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MAPS VOLUNTEERSIMPACT CHURCHPAGE 5

CHURCH TAKES HOLD WHERE MAJORITY HAVE NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION PAGE 3 • STUDENTS CHANGING THE WORLD PAGE 4 • AIDING MISSIONARIES FROM THE START PAGE 7 • THIS WEEK IN AG

HISTORY PAGE 8

STUNTS AID SPEED THE LIGHTPAGE 5

FLORIDA CHURCHES STILL REBOUNDINGPAGE 6

A COLLECTION OF THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES FROM PENEWS.ORG

SUNDAY,MARCH 11,2018

THIS WEEK IN AG HISTORYBY DARRIN J. RODGERS

Robert A. Brown, with his wife Marie, founded Glad Tidings Tabernacle in New York City, which for many years was the largest congregation in the Assemblies of God. However, Brown spent his youth far away from God.

Born in Northern Ireland, Brown lived a worldly lifestyle. He decided to hear one of his cousins preach and was deeply impressed. The Holy Spirit grabbed hold of his heart and he surrendered his life to Christ.

After immigrating to America in 1898, Brown studied for the ministry and was ordained by the Wesleyan Methodist Church.

One day in 1907, he decided to attend a service held in a small Holiness mission in New York City.

Two young women ministers, Marie Burgess and Jessie Brown (not related to Robert), were fearlessly preaching the Pentecostal message.

Robert Brown was asked to preach at the church. He decided to preach on Acts 2:4 and the baptism of the Holy

Spirit. As he preached, he grew under great conviction that he needed to experience the Baptism. He received the experience a little while later, on Jan. 11, 1908.

Robert married Marie Burgess and they established what became Glad Tidings Tabernacle. He became an AG executive presbyter in 1915.

Read the March 6, 1948, issue of the Pentecostal Evangel online at http://s2.ag.org/mar61948.

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OBEDIENCE LEADS TO ALS HEALING PAGE 2

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Richard T. Daddona, went into the baptismal waters of Trinity Chapel Assembly of God in Louisville, Kentucky, on Sept. 24, 2017, and emerged as a faithful man healed of ALS.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, progressively weakens muscles and severely affects a person’s physical abilities. In October 2016, a neurologist confirmed that Daddona, 59, had the disease after he had suffered for a year with a horrible, constant twitching throughout his body.

In January 2017, Daddona retired and began using a wheelchair to function because of the disease’s impact on his legs. Daddona’s wife of 30 years, Nancie, became his primary caregiver. Daddona could not sit up, roll over, get dressed, or bathe by himself.

Immediately after the diagnosis, Daddona says he began to have a series of 12 elaborate dreams. Someone always preached a message about healing waters and how they could wash away sickness, sin, and disease. With each new dream,

Daddona could decipher an additional Bible verse on trees along a path that led to a waterfall filling a small pool.

“I would wake up long enough to write down the Scripture and go back to sleep,” Daddona recalls, Nancie kept a log of the dreams, which occurred over several months. Midway through, the Daddonas approached their pastor, Scott A. Brown.

“The repetition of the dreams coupled with the Scripture was when we began to see there was a clear and common theme and one aspect of that was water baptism,” says Brown, 48.

The verse from the penultimate dream came from Acts 22:16: “And now why are you waiting? Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord” (NKJV). Daddona had never been baptized.

At the baptismal service, Daddona’s testimony was read as well as the explanation of his dreams and accompanying Scriptures. Two associate pastors had to physically lower Daddona from his wheelchair

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T H E A B C s O F S A L V A T I O N

ACCEPT that you are a sinner, and God’s punishment for yoursin is death and separation from God forever.

BELIEVE that Jesus paid God’s price for your sin when He died on the cross.

CONFESS “Jesus, I believe You are who the Bible and historydeclares You are – the Son of God. I humble myself and surrender to You. Forgive me. Make me spiritually whole. Change my life. Amen.”

AIDING MISSIONARIES FROM THE STARTBY REBECCA BURTRAM

Half a dozen new Colorado church plants pledged to sponsor AG world missionaries at their first missions convention for the Central District. Janie Wead-Mobley, church planting director for the district — which encompasses Hispanic congregations in the six Rocky Mountain states — is leading the charge in encouraging new congregations to make supporting and sending world missionaries a part of their DNA. She believes the work of planting churches in the U.S. and spreading the gospel globally go hand in hand.

Throughout her ministry, Wead-Mobley has felt strongly about the need to help church planters survive the financial struggles of the first couple of years after opening. At a recent missions convention, Wead-Mobley gathered planters together and urged them to challenge congregants to give from a position of need. While she recognizes the unusual nature of the concept, Wead-Mobley says she has seen church plants thrive, and go from merely giving to missions to

sponsoring missionaries from within.“I anticipate we are going to see

the missionaries come out of these churches that gave,” she says. “Going from giving to sending is when you see the full cycle.”

Horacio and Angie Lopez planted Centro Familiar Cristiano in Aurora, Colorado, four years ago. They caught the vision for missions when Wead-Mobley took them to a Hispanic missions convention in Springdale, Arkansas.

“We saw that they started as we started — small — and we saw how much God blessed them,” says Angie Lopez.

Centro Familiar Cristiano now supports five missionaries.

OBEDIENCE LEADS TO ALS HEALINGBY ALLISON N. BLEVINS

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Elizabeth Kahrs cried the first time she saw the FeedOne promotional video at her Chi Alpha chapter. A senior nursing major at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Kahrs, 22, always had a heart for kids, but witnessing how children deal with global hunger every day moved her to become part of the solution.

“FeedOne has stolen my heart,” she says. So much so that after she graduates in May she won’t become an emergency room nurse as planned. Instead, Kahrs will serve a year as a missionary associate with Chi Alpha Campus Ministries USA at a local hospital, gaining experience before becoming a medical missionary with Convoy of Hope, FeedOne’s parent organization.

Her story is just one of the many changed lives coming from the Chi Alpha Campus Ministries’ partnership with FeedOne, a ministry that works to abolish hunger one child at a time.

“Students want to talk seriously

about what they can do to see FeedOne succeed on campus as a long-term initiative,” says Thomas E. Trask II, U.S. missionary with Chi Alpha at the University of Missouri. They see the importance of that partnership.”

Derek Britt, U.S. missionary with Chi Alpha at Indiana University, sees similar responses with students at the campus in Bloomington.

“We want to instill in these students the idea that they are responsible to meet this need,” Britt says. “We want to love people well so kids can eat. These students really get that.”

The partnering Chi Alpha chapters have seen great results with fundraising efforts. Last November, the MU chapter raised $41,775. Some of the small groups collect loose change. Others hold more elaborate events. One group hauled a beater car to a prominent place around campus and let students take a sledgehammer to it for a fee.

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STUDENTS CHANGING THE WORLDBY GINGER KOLBABA

Over the past two decades, dozens of RV Volunteers have parked their recreational vehicles on the campus of the Harvest Church for construction projects.

RV Volunteers sent through U.S. Mission America Placement Service (MAPS) have completed a half-dozen building and remodeling projects on the site over the years as the Glendale, Arizona, congregation has grown from 20 adherents to 2,500.

“Without U.S. MAPS’ ministry, Harvest just would not be where it is today,” says Ron G. Rockwell, lead pastor.

U.S. MAPS volunteers have constructed all four buildings that make up the church’s current campus. In the fall of 2018, Harvest will greet another crew to begin work on a new 50,000-square-foot sanctuary that will seat up to 2,500. During its largest project completed in 2010, the church welcomed 20 RVs housing 30 volunteer workers.

Rockwell estimates the volunteer efforts so far have saved the church at least $10 million in labor costs.

U.S. MAPS volunteers first arrived in 1998 to build a 1,000-square-foot sanctuary with room for 100 people. They returned in 1999 to add 3,000 more square feet. Two years later, volunteers built a 13,000-square-foot sanctuary. The church in 2010 opened a 34,000-square-foot, 1,000-seat worship center, also built by U.S. MAPS workers.

“Five, Six, Seven, Eight!” That was the call heard at least

1,000 times in the Florence (Alabama) First Assembly of God gymnasium as 18-year-old Rachel Phillips and 19 girls from her high school cheer team spent hours doing 1,000 stunts in a challenging fundraising effort for Speed the Light (STL).

The idea of doing 1,000 cheer stunts began when Steve Mason, the Alabama District Council Youth director, spoke about the One in One Thousand Speed the Light challenge to youth at last summer’s district youth camp. The challenge is for one student or youth group to do one thing 1,000 times to raise $1,000 for STL, which provides missionaries vehicles and communication equipment.

Phillips, who’s the captain of the Wilson High School cheerleading squad, presented the idea of doing the stunts and, to her surprise, everyone supported the idea.

But as the date drew closer, difficulties arose and Phillips considered cancelling. “But then I just decided we were going to do it anyway — that God was going to come through for us,” she says.

She was right.Performing stunts from 9:30 a.m. to

about 2 p.m., the effort was a stunning success — going from a feared failure to raising $1,668.30 for STL.

MAPS VOLUNTEERSIMPACT CHURCHBY IAN RICHARDSON

STUNTS AID SPEED THE LIGHTBY DAN VAN VEEN

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into the tub.As Daddona sat in the baptismal tub,

he began to pray for God to heal him. “I knew I was going to be healed, but

I just didn’t know when,” Daddona says. “I was just praying that God would heal me at that moment.”

When Daddona came out of the water, he says he began to feel a tingly heat, first in his hands — which were curled over themselves — and then in his legs. Daddona stood up from the water, grasped the associate pastors’ hands with strength he didn’t possess only moments earlier, and stepped out

of the tub unassisted. He hugged his wife, two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren watching from the front row. The entire congregation rejoiced in tears, applause, hugs, and hallelujahs over the instant healing.

Instead of sitting in the wheelchair that brought him in, Daddona pushed it out of church that day.

Now, a few months later, Daddona volunteers in the infant nursery with Nancie each week. He walks and moves about as if he never had ALS, and he has strength and agility with everyday tasks.

FLORIDA CHURCHES STILL REBOUNDINGBY ERIC TIANSAY

Many AG churches in south Florida still are rebounding from the impact of Hurricane Irma, which hit the Sunshine State more than six months ago.

In September 2017, Irma decimated the U.S. Virgin Islands before churning toward Florida. Peninsular Florida District Superintendent Terry Raburn says no AG churches have closed permanently due to Irma, but many sustained damage.

“We are still moving the incredible amounts of storm-damaged items that have to be hauled away before rebuilding can begin,” Raburn explains.

Russ R. Debord, Peninsular Florida District presbyter, notes that First AG Frederiksted in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and New Life AG in Marathon, Florida, sustained extensive damage, forcing them to meet outdoors under tarps and in temporary locations.

Debord says Frederiksted Pastor Jeff K. Culver has used creative means to keep the church open, but the restoration process is going slowly due to lack of funds and insurance settlements still to be paid.

In November, Debord and Michael Nelson, president of the AG National Black Fellowship, traveled to all six U.S. Virgin Island AG churches and met with those pastors. The pair provided encouragement plus nearly 80 pallets of food, water, generators, and other supplies.

“Each had harrowing stories recounting how three separate hurricanes hit, causing untold amounts of devastation,” says Debord, noting that Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria also wreaked havoc on the U.S. Virgin Islands last year.

Jonathan C. Carey, lead pastor of Glad Tidings Tabernacle, a Peninsular Florida District church in Key West, Florida, held services on Sept. 9, a day after Hurricane Irma passed through the area.

“We felt it was important to open the doors and be a point of contact and hope for those who could not leave Key West,” Carey says. The church has a community food pantry, which enabled the congregation to distribute provisions to needy individuals and families.

Anchor Church was planted in Milford, Delaware, in April 2017 by lead pastors Paul and Rachel Bowman. It is currently the only Assemblies of God church in the town of 10,000.

More than 60 percent of Milford’s population claims to have no religious affiliation, according to the city’s data report. The Bowmans knew that establishing a church in this largely unreached community could present numerous challenges.

“There is also a high poverty rate in the community,” Paul says. “We needed to bring not only spiritual hope, but also the kind of hope that meets the people’s physical needs and impacts their daily lives.”

Anchor Church established its home at the local Boys and Girls Club, using AGTrust Matching Funds to purchase

needed equipment. But rather than simply being weekly tenants and having services, the Bowmans and their launch team immersed themselves in community service.

“Showing true Christian spirituality makes an impact on the community,” Paul says. “It helps people who claim no religious affiliation to see the church being Christ-like.”

As of January 2018, Anchor Church averaged 140 in weekly attendance, a remarkable indication of growth in a community where so many claim to have no religious affiliation.

CHURCH TAKES HOLD WHERE MAJORITY HAVE NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONBY DAN KERSTEN