The following article was republished with permission from the August 6 edition of Baptist Press. Please continue to pray for those affected by fires in the Northwest, along with those churches and communities impacted by wildfire here in Utah and Idaho. SBC DR teams from Utah have been activated for response for flood recovery in Beaver, UT August 9-15 and Colorado to aid with Personal Property Recovery following the Aspen Fire at the end of the month.
SPOKANE, Wash. (BP) – Churches and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams are continuing to respond amid historic wildfires in the Northwest.
A complete response strategy won’t come until the fires are out, and that won’t be for a while. Meanwhile, churches are joining others to help replace needed items. Valleypoint Church in Spokane is providing hygiene kits. The Rock Church is helping gather and deliver groceries. Grace Christian Fellowship opened up space for 30 displaced adult residents of a memory care center.
Those actions are occurring in one of the least religious areas of the country, said Northwest Baptist Convention Evangelism Specialist Zac Minton. Spiritual questions are bound to come up.
“Spokane is a very family-oriented community, but less than 6 percent attend an evangelical church,” he noted. “This is a very giving and caring community, and a lot of people are donating goods.”
In terms of acreage, the Autumn Lane, Old Trails and Fairview fires don’t stand out among others in the region. Their proximity to Spokane, though, has already placed them among the most destructive in state history in terms of structures lost.
Minton was an electrician dispatched to New Orleans after Katrina to pull electric meters. He helped after an EF4 tornado struck Moore, Okla., in 2010. This devastation is different.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “People’s lives are destroyed. But we’re trying to let them know that in the midst of the chaos, there is hope, and His name is Jesus.”
Of Oregon’s 2 million acres lost to fires this year, 1.81 million have come through the 32 currently burning.
Tens of thousands of acres have burned in Washington, headlined by those in Spokane County. Two deaths have been blamed on the fires, including that of a man who wrecked his ATV while attempting to fight the flames near his property. An arson suspect is in custody.
Dave and Pat Crates have retained their joy despite losing their home, said Zac Minton, shown with the couple. The Crates are members of North Addison Baptist Church, pastored by Matt Tremblay, who was discipled at The Rock Church.
Minton arrived in Spokane 12 years ago as a church planter. He helped start three congregations, including the one he would serve as pastor, The Rock Church. A little over three years ago, he accepted an offer to serve as the state’s evangelism director, but remained in Spokane.
The current fires have displaced more than 65,000 people, said Minton, whose 3 Circles tattoo on his wrist always stands at the ready for a spiritual conversation. City leaders revealed yesterday, he added, that evacuation orders for some areas won’t be lifted for several days.
Disaster Relief personnel are on alert and working alongside churches, said Gary Floyd, state director. “There’s been at least one church burned, maybe more,” he said. “This fire is historical.”
Like Minton, he said the two biggest needs are prayer and money.
“They are effective,” said Floyd. “Money allows us to apply it where needed. People are praying for us around the world and saying they want to send teams. It’s a profound example of why cooperating and connecting around the Gospel is so important.”
He expects the cleanup could take up to five years. Part of the need will be more churches.
“We’re going to have people coming to Christ, and we’ll need others to build relationships with them. It will take years for people to process the loss on multiple levels,” he said.
Minton knows of three families in his church who lost their homes. One pastor and his family had to evacuate and sleep at the church.
Everyone is helping as they can, like Danny Morris, The Rock’s current pastor. He responded to Minton’s 6:30 a.m. call for someone to make a grocery run for the memory care patients at Grace Christian Fellowship.
Local pastors will continue to pray at 10:02 a.m. each day, Minton said.
“We’re praying for God to raise people up to come and do this ministry with us. Prayer is how I got here.”
King’s Cross Church in Fruit Heights, Utah, began worshiping in their newly renovated worship center. The three-year-old Southern Baptist church plant, located 20 miles north of Salt Lake City, recently merged with another congregation, acquiring a building as part of the merger. Photo courtesy of Sarah Henderson
FRUIT HEIGHTS, Utah – It’s getting increasingly difficult for church plants across the nation to find a suitable, low-cost place to meet on Sunday mornings. But King’s Cross Church had one handed to it in Davis County, a growing northern suburb of Salt Lake City.
The building belonged to a declining church and came complete with a congregation, one of two that have joined with the three-year-old church plant that plans to plant two additional churches over the next two years.
“God’s grace. It’s humbling,” Pastor Austin Glenn told UI Connections. “It’s crazy to think of God’s kindness towards us.”
What the Glenn couple – and now the church – have done could be called “relationship-building on steroids.”
Sent in 2021 by Church at the Cross in Grapevine, Texas, the Glenn family (that today includes five homeschooled youngsters between 2 and 10) went through Send Network’s assessment process after spending a year at a church previously started by Church at the Cross in Grapevine. Send Network is the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) church planting arm.
Care for the community, their mission field, is at the heart of King’s Cross Church. One of the ministries KCC continued (that was started by LifePoint church before them) is water distribution at Farmington Festival Days.
Then they moved to Farmington, in Davis County, Utah, north of Salt Lake City, and started First Friday Grill and Chill at their home. They built a launch team that met for Bible study and became involved in various service projects to become known in the community: backpack drive, park cleanups, gift bags for the 1,000 teachers and staff members in Farmington, and free water bottles during the town’s Festival Days.
“We adopted LifePoint Church, another small Southern Baptist church in Farmington,” Glenn recounted. “It was basically five families. The church had been going about eight years and hadn’t gotten a lot of traction. After a year of semi-regular lunches, the pastor [Brent Van Sickle] asked me, ‘What do you think about us joining you?’ Brent now serves as pastor for outreach and missions at King’s Cross.”
LifePoint, which closed in December 2022, had participated in pre-launch meetings for King’s Cross, which launched on March 5, 2023, with 25 adults and 24 youngsters. The new church plant met Sundays at Ascent Academy charter school.
“We wanted to do youth activities, women’s groups, men’s breakfasts and the like when the Academy wasn’t available. We reached out to Mountain Road Church – it was about seven minutes away – to ask if we could rent their building,” Glenn said. “They said, ‘It’s not for rent, but you can borrow it.’ We started including them in the different things we were doing.”
Mountain Road Church, which had started in 1982, gave its property and joined King’s Cross Church in December 2024. Then came fundraising for the renovations King’s Cross wanted to make, including expanding the 150-seat worship center to its current 280-seat capacity. About $750,000 was quickly pledged “by internal and external sources,” Glenn said.
Every inch of the church building in Fruit Heights was impacted by the massive reconstruction project that took many months.
“We gave the whole place a facelift,” the pastor said. “Literally everything was touched. A big expense was fire sprinklers: $250,000 for that alone.”
Josh Gardner, King’s Cross Church’s director of discipleship and development, also is a NAMB-endorsed church planting apprentice who anticipates planting a church in North Salt Lake in February 2027. At this time, he is developing a launch team and raising support. King’s Cross anticipates being the sending church.
King’s Cross also plans to launch Ukrainian Living Hope Church in August 2026 with Oleh Kamanov serving as the planter. He recently completed the NAMB assessment process. The Ukrainian group moved their Bible studies from people’s homes to the church once renovations were completed in early March. One man who recently started attending the weekly Bible study is an experienced worship leader.
On the Saturday before Easter, April 4, about 50 children and their parents heard a clear Gospel message by Pastor Oleh, along with a puppet show in Ukrainian that told the story of two pirates who are moved by the true story of Easter. A family Easter egg hunt came next. At least 60 Ukrainians participated in the event.
These two congregations are the focus of King’s Cross Church’s Easter Renewal Offering where the majority of funds raised Easter through Pentecost Sundays are to be allocated between the two new church plants to help with start up costs that are not covered by outside partnerships. The rest of the offering is to be given to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions to assist church planting across the country.
“We talk a lot about being a people sent on mission, and I think our people really embody that culture of evangelism,” Glenn said of King’s Cross Church. “We’re pretty traditional. We have communion every Sunday. We don’t have a rock band.
Baptisms have become a frequent occurrence at King’s Cross Church, many of whom have recently left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
“We do have a commitment to Gospel centrality in preaching and preach 40- to 60-minute sermons,” the pastor continued. “We dive deeply into the text. Our folks seem to like it. They really want to know what the Bible says.”
March 1, the first service in the renovated 13,000-square-foot building on four acres of land a bit northeast of Farmington, drew a near-maximum 252 people. Easter Sunday five weeks later drew 347 people total to two services and included three baptisms, all recent believers who left Mormonism and are being discipled through ministries at King’s Cross Church.
“As Henry Blackaby told Southern Baptists, ‘Find out where God is moving and join Him in the work,’” Glenn said. “That’s Utah. In ways like never before, God is drawing people unto Himself here, and it is a joy to partner with Him in the work.”
Ogden, UT – Redemption Church in Ogden led a Vacation Bible School April 21-23 at the church that drew 33 youngsters, just two shy of the 35 they were anticipating.
“Every kid was engaged with the Gospel each night,” VBS Director (and Connections and Family Pastor at Redemption Ogden) Casey Swails told UI Connections. “This was our first full-on VBS at Redemption Church Ogden. Many years ago we tried a makeshift VBS in the park before we ever had a building and it was not very well attended or executed. So this one was the first VBS we were able to fully make happen, and make it happen well.”
Swails credited a mission team from First Baptist Church at the Fields in Carrollton, Texas, for their enthusiastic assistance in bringing Illumination Station to Redemption Ogden.
Volunteers engaged kids on their level with Bible stories and activities based on the Lifeway VBS theme, Illumination Station.
“They presented us with the idea and gave us the know-how and lots of prep work to make it happen as well as it did,” Swails said. “In the future – probably 2027 – we hope to be able to do VBS during the summer. This was a great first time, and learning experience.
“The kids absolutely loved Illumination Station. From singing songs, to the nightly lessons, to shouting John 8:12, the kids learned that Jesus is the light of the world and that He can be the light of their life.”
At least 30 church volunteers worked with the mission team, including roughly eight junior high and high school students from Redemption Ogden’s student ministry. “That was a really great opportunity for them to partner with us in doing ministry,” the VBS director said.
High points of the VBS for Swails?
FBC at the Fields in Carrolton, Texas brought gifted and committed volunteers to assist in leading the event.
“Every night after the lesson portion, it was always a great encouragement to hear from the mission team’s lesson leaders that all of the kids were very engaged, good at asking questions, and the kids who are a regular part of Redemption Church Ogden had been taught the Bible well to respond to questions in a way that surprised the mission team.
“The excitement of the kids was unmatched. All the kids had an amazing time and it showed in our opening and closing ceremonies. We had some kids that we heard were itching to get away from their scheduled sports activities in order to come to VBS. We also heard kids running out to their parents after checkout excited to tell them about what they had been doing.
“We plan to continue connecting with the kids through the normal rhythms of life at Redemption,” Swails continued. “They were all excited to learn and enjoyed their time at VBS. Everyone from the volunteers to the kids had an amazing time. We learned so much and believe VBS could be an annual ministry moving forward.”
Swails expressed his thanks to UISBC for the evangelism grant awarded to the church that enabled supplies to be purchased for the spring VBS.
“It was a great encouragement that all the volunteers had an amazing time,” Swails said. “Every volunteer left tired, but so full of joy. While it was a lot of work for our volunteers, I believe that it breathed a lot of life into them to see the kids having so much fun and engaging in the Bible.”
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on SendRelief.org. Used by permission.
By DeeDee Adams (Photo Credit: Rob Witzel) Send Relief Staff
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Michael Cooper was not prepared for what he saw.
He had driven to Hunter High School to watch something unusual happen. The volunteers had come from Houston and Virginia, most of them strangers to each other, and they were doing something that seemed almost too simple for the distance they’d traveled: handing out donuts to high school students on their way into class.
But Cooper wasn’t concerned about the donuts. He was curious to see how his daughter would handle things.
She’s 15, a freshman at the same school where her mother has taught math for 11 years. She grew up in Utah, one of the most religiously distinct places in the United States as the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On any given Sunday, more people attend a worship service in Utah than in any other state. And yet, Cooper will tell you plainly, Utah is one of the darkest mission fields in the nation. Many residents who claim faith in Jesus believe their own works play a role in their salvation. Most people here, he says, do not know even one evangelical Christian.
His daughter had grown up knowing that. She had spent most of her school years without Christian peers. But this year, a small group of students at Hunter High started something new: the school’s first-ever Christian club. They called it Leap of Faith.
That morning, she stood at the entrance of the school with a box of donuts in her hands and told every student who walked past the same thing:
Come to Leap of Faith. Jesus loves you.
“What I got to witness,” Cooper told the rally crowd that night, “was 15 million Southern Baptists standing behind my daughter. I saw my grandfather standing behind my daughter. A legacy of people who were not afraid of dark places, saying Jesus loves you.”
He had been praying for that school for 11 years.
Michael Cooper, Send Salt Lake City Missionary shares at Serve Tour Celebration service.
A Thousand Donuts and One Question
The donuts were gone in minutes. But what they opened lasted longer.
Lauren Napier led the volunteer team that served alongside ValleyLight Church at Hunter High that morning. After the last box was empty, the student who leads Leap of Faith pulled the group aside.
“This wasn’t about the donuts at all,” he told them. “Y’all handing out donuts allowed me to get to pray for my brothers and sisters at this school and share the gospel with people in a way I never had before.”
There are just 20 Christian students in the entire school. That morning, they stood in front of their classmates and talked about Jesus.
Later, Napier’s team went from Hunter High to the Utah State Correctional Facility, where they handed out more than 300 flavored sodas to staff and correctional officers. Nobody in that building had ever seen anything like it. One woman on the team works at the facility and had been quietly building gospel conversations with coworkers for months. When her church showed up to love on the people she works beside every day, walls came down. The conversations she had begun now had room to continue.
One Weekend Across the Wasatch Front
Serve Tour Salt Lake City, held April 17–18, brought 37 churches from 15 states together for 24 projects across the region. The 275 volunteers served more than 2,150 people, packed 2,900 meals, logged 1,880 construction hours, and had at least 270 gospel conversations. They worked in five schools, four churches, 12 community settings, and served three bivocational pastors doing ministry on the margins of their own time and resources.
The partnership behind it included the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention, Send Network, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, and Send Relief, who together made the weekend possible. Utah-Idaho Disaster Relief prepared lunches for volunteers during the day and served a full BBQ dinner with peach cobbler at the Saturday night rally.
DR Volunteer, Clara Hohmann brings a smile with every BBQ sandwich served.
Because volunteers were spread across the city, the Saturday night rally was where it all came into focus—what God had done and how to keep it going.
Why Are You Here?
At a nearby elementary school, John Perkins and his team built shelving and set up a resource center for food and clothing. About half the students there need both on a regular basis.
Teachers kept pulling Perkins aside, one after another, asking the same questions in hushed voices.
“Why are you doing this? Why are you here?”
He told every one of them.
“This is the gospel,” he said. “We’ve received a great gift, and this is why we serve.”
He watched it start to register on the face of the school administrator as he explained it. “We pray,” Perkins told the crowd that night, “that those families would not just be clothed with clothes, but long-term, clothed in Christ’s righteousness.”
Second Baptist Church of Ogden was able to bless their community with food distribution.
The administrator wrote to the team afterward: “Thank you for all the amazing service given to us today. Thank you for the beautiful spirit you brought to our school.”
At the University of Utah, volunteers partnered with Resonate Church for a campus outreach, giving students food truck vouchers and asking two simple questions about faith. In response, 25 said they wanted to learn more about Jesus and the Bible, 14 asked for a follow-up conversation, and 15 said they wanted to visit a church.
During the outreach, a volunteer started talking with a young couple. The girlfriend was not a believer. The volunteer shared her testimony and gave her a Bible, encouraging her to start with the Gospel of John. The couple left together for the library. A few minutes later, the boyfriend came back alone.
He wanted a Bible too. He wanted to read John with her.
Going Door-to-Door in a Place Where That Is Radical
Ashley Smith’s team did what most people in Utah do not do. They knocked on doors.
The project was called Prayer on the Porch. Three groups covered three different streets, offering to pray for neighbors, help with yard work, and simply introduce themselves. In a state where door-to-door religious conversations carry a particular weight and history, showing up as a neighbor rather than an institution was its own kind of statement.
Student Send Relief missionaries prayed with Salt Lake City neighbors.
One group had a long gospel conversation with a man who had been LDS his whole life. Another team met a woman who had a one-week-old baby and spent time with her, helped around her house, and prayed over her new family.
One volunteer on Smith’s team arrived that morning too nervous to knock. By the end of the day, she was the one who couldn’t stop.
At a skate park adjacent to Redemption Church, Stu Ross and his team hosted a block party with food, tricks, and conversation. Ross got saved through a skateboarding ministry as a teenager, and the park sits directly in front of his church. Over the course of the afternoon, the team had a dozen gospel conversations. One man told Ross he was planning to come to church Sunday. He wanted to follow Jesus, he said, but he wanted to take it one step at a time.
In Utah, that kind of decision rarely stays private. For many, choosing to follow Christ means stepping away from a faith tradition that is also family, community, and identity. He could feel the weight of it. A volunteer from a Montana church prayed with him before the day ended.
The gospel was shared in an Ogden skate park across from Redemption Church building.
In partnership with Gospel Grace Church, volunteers served 150 meals and distributed 30 Bibles inside a refugee community, sitting with families and staying long enough to hear their stories.
Volunteers also completed significant construction work for three bivocational church planters stretching themselves thin between jobs and ministry: a new shed, a renovated garage, and major landscaping they would not have been able to finish alone. At Gospel Light Church, a team stripped five layers of shingles off a house being converted into transitional housing, filling three large dumpsters. At Kings Cross Church, volunteers built two pergolas from scratch, creating a welcoming outdoor space for a congregation still finding its footing.
Missionary house at Gospel Light church in the Rose Park neighborhood of Salt Lake City got an extreme makeover as volunteers spent two days of roofing and renovation work.
The mayor showed up at a first responder appreciation block party, hosted by Canyons Church with the Cottonwood Heights Town Council. He was not the only one who noticed something different was happening.
Beautiful Feet
On Saturday night, the volunteers gathered at Risen Life Church for the rally. Rob Lee, executive director of Utah-Idaho Baptists, told them plainly what they were dealing with.
“The majority of people in Utah do not know four biblical Christians,” he said. “Most don’t even know one. We need people to come here and help us.”
Will Galkin, a Send Network city missionary in Salt Lake, asked the crowd not to just go home. “On the way home,” he said, “write in a journal: Lord, what did you do in me? And Lord, what do you want me to do about Utah?”
Then Michael Cooper stood up.
He started by saying thank you. Then he told the room the truth about what it costs to build the church in Utah.
There are days, he said, that feel lonely. You are planting in a city where the gospel is crowded out not by apathy but by a deeply held alternative—one that looks familiar from the outside and asks the same eternal questions but answers them differently. You are serving people who are already religious, already devout, and already certain. That is a particular kind of hard.
But every morning, his wife, Devon, gets up before school starts and pulls out eight index cards.
She teaches math at Hunter High. Has for 11 years. And every morning she writes a prayer on each card, one for each of eight students, and sets them on the desks before the kids arrive. Every one of her 150 students gets prayed for twice during the school year. When students graduate and move on, some of them come back to ask her if she’ll recreate the card. They lost it, they say, and they want it back. For a while, students were taking pictures of Mrs. Cooper’s cards and sharing them on social media.
For most of those students, Devon Cooper is the only Christian teacher they will ever have from kindergarten through graduation.
His own daughters have never had one.
Then Cooper told the room what he saw at Hunter High that morning. His 15-year-old daughter, standing at the entrance of the school her mother has prayed over for 11 years, holding a box of donuts, telling students she does not know that Jesus loves them.
“The conversations happening before you came and the conversations that will happen after you go far beyond what you did this weekend,” he said. “For months, people are going to ask us: why did those people come to Utah to do that? And we are going to get to say, over and over again, because they love Jesus. They want you to know Jesus.”
He closed by thanking them one more time.
“Thank you for your beautiful feet that walked to Utah. Thank you for your beautiful feet that sat in vans and airplanes. A flicker of light in a very dark room can make a huge difference. You may think all you did was that. But let’s not let it end here. Let’s ask the Lord: what do you have next?”
Eleven years of prayer cards. A freshman with a box of donuts. A young man who walked back alone to ask for a Bible.
For years, the missionaries serving in Salt Lake City have been faithful in the dark. This weekend, 275 people rolled up their sleeves to serve alongside them, reminding them they are not alone.
Send Relief, a collaborative ministry between the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, is Southern Baptists’ global compassion ministry. For more information on opportunities to serve alongside us, visitSendRelief.org/trips.
This originally appeared in the May 5 edition of Baptist Press, Used by permission
Snowboard World Champion, Tom Gilles, signs hats while sharing with Southern Utah teens
MONTICELLO, Utah – A small Utah church scored an evangelistic coup that spread to two states in late April.
Youth director Erin Barry at First Baptist Church of Monticello, southeastern Utah, knows a world champion extreme snowboarder-turned-evangelist, and invited him to speak to students April 19-24. Tom Gilles accepted and brought three-time Olympic Gold Medalist (in softball) and motivational speaker Leah Amico with him.
“Tom had an encounter with God at my dad’s church in Lake Tahoe in 2003, and was saved soon after,” Barry told UI Connections. “We saw each other last fall and I asked him. We’ve been planning this since October. We have been seeing God move throughout our area recently. In Dove Creek, [Colo.,] a third of the middle/high school students are attending FCA [Fellowship of Christian athletes] at times on Tuesday for lunch and a Bible lesson.
Three time softball Olympic Gold medalist, Leah Amico shares with girls team.
“We want to see more kids come to Christ,” continued Barry, bivocational as the volleyball coach at Dove Creek High School. “Tom and Leah have a great passion for evangelism and can reach kids through sports. We spent the week traveling to local schools, doing assemblies, meeting with softball teams and FCA Huddles.”
Those schools are in Monticello and Blanding, Utah, and in Dove Creek, Dolores and Durango, Colo. Monticello’s population: 1,722; Blanding: 3,280; Durango: 19,811; Dolores: 958; and Dove Creek, 676.
“Tom told his stories, how God changed his life, and Leah, how overcoming adversity led her to three gold medals,” Barry said.
Gilles holds the world’s record for extreme snowboarding’s quarter-pipe drop-in. While a straight-arrow athlete in high school, his life took a turn when he got into professional snowboarding. He began drinking and using drugs.
The Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention [UISBC] gave a “substantial grant” to the project, Barry said, adding that his church covered the rest.
“First Baptist Church of Monticello could not do ‘The Gold Standard and Rad Assemblies’ without outside assistance from the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention and the [North American Mission Board] evangelism grant,” said Rob Lee, executive director of the UISBC. “The beauty of partnering is that the church could do far more than it could on its own and capitalize on the Winter Olympics in February.
“The church runs around 40 to 60 on most Sundays and has always had a big vision to engage its community with the Gospel,” Lee continued. “They started a radio station many years ago under the leadership of their former pastor, John Williams, which ended up broadcasting the high school sports events for the community, opening the church’s doors to the school.”
Over the last 18 months, First Monticello has helped restart another church in Gideon Baptist Association, “so I know their passion for making a kingdom impact in their region,” Lee continued. “Without our partnership, many of these God-sized events would not have been possible at the level their church leaders had dreamed of.”
Gilles and Amico spoke to 760 students throughout the week, who because of their location probably had never before heard an evangelistic message from top athletes, Dove Creek FCA leader Donella Fury told Baptist Press. At least 160 of the students indicated they had “some sort of encounter with God,” Barry said.
The First Monticello youth first met with Gilles Sunday night at youth group.
“I encouraged them to be expectant and by Friday night they got more and more excited,” Gilles told Baptist Press. “The fact they were sharing their faith was really cool. [It was] Faith in action. The really cool thing is how excited they were to see God move!”
Gilles spoke Tuesday in Dove Creek, Colo., at an FCA Huddle and at an all-school assembly. Wednesday Gilles spoke with 120 students at the Durango, Colo., FCA Huddle, where “When Tom gave an altar call, every student went forward,” Barry said. Later that day, Gilles and Amico spoke at a night of worship and prayer with members of First Monticello.
Crowded assemblies gave several opportunities for gospel engagement with kids in the schools.
“Thursday morning, they spoke to all the elementary, middle school and high school students in Dolores, and then traveled to Monticello where they spoke at an all-school assembly at the high school,” Barry said. “Leah went to softball practice and spoke with Monticello’s team. Then she went to softball practice in Blanding and spoke with their team.
“On Friday night we hosted a worship and story event where Leah and Tom shared their stories and presented the Gospel to more than 100 students and parents,” the Monticello youth director continued. “Throughout the week we had the opportunity to pray with atheists, Muslims, Mormons and everyone in between. They weren’t making professions of faith, but they heard truth and that affected them.”
Gilles said, “I saw kids super hungry for God’s Word but not experiencing it. … They just want the raw truth and they need it. When truth hits them, they react.”
Fury described the events in Dove Creek school for those in grades 6-12.
“At lunch it was definitely Scripture-based and Christ-focused,” Fury said. “We prayed for the assembly and [Gilles] asked each of the kids to pray for one person specifically. At the assembly he kept it very politically correct. He didn’t come out and say Jesus was the reason for the changes in his life but he quoted Bible verses [without their scriptural addresses]. He was just talking about kids’ choices, suggesting good choices in friends, in habits, in everything they do, and don’t compromise!”
Gilles was the “Rad” part of the week’s title. Amico, the “Gold standard.”
Tom and Leah enjoyed speaking to the kids no matter the size of the crowds.
“I challenge students to take ownership of their future by following the best MAP for success: Mindset: Believing in yourself and embracing challenges as opportunities; Action: Taking intentional steps toward your goals every single day; and People: Surrounding yourself with those who push you to be your best,” Amico says on her website.
“At assembly, my and the students’ favorite part was the connection [Gilles] made with them. He said he told them his story and wanted theirs,” Fury said. “He passed out paper and told them to write their name and grade, and one thing they were dealing with, and said he would read all the papers before he left the school.
“It was so neat to watch the kids write and write and write. Some took 10 to 15 minutes writing,” Fury continued. “There was not a single student who did not take their paper down front. It was so touching, really amazing to see. We’ve never had anything like this before.”
The following article appeared in the March 9 issue of BCM/D News. Republished with their permission.
By Sharon Mager
Brandon Mueller from Brunswick, MD deconstructed Mormonism after a believer challenged him to read the Gospel of John with fresh eyes. This started a journey of faith.
BRUNSWICK, Md. — Brandon Mueller describes himself as what one of his Metro Baltimore Seminary (MBS) professors once called a “deconstructed Mormon.” The phrase resonated with him immediately.
“I never really gave myself that title before,” Mueller said, “but when he said it, I thought, ‘That really encapsulates a lot.’”
Today, Mueller is a member of The Crossings Community Church in Brunswick, a replant of First Baptist Church of Brunswick (FBC), where he serves as the church’s treasurer and leads a men’s group.
He is also pursuing a Master of Divinity in church planting and renewal at Metro Baltimore Seminary* while supporting Pastor Justin Wyckoff and the church through a replanting process. The church plans to launch on Easter.
Mueller grew up in the Mormon church and remained deeply involved throughout his early life. About ten years ago, however, he began questioning the faith he had always known.
“There was a period of time where it was like, ‘This isn’t what they claim it is,’” Mueller said.
Mormonism had shaped his friendships and family life, and leaving it proved to be a slow and difficult process.
During that time, a friend challenged him to read the Gospel of John with fresh eyes. As he did, Mueller says God began working in his heart.
“That is where God really opened my eyes,” he said. “And I definitely had a born-again experience.”
At first, Mueller tried to reconcile Mormonism with his new faith in Christ. “I truly thought I could do more good as a witness inside the church than outside,” he said.
A pivotal moment came when he was asked to give a talk during a Mormon sacrament meeting. A church leader asked him to speak about the doctrine known as “The Restoration of the Priesthood,” which teaches that divine authority was given to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.
Mueller declined.
Asked why, he replied, “Because I don’t believe in it.”
“Mueller said, “To his credit and my surprise, the leader asked, ‘What do you believe in?’ and I said, ‘I believe in Christ.’ And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you talk about that?’”
Why not indeed?
Mueller said, “I constructed a talk that was really a sermon about being justified by faith, and I delivered that talk and quoted long passages out of the NIV Bible.”
The sermon was well-received, but also brought clarity to Mueller.
He said, “While that was very encouraging, it felt very disingenuous because I knew that was not Mormonism teaching. I felt it was also lending undeserved credibility to the Mormon doctrine.” He did not want to give false security.
Within a month, Mueller, his wife Grace Mueller, and their five children left Mormonism.
He then began attending Fellowship Bible Church in Shenandoah Junction, West Virginia, a large Bible-believing church where Mueller thought he could quietly explore his new faith, sitting in the back and hoping to remain unnoticed. The pastor, Van Marsceau, however, noticed him and listened to his story. He began encouraging Mueller, and Mueller said he grew significantly during that time. Mueller said he is thankful for his time at that church.
Several years later, the family began attending First Baptist Church of Brunswick, now The Crossings Community Church.
“My wife was friends with Pastor Justin’s (Wyckoff) wife,” Mueller explained. “And our kids started going to the youth group before we even really showed up on a Sunday.”
The family soon felt at home, and not long after, Mueller sensed a call to ministry.
Phil Graves, the former pastor of Crossings, suggested he consider Metro Baltimore Seminary. Mueller eventually enrolled and is now working toward a three-year Master of Divinity with a concentration in church planting and renewal.
“I think I might be called to plant a church,” he said. “I think that that may be where God is ultimately leading me.”
For Mueller, seminary is not only about theological training but also spiritual formation and learning alongside other students with different perspectives. He also called the interaction with other students “invaluable.”
Mueller balances seminary with a full-time job as a web developer while serving his church and caring for his family. He is also gaining hands-on ministry experience at Crossings under Wyckoff’s mentorship as part of his seminary education.
“One of the things that Pastor Justin wants to start doing is having me preach on a more regular basis,” Mueller said. “So having the classroom experience of writing sermons and then actually presenting the material is very beneficial.”
Mueller continues to focus on being obedient to God’s calling at home, at work, at seminary, and at church, and on preparing for the church’s Easter launch service — a new chapter for the congregation and another step in Mueller’s unfolding call to serve Christ.
*The BCM/D has a partnership with Metro Baltimore Seminary, Lancaster Bible College, and The George Liele Leadership Institute
UI Connections republished this story as an encouragement to Utah and Idaho churches that may have folks in their community, like Brandon, who are looking for answers to their questions about faith and their LDS leaders are not giving adequate answers. If you have any questions about how your church can be better equipped to welcome seekers like Brandon in your community, reach out to Utah Idaho SBC staff and we can begin a conversation about tools available to help your church provide a biblical apologetic to faith seekers.
