer, the church hosted a community garden that was overseen by two congregants in their late 20s.

“They would take the produce that we would harvest and walk around town with it and drop it off to people,” said Lahring, who added that a couple of the produce recipients have since started attending the church.

“Even if you think you’re a small church, don’t count yourself out. Dale Woods [a Free Methodist pastor and missionary] said it best: ‘We don’t see problems. We see opportunities,’” Lahring said. “With God, it’s not impossible.”

Make Disciples

Make Disciples

The following article, authored by Bishop Keith Cowart, beautifully reflects our call to Make Disciples, the third of three points of our FMCUSA Mission.

I remember a time when it was rare to find a mission statement posted in a corporate environment, much less in the church. Today, we find them everywhere, from Fortune 500 companies to fast-food restaurants, and most definitely, in churches. A stated mission can be a strategically important tool that helps create culture and provides much-needed clarity, focus, and directional guidance. Or it can be nothing more than a marketing tool that looks great in print but has almost no impact on the company or organization.

The mission of the Free Methodist Church is to “love God, love people and make disciples.” It is a wonderfully simple, yet profound call rooted in the very words of Jesus in His Great Command (Mark 12:30–31) and Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20). It is clear, concise and sound. Our challenge is to devote ourselves to living it and not just talking about it.

My colleagues have taken us through the first two components of our threefold mission. My task is to tackle the final piece: making disciples. Unfortunately, decades of research provide striking evidence that while there has been no shortage of ink spilled or airways filled with talk of discipleship, the church has largely failed to deliver the goods. Church attendance is waning. The behavior and lifestyle of self-identifying Christians is not demonstrably different from those who claim no faith at all. Most troubling, millennials and post-millennials reared in the church increasingly reflect a worldview that is decidedly more secular than biblical.

Convicted by such findings, researcher George Barna spent six years interviewing more than 15,000 Americans in the hopes of identifying both the nature of spiritual transformation and the dynamics that impact that journey positively or negatively. He shares his findings in his book, “Maximum Faith,” in which he identifies 10 “stops” on the journey to transformation (see the accompanying graphic summarized from his book, which can be ordered at fmchr.ch/barnafaith). He also reveals the percentage of Americans who report progress to each stop along the way. The most obvious finding of Barna’s research is that few self-identifying Christians in America have moved beyond initial conversion and even fewer have progressed beyond involvement in church activities.

Of particular concern for those of us in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition is that stops 7-10 reflect a thoroughly Wesleyan understanding of the sanctified life we are ultimately called to live as Christians. A mere 11% of Americans report movement into that realm and a paltry 1% claim to have progressed to the kind of life Barna describes as “profound love of God” and “profound love of people.” Sound familiar? Unless Free Methodists make up a big chunk of that 1%, we’ve got some serious work to do!

While we could surely find this information depressing, I prefer to see it as a wakeup call that provides an opportunity to reclaim a thoroughly biblical view of and commitment to biblical discipleship. The days when it was beneficial or even popular in our society to be identified as a Christian are long gone … and that’s a good thing. History and the voices of our brothers and sisters around the world today tell us that Christianity tends to thrive most when it is unpopular and even opposed. The church has a way of sharpening its focus and strengthening its resolve when the safety net of social acceptance is removed and the only option is to embrace the dangerous, but life-giving path of biblical discipleship.

The Great Commission

Sometimes a scripture becomes so familiar that it loses its punch. I’m afraid that may be true of the Great Commission, so let’s take a moment to review the critical elements of this scripture that is so foundational to our understanding of discipleship.

First, we have to ditch the siloed view of evangelism and discipleship. The only true verb in the Great Commission is mathēteúō, which is Greek for, you guessed it, “make disciples.” This is Jesus’ central command, which by the way, is quite different from the aim of merely making converts or good church members. We are to invest our lives in helping others become fully devoted followers of Jesus, the ultimate fruit of which is profound love of God and people.

The way we are to fulfill that command is articulated by three participles that define the means of discipleship: going, baptizing and teaching. The command to “go” is the call to evangelism. As many have pointed out, the best translation is “in your going.” Evangelism is best carried out by ordinary people in the natural rhythms of everyday life. But the primary insight here is that in Jesus’ view, evangelism and discipleship are inseparable. You can’t make disciples without evangelism, and the whole point of evangelism is to make disciples. Evangelism without discipleship is like giving birth to a baby with no intent of bringing it home, caring for it, and nurturing it to maturity. Barna calls it “spiritual abuse.”

Second, we must understand the central role of community in discipleship. Why would Jesus link baptism and discipleship in the Great Commission? Without question, baptism allows a new follower of Jesus to publicly profess his or her faith and be received as one who now belongs to “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” But biblical scholars also point out that baptism was viewed as an initiation into the community of faith.

It might be surprising to some that Jesus focuses on baptism and initiation into Christian community before commanding us to teach, but it really shouldn’t be. The creation story reveals that God’s very nature is inherently relational — “Let us make humans in our image” (Genesis 1:26 GW). When Jesus launches His public ministry, he didn’t ask His disciples to read a book or attend a class. He invited them to “follow me” and “come and see.” Jesus’ approach to discipleship was to shape the lives of His followers in the whole-life context of personal relationships.

One of the most challenging implications of this insight is that we are to invite people into a relationship with Jesus and the community of faith at the beginning of their spiritual journey, not after they’ve demonstrated sufficient knowledge or right behavior to warrant it. While we have to hold this insight in tension with other scriptures that highlight the importance of repentance, obedience and accountability, we must embrace the truth that transformation is best viewed as the fruit, rather than a required condition, of authentic Christian community.

It is important to point out, however, that “going to church” and engaging in community are not the same things. Of the many qualities of biblical community, I’d like to highlight three that are critical to the journey of discipleship. The first is authenticity. The most fertile ground for growth in discipleship is a grace-filled environment in which honesty, openness and transparency are both modeled and encouraged. The second is mutual ministry. Life in community provides the opportunity to actually do the stuff we talk about on Sundays. As believers “do life together,” concepts like love, forgiveness and mercy are made concrete, providing the necessary means for shaping character. The third is diversity. While homogeneity may be a good church growth principle, it’s not a good discipleship principle. If we spend all of our time with people who are like ourselves, we have no one to show us our blind spots. However, when we engage in diverse community, we discover the gift of different perspectives, background and life experiences that stretch us and challenge us to move beyond what we already know. Together, these three qualities can significantly accelerate growth in discipleship.

Third, we must recover a commitment to transformational teaching. I once heard a popular author and proponent of the missional church movement make the statement, “Jesus wasn’t a teacher.” Really? Wasn’t that one of the names given Him by His disciples? Didn’t people marvel and say, “We’ve never heard anyone teach with such authority?” Aren’t the gospels filled with His teachings?

On the one hand, I get it. We have rightly witnessed a significant pushback to traditional, classroom-style teaching that often accomplishes little more than the transfer of information. Jesus made it clear that our aim in teaching is transformation, not information, when He commanded us to “teach them to obey” (Matthew 28:20 GNT). But in light of studies that call this generation of believers “the most biblically illiterate in history,” shouldn’t we consider the possibility that the pendulum has swung too far? In our attempts to emphasize community and mission, have we neglected the vital role of teaching God’s Word in a transformational way? Could it be that one of the reasons so many self-identified Christians are conforming to the world is because we have failed to give them the necessary means by which to renew their minds?

Our drift away from teaching the Bible has left our children and youth, in particular, highly vulnerable to the secular catechism of Hollywood, the music industry and social media. There is an all-out blitz to make secular values mainstream in our nation, and one of the ways that’s being accomplished is by casting Christian values as backward at best and bigoted at worst. Quite frankly, the world is doing a much better job of discipling our youth with its secular ideology than the church is at providing a strong, biblical foundation. It’s time for the church to answer the wake-up call and get serious about biblical discipleship.

The Cost of Non-Discipleship

Back in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the plague of “cheap grace” that had crept into the church of his day. The book was titled “The Cost of Discipleship,” something Bonhoeffer not only advocated in print, but embraced in life. He was one of the few German theologians who dared to take a stand against Hitler, and it ultimately cost him his life. This is how he described cheap grace:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate” (fmchr.ch/cheapgrace).

Interestingly, Barna’s research supports the idea that we do believers no favors when we emphasize the benefits but minimize the cost of discipleship. He found that only those believers who are willing to persevere through “spiritual brokenness” to the crisis point of “surrender and submission” ever progress to the ultimate aim of profound love of God and profound love of people. Unfortunately, most Christians in America choose to retreat to the safety and comfort of nominal Christianity, tragically unaware that avoiding the cost means they are also forfeiting the treasure of a wholly transformed life.

In “the Spirit of the Disciplines” (fmchr.ch/dwillard), Dallas Willard argues that the cost of non-discipleship is at least as great as the cost of discipleship: “Non-discipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life that Jesus said He came to bring (John 10:10).”

At the risk of being overly simplistic, it seems to me that the American obsession with membership and attendance growth has enticed us to “lower the bar” on discipleship, resulting in mostly nominal Christians who end up finding lukewarm spirituality to be wholly unsatisfying and unconvincing. Those who hold on for dear life remain in the fold but offer no compelling reason for their children, neighbors or colleagues to join them.

But what if we were to return wholeheartedly to our mission of making disciples who love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength and demonstrate their love for others in tangible, meaningful ways? What if our very lives, transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, became our greatest witness to a watching world? What if you believed these questions were not for someone else, but you?

Bishop Keith Cowart oversees Free Methodist ministries along the Eastern Seaboard, in the South Central United States and also in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He was elected a bishop of the Free Methodist Church – USA at General Conference 2019. He previously served as the superintendent of the Southeast Region after 21 years as the founding lead pastor of Christ Community Church in Columbus, Georgia.

Love People

Love People

The following article, authored by Bishop Matthew Whitehead, beautifully reflects our call to Love People, the second of three points of our FMCUSA Mission.

When our daughters were small, they loved watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Our youngest daughter, Melissa, said Mr. Rogers was one of her favorite people on earth. In fact, when the program was over, she’d kiss the TV because she loved him so much. Mr. Rogers’ love and respect for children was evident to most everyone who watched the program.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is a powerful movie released in November and based on Fred Rogers’ relationship with a troubled journalist who was assigned to write a magazine article about Rogers. The journalist character in the movie is based on the real-life journalist Tom Junod. Junod reports he was initially skeptical about the assignment but came to experience the unconditional love shown to him by Fred Rogers. Writing in the December issue of The Atlantic, Junod makes this observation about his relationship with Fred Rogers:

“A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. … [The movie] seems like a culmination of the gifts that Fred Rogers gave me and all of us, gifts that fit the definition of grace because they feel, at least in my case, undeserved. I still don’t know what he saw in me, why he decided to trust me, or what, to this day, he wanted from me, if anything at all” (fmchr.ch/atlantic).

Mr. Rogers began every program the same way. He would put on his sneakers and change into a cardigan sweater while singing the show’s theme song, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is another way to think about the second part of the threefold mission of the Free Methodist Church: love God, love people, and make disciples.

Loving people compels us to lay down our preferences.

Each of us have preferences. We prefer different types of music, like particular foods, and enjoy very different forms of recreation. It’s a good thing that we don’t all agree. Wouldn’t life be boring if we all liked the same things?

Unfortunately, some people confuse preferences with foundational truth. Foundational truths are those bedrock pillars of our faith that must never change. For example, people confuse preferences with foundational truth when they strongly believe that music in a worship experience can only be one specific style and that all other forms of worship are not valid. The bottom line isn’t what we prefer but what is pleasing to God and what will draw people to consider a relationship with Jesus.

Jesus was so good at creating a welcoming environment for people. Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well (John 4) and engages her in a life-changing conversation. Jesus perfectly models truth and grace as He talks with her. Jesus never soft-pedals the truth but makes her feel so comfortable that she opens up to share the deep secrets of her life.

The response of this woman — transformed by meeting Jesus — is so powerful. She lives out what it means to tell others the good news about Jesus, “‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?’ They came out of the town and made their way toward him” (John 4:29–30).

Every local church needs to wrestle with this question of preferences. This is such a complex issue. Local church leaders need to ask: How do we both serve the people who are already a part of the church family and create a welcoming environment for those who are not yet here?

Our founders were committed to simplicity in dress and modesty so the poor would feel welcomed among us. In our culture, it’s hard to tell if someone is wealthy by the way they are dressed, but the principle is the same. We desire our churches to be welcoming places for people and to eliminate all the roadblocks that would prevent them from feeling at home.

One provocative question I believe is so helpful as we think about this issue is: Who gets served first? Of course, local churches should create environments where people can grow and mature who are already there, but church members must also think and pray about making sure their church is ready for company and willing to remove any roadblocks that prevent new people from being welcomed and feeling comfortable.

In my previous role as a superintendent for over 20 years, I’ve worked with pastors and local church leadership teams as they wrestled with these questions. In most cases, local churches want to be welcoming places, but the process of getting there can be painful. This requires a prayerful strategic effort on the part of pastors to cast a vision for this kind of a local church and leaders’ will to embrace the change that must take place.

Loving people demands a radical commitment to listen.

Really listening to people is a hard thing to do — especially to listen to people who may disagree with us. But the ability to talk graciously with someone who we may disagree with is a sign of spiritual maturity and sanctification. The closer we become to Jesus, the more we want to engage with people and listen to their stories and even the pain they’ve experienced.

Our society is so divided and so factionalized. It seems like it is no longer possible to disagree agreeably. When we only talk with people who agree with us politically and watch the same cable news programs we do, we miss the opportunity to hear other people’s perspective and live out a call to listen.

As Christ-followers we are called to stand in the gap and live out James’ admonition: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry” (James 1:19). This is so hard to do; isn’t it? Some of us are very good at talking but not very good at listening. As Dr. Phil McGraw said, “We need to be long on ears and short on mouth.”

While having lunch with a friend recently, we talked about the incredible impact of the life of Fred Rogers and the recent renewed interest in him. As we talked, we both admitted we didn’t really get Mr. Rogers at the time. His unpretentious ways of communicating and simple sets and puppets seemed odd to us adults. We completely missed his profound respect for children and the powerful message he proclaimed.

The radical commitment to listen is one of the places where I think we miss the point today. We can mistakenly believe that to listen to someone different from us compromises who we are. Nothing could be further from the truth. Listening communicates acceptance in ways that most of us do not fully understand.

Loving people motivates us to take the gospel down the street and around the world.

Before the Free Methodist Church was a decade old, we began planting churches in different parts of the country, and by our 20s, we were sending missionaries around the world. This motivation to share the good news of Jesus came from the biblical mandate in Acts 1:8, But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

An improper reading of this text leads to the faulty conclusion that once we have all the bases covered in Jerusalem we can go on next to Judea and so on. Rather, the scriptural admonition in Acts 1:8 is that these things should be happening at the same time and not one after the other.

Our worldwide missions movement now dwarfs the Free Methodist Church in the United States. The Free Methodist Church is now ministering in more than 80 nations around the world. This explosive growth outside the United States is something that should bring us pride as a ministry family.

But we also long for the day that kind of impact is being experienced here in the United States. We see the seeds of kingdom harvest on the horizon. We know this kind of rapid spread of the gospel is possible.

Loving people propels us to meet people’s needs and stand for justice and reconciliation.

Our ministry family traces its roots back to people who were profoundly committed to proclaiming the gospel and meeting the needs of people. This coupling of a personal and social holiness is in the DNA of who we are as Free Methodists.

Our amazing God is no respecter of persons. God deeply loves every person in the human family. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more and nothing we can do to make God love us any less.

Justice and reconciliation are part of who are, but at times we’ve been silent when we should have spoken up. At times we should have been quiet and listened to the pain of people who’ve experienced racism and sexism in our ministry family.

It’s amazing to look around the Free Methodist Church today and see the needs that are being met in so many ways. We are living out this part of our DNA better than we ever have before.

Remember the words of the prophet Micah:

“He has shown you, O man, what is good;

And what does the Lord require of you

But to do justly,

To love mercy,

And to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8 NKJV)

The church that I pastored in Seattle developed a ministry to homeless women. We welcomed women into our church facility to sleep every night. This ministry became a vital part of who we were as a congregation. Because our family lived in a parsonage next door to the church, these women became our friends and neighbors.

While this ministry helped to meet the needs of homeless women in Seattle, the impact on our congregation and our family was profound. We realized that these women had so much to teach us. We learned about what it was like to be poor and homeless. The ministry was messy and full of complications, but, looking back, I think the most lasting change was in us.

We know many of the women in the shelter were fleeing domestic violence, and we suspect some of the others may have been battling their own drug and alcohol addictions, or were in the grips of mental illness. I asked our daughters looking back what that was like as young girls to be around that type of ministry, and one of my daughters recalled that she was never scared of the women; she was scared for them.

Our daughters were able to experience a gritty but real-life version of ministry. They have both grown to be women of God with huge compassionate hearts for the marginalized. We all trace that back to living next door to the shelter and frequent interactions with our homeless friends living next door.

Jesus defines what it means to meet people’s needs in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 10:25–37). Jesus responds to a question from a teacher of the law that prompts Jesus to tell this powerful story. The text tells us that this religious leader asked Jesus this question to test him. He could not have imagined how Jesus would respond.

Jesus turns the tables and makes the religious people the ones who miss the point in this story, and the most compassionate and godlike response comes from the most outcast people group of Jesus’ day.

Loving people requires us to share the good news of Jesus.

We have a passion for people to come to know Jesus. We believe that a relationship with Jesus is the best decision a person can ever make. Social justice is in our DNA as a ministry family, but we also must know that was always coupled with strong proclamation of the gospel. One cannot be separated from the other. The Great Commission and the Greatest Commandment are the foundation of who we are.

The meeting of needs without sharing the message of Jesus is inadequate, and the proclamation of the gospel without the commitment to take a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name is irresponsible.

Jesus lays out this kingdom priority just before He returns to heaven, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20).

Both evangelism and discipleship are critical in following God’s mandate for us and are both a part of what it means to love people. The proclamation of the gospel and making disciples are inseparable. You really can’t have one without the other. Local churches should intentionally provide opportunities for people to be presented with the good news of new life in Christ and then offer an appropriate way for people to respond. God-honoring local churches will also provide clear avenues for people to grow in their faith and become deeply rooted in the body of Christ.

People all around us are desperately looking for persons and local churches to love them and help them discover what it means to find a life-giving relationship with Jesus.

Love God. Love People. Make Disciples. Won’t you be my neighbor?

Bishop Matt Whitehead oversees Free Methodist ministries in the Western United States and also in Africa. He was elected the lead bishop of the Free Methodist Church – USA at General Conference 2019. He previously served more than 20 years as the superintendent of the Pacific Northwest Conference after 17 years as a local church pastor.

Love God

Love God

The following article, authored by Bishop Linda Adams, beautifully reflects our call to Love God, the first of three points of our  FMCUSA Mission.

Our Free Methodist mission statement says simply that our reason for being comes down to three things: love God, love people and make disciples. The first and foremost of these three — the foundation of it all — is to love God.

This primary call of a Christian can be misunderstood by exaggerating any aspect of it. For instance, some take the call to love God above all else as pure demand, to be dutifully obeyed by whatever determination we can muster. It is a command, after all. Jesus quoted verses from Deuteronomy when He named it the greatest commandment: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30–31).

To those who equate love with duty, aligning all the powers of our will with reverent regard for God and obedience to His law is what God requires as our chief aim.  Love equals right actions, with no regard for relationship or emotion. Our proper response to God is to know the right thing and do it.

The opposite tendency is to hear the word “love” sentimentally. If love for God is a feeling, then we should constantly try to conjure up the right emotions. Logically oriented personalities can never or rarely achieve this heartfelt devotion; poetic descriptions by others leave them baffled. If loving God is all about feelings of adoration and worship, we may chase this experience through repetitious praise music or other attempts to recreate the memory of a transcendent connection we once felt. To bring our “heart, soul, mind and strength” to God means to be all in, all the time, with all our powers so we can always feel devoted to God. Right actions and obedient choices take a back seat to our emotional state in defining how God wants to be loved.

If we’re not familiar with other religions, we might not realize how radical it is for the Christian to relate to God in terms of love in the first place. Deities normally demand appeasement or submission, not love.

Most radical of all is the Christian claim that the invitation to love God springs from God’s very being as a sacred community of three whose creative energy is love. God is not solitary but has existed from eternity past in a mutually loving Trinity. Jesus alluded to this as He prayed, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24).

Genesis 1 reveals the Spirit of God brooding over Creation, drawing forth life, beauty and goodness, climaxing in the creation of human beings in God’s image. The love of the triune Godhead overflows to the created ones. Made in the image of a God who exists in eternal love, we were made by love and for love. Therefore, our love for God is grounded in God’s extravagant prior love for us.

The Old Testament continues to reveal God’s essential nature as love, expanding the meaning of the term. In Exodus we read: “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin’” (34:5–7).

Mutual Faithfulness

This God invites the people of Israel into a covenant relationship in which God offers love and loyalty and asks for a corresponding exclusive devotion from the people. This is the pattern: God loves and commits first and offers a relationship based on mutual faithfulness. Many passages throughout the Bible reveal this order of things, but perhaps the most succinct is the Apostle John’s statement, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

If our capacity to love God is reciprocal, offering back to God that which has first been given to us, how can we describe that first love? For thousands of years, mystics and theologians, preachers and everyday “beloved ones” have tried to capture in words the indescribable. They have used potent images like God pouring energy into the soul — drawing out greater vitality and love — and forceful terms like “hungry love” and “stormy love” (the words of 14th century Flemish mystic John Ruysbroeck) that elicit storms of love in response. Like 20th century British theologian Evelyn Underhill, they describe love that encompasses “agony, passion, beauty, sternness and pity” and results in selfgiving love or charity in the recipient (fmchr.ch/eunderhill). Following biblical imagery, God’s love has been envisioned as that of a caring shepherd, a good father, a protective mother bear, a loyal friend, and even a divine lover and bridegroom. Each metaphor reveals an aspect of this God who is Love.

The supreme example of love is Jesus, who freely gave His life in sacrifice for our sake. In Philippians, we read that Jesus humbled Himself “by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross” (2:8). And in Romans, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8).

Transforming + Empowering

Ordinary people transformed by this divine love can respond in heroic acts of self-giving. The biblical story and the story of the church down through the ages are filled with examples of the transformative power of God’s love in the human heart. Love for God emanates in humble service to the poor and powerless, works of justice and mercy near and far, forgiveness for those who have caused harm, carrying the mission of God to the ends of the earth, bold proclamation of the gospel of grace even under persecution, battling the forces of evil in their many guises, and countless examples of compassionate, sacrificial service to one’s family, church, community and world.

Completely comprehending this divine love cannot be accomplished by human wisdom or reason, even in a lifetime of effort. The Apostle Paul prays that the Ephesian Christians and all of God’s holy people — by extension including us — will be supernaturally empowered to grasp this incomprehensible love: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17b– 19).

His sequence is this: First, we become grounded (rooted, established) in the experience of love. Let that soak in for a minute! Advancing toward grasping the enormity of God’s love begins by first experiencing love at ground level and below, down to our roots. This essential starting point prepares us to receive the power, in community, to comprehend at increasing levels the expansive dimensions of Christ’s love for us and, by implication, for one another. This growth leads to the seeming impossibility of knowing something that surpasses knowledge, this ultimate love. Why? Not just to apprehend a fact, but so that together we can be filled with the overflowing fulness of God.

Knowing Leads to Loving

I hope you’ve been privileged to know someone so winsome and attractive that people comment, “To know her is to love her.” Does a name and face come to mind for you? Far more profoundly than in the case of a lovely person, this is true of the Living God. To know God is to love God. This should be our quest. All our acts of worship and spiritual disciplines have as their aim this fuller and deeper knowledge of God, so that as we know God more, we will love God more.

As Jesus taught, the commands to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves cannot be separated. Loving God leads to loving people — even ourselves! To know God is to know love and to become loving. The Apostle John put it this way, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7–8).

To love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength is a big enough challenge for a lifetime. The longer we live and press on to love God, the more we yearn to place our integrated selves — body, emotions, intellect and will — at God’s disposal, available for God’s purposes, as our act of responsive love. Our fragmented and distracted selves come together to will one thing; in this centering we find peace.

What holds us back from receiving God’s love? Often it is fear. If we can catch a glimpse of the goodness and love at the heart of God, we can lose our fear and surrender to this power that pursues us. In his “Confessions,” St. Augustine wrote of his regret for wasting the early years of his life before his conversion, “Oh Beauty so old and so new! Too late have I loved Thee!”

Like the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15:11–32), Augustine had run from the Father’s love and squandered years of his life. Yet when he came to himself and found the courage and humility to return to the Father, he discovered mercy, welcome, honor and belonging. All he had sought in the far country had been waiting for him back home in the Father’s house. Although in his humiliation, the Prodigal Son offered to become his Father’s servant, the Father would have none of that! He fully restored him to sonship, with all its rights and privileges.

In the same way, God gives the Holy Spirit to us so we can escape the prison of fear and know that we are God’s very own, beloved children. “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Romans 8:15- 16).

John Wesley, founder of Methodism, championed this “inward witness of the Spirit” (fmchr.ch/jwesley). By a powerful personal experience of God’s indwelling Spirit, he realized that God works to make the believer “perfect in love.” Wesley testified of his own transformation and taught on this New Testament theme, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18). What a hope-filled doctrine! The One who loves us perfectly desires to overcome our fear with love, completing us and freeing us for His holy use. We will never advance to perfection in performance or overcome the possibility of failure, but our motive can become pure love.

“Do You Love Me?”

At the very end of Jesus’ time on earth, standing on the seashore like the first time they had met, Jesus asked a pressing question of his friend Peter. “Do you love me?” And Peter answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus repeated the question and Peter repeated his answer. The third time Jesus asked, Peter was hurt. He replied, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” Jesus’ response all three times was to call him to ministry on Jesus’ behalf, “Feed my lambs.” “Take care of my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”

This is an amazing, poignant scene (John 21:15–19). Imagine! The incarnate God “popping the question” to a mere human in the most vulnerable way. Like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof ” asking his wife, Golde, “Do you love me?” Jesus wants to hear from Peter the most personal words, “I love you.”

In the “Fiddler” lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, Golde reviews their 25 years of shared marital life with all its work and hardships, then ends with, “For 25 years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him, 25 years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?” Tevye triumphantly proclaims, “Then you love me!” She admits, “I suppose I do.” “And I suppose I love you too” (fmchr.ch/fiddler).

Both Peter and Jesus could have listed Peter’s actions showing his love — he had left all to follow Jesus. For three years he had been apprenticed to this rabbi, observing and learning and being mentored in the deepest truths of life. But beyond the realm of teaching and learning, following and taking on the role of disciple, preparing for even greater leadership in this movement in the future, Jesus wanted to hear in Peter’s own voice what was in Peter’s heart. “Do you love me?”

I hope you never get over the astonishing reality that the God of the universe wants your love. Whether expressed in rapturous song or mundane sheep-feeding faithfulness, I pray you’ll never grow tired of offering yourself back to the Lover of your Soul in wholehearted devotion. It’s your reason for being.

Bishop Linda Adams, D.Min., was elected to the Board of Bishops at General Conference 2019 after serving 11 years as the director of International Child Care Ministries. She previously served as a pastor in New York, Illinois and Michigan. As a bishop, she oversees Free Methodist ministries in the North and North Central portions of the United States and also in Latin America.