Gerry Stoltzfoos, Freedom Valley Woship Center

Right off the bat I appreciate Freedom Valley Worship’s Center’s goal of reaching the unchurched, people who have been hurt by the church, and people who have negative preconceptions about the church and Christians. I think that there is definitely a need for that I think in my opinion. In all the creative outside the box ideas you see from Gerry Stoltzfoos, like the therapeutic horse riding, coffee shop, the band scene and all the other creative ideas that they have done, I think they are all great and are reaching people. I think it’s great that they are not afraid of failure at Freedom Valley. But in all the creative things I heard about what they were doing at the church you can begin to question their motives kind of and wonder if there just trying to be relevant, creative and maybe they have forgot about reaching souls. But then I saw and heard Pastor Gerry’s heart as he shared that it’s not all about the creativity, but it’s about a passion to reach souls that are going to hell. That the creativity part flows out of that desire and that is their main purpose to reach unsaved souls. And you can see and hear that when he talks about it. He stressed that the passion is the key component of evangelism and the creativity just flows out of it. One question I have been thinking about the past couple days as I am becoming more and more interested in church planting and hearing all the statistics and all. That question is what becomes of the churches that are already established, what becomes of them if everyone is being encouraged to start a new church? Are the already established churches forgotten about, it’s apparent that they are not reaching the people that are already solid Christians as the study at Willow Creek has shown. And they are not reaching unsaved people that effectively, according to the statistics. So what becomes their purpose, what are they to do?