The Story of Anchorage Wesleyan Church

As a child, my Father, who is also a minister, often spoke of his desire to plant a church and on two different occasions our family took churches with less than 5 members. I remember telling my dad that I would do several things in life: 1. Play in the NBA and dunk from the 3-point line (still waiting for the right moment) 2. Buy him a red Corvette (he’s now too old to really enjoy it, so I hope to buy one for myself) 3. Become President of the United States (again, waiting for the right moment) and 4. Use my status as a result of the above achievements to attract a large crowd and start a church (pretty good strategy!).

Over time I grew out of my dreams and begin considering what my life would really be like and what I would do with my time. Near the end of my high school career I was within a week of signing up with the Marines, when God lead me very clearly to a decision to become a pastor. A classmate, Billy Benz committed suicide after being caught with a gun in school (which I reported but didn’t offer to befriend) and a variety of other problems, including routine beatings from the male members of each of the established cliques. God convicted me about the fact that I was in the perfect situation to help Billy find hope in life. I was a minister’s son who knew very well how to identify a hurting person and I knew very well how to befriend, encourage, and change his life eternally. Instead, I joined my classmates in a good laugh when we found out that he had shot himself in the head, while sitting alone in a field outside of the city. I determined then that I would never again miss an opportunity help those searching for hope.

As a freshman college student, I was invited to be the youth leader at a small Nazarene church in Indiana for $50 a week (not bad considering it is more than I make now). I met with the youth group – about 5 teens and came away very excited, because we made out a list of about 20 of their friends that they knew would come if we just threw out some free pizza. I almost ran to the Senior Pastor with excitement, only to be astonished by his actions. He looked at the sheet and then took out his pencil and began crossing off many of the names on the list, saying “We don’t want these kids anywhere near this property; in fact we have kicked them off several times. These kids are the ones that cause all the trouble in this town and they smoke too.” When I attempted to challenge his assumption that these kids were no longer valuable to God, he swore at me and threatened me physically. Oh, how I wish he would have thrown two punches (the Bible is unclear as to how to respond after you have turned your cheek once). I determined at this point in my life that I would always seek the outcasts with passion.

My next ministry experience was one of the prime incubators for the church planting dream that is within my heart. I was able to serve as the youth pastor at Countryside Community Church in Spearfish, SD, which was a 2 year old church plant. As a result of God’s blessing on our youth ministry, we saw many teens in the area place their faith in Christ and receive baptism. Tyler Loken, who now serves on the AWC Leadership Team, also served on the leadership team of the Countryside Student Ministry. God built my confidence in Him, in my own ministry ability, and in his calling on my life to plant a church. Countryside was free of most of the encumbrances that often hold established churches back from fulfilling the great commission and this excited me greatly. Established churches can often become political labyrinths so filled with personal ambitions that the Gospel is completely halted.

The statistics about the effectiveness of church planting as compared to established churches in seeing lost people come to Christ as their Lord began to make sense to me as week after week we would see people find new life. The “Action Team” or Leadership Team Meetings were a completely different atmosphere than I had ever experienced or heard of before. The leadership of the church came together, prayed, held each other accountable and then discussed how to make the church more effective in ministry. Most of the meetings that I had seen and heard about were concerned with how a certain set of individuals or families wanted to have more organ music or some other similar topic. Ninety-five percent of the time our discussions centered around how to more effectively reach greater numbers of people with the Gospel and how to see authentic life change as they continued their experience at Countryside – it was a breath of fresh air. I became convinced that the sacrifice and the risk of church planting were well worth the cost.

Through an odd set of circumstances, the State of Alaska was added to the responsibility of the Dakota District of the Wesleyan Church at about the same time I decided that church planting was for me. Having expressed my desire to plant a church, I was invited to go on an exploratory trip to Alaska to see what potential was there. We learned a lot from our initial visit; I decided that church planting in Alaska would meld several dreams together for me and that God was leading me in this direction.

During the summer of ’98, I stayed in the garage of Dan and Denise Menefee, who preceded Heidi and I in coming to Alaska to plant churches. While I was here, I was deeply impacted by the experience that I had while conducting a door to door survey in the Lake Hood area. One of the questions on the survey was, “If you are not currently attending church, why not?”, and I will remember the faces of some of those who responded until I die. It was clear that the #1 reason people kept their distance from God and the church was because of hypocrites. Isn’t it interesting that this makes the blood of Christ boil more than any other issue? As I continued to hear this response my blood began to boil as well. The example of hypocrisy most often cited was the abuse of money by popular Christian leaders. As a result of this experience I began seeking a strategy to authentically and effectively approach the lost of Anchorage.

God answered my prayer, of course. The next semester at OWU part of my course load was a class called The Pauline Writings. I didn’t really know who Pauline was but it sounded like a pretty wimpy class. Over the course of the class not only did I discover that Pauline was another way of saying, “written by Paul”, but I also saw for the first time what it looked like to go into enemy territory completely outmatched and win the day! Reading Paul’s writing took the ‘ine’ right out of Pauline – His writings should instead be called the “Paul-macho” writings. Paul put all he had on the line in order to advance the truth he finally understood after a face to face confrontation with the Master. Not only was I deeply moved and impacted by Paul’s passion for the purity of the church and the essentials of the Gospel, but the Lord also made my strategy very clear to me.

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