Our Church Plants
In 3+ years of public ministry, God has shown Himself faithful to Restoration Church. As many young church plants experience, we’ve met in different locations over the course of those years, but God is faithful. In 2023, Restoration Church moved into, Lord willing, a long term facility. As we move through this calendar year, we believe that the Lord is going to do great things with this new ministry tool.
During the first quarter, we are praying for and chasing after a goal of 100 gospel conversations. Intentionally sharing the gospel, we believe the Lord will save some which will lead to baptisms and more laborers for the harvest. The momentum of these conversations leads to our goal to gather 200 people at Easter for God’s glory!
We’re praying and would love to have you pray with us as we desire to serve the Lord faithfully in 2023 to reach the city of Adel.
The last two years have certainly been a journey. The covid pandemic took its toll on us as a church and on me as a leader. Through all of it God has certainly sifted our church and our leadership. While extremely hard, we are grateful for the lessons and insights God has given us, that bring us to where we are as a church currently.
We have made the decision for the time being to move to a house church model, or as some people like to call it, missional communities. Our vision is to multiply micro communities. Whether they meet in a house or not, we want to plant these communities wherever they are needed around the city. Simplicity is the name of the game for us. We are working to disciple people to then go and lead these groups to disciple more people. Currently we have 1 group of about 60 adults/Students, and 15 or so elementary school kids. The amazing thing is that our weekly youth ministries outnumber our church gatherings on Sunday by about 30. Our weekly Elementary, Middle school, and High school youth groups total close to 90 students. Our Elementary school Bible club meets on Mondays after school. Middle School meets Wednesday nights at a rented church building, while High school group meets at our house. Around 70% of the students in our youth ministry have families who do not go to church anywhere. Please pray that God shows us, and produces spiritual change from opportunities to reach these families.
God is raising up leaders and volunteers more than we have seen in the past in our church, and we are excited about where he may want this to go.
Please pray with us about the plant of our second Missional Community, which will be coming soon. We have the Location and the leadership to make the jump, so please pray God gives the vision to the church in the upcoming months.
LifeChange is excited for another year serving the eastside of Des Moines. 2022 was a great year as we baptized 15, averaged nearly 120 in attendance and continued to serve our 6 local public schools and Grandview University. Pastor Steve serves both the Grandview University girls and boys wrestling teams (100+ students) as their chaplain and shares the Gospel weekly with them.
We also had the privilege of seeing God call one of our church members (Ryan Kirkpatrick) as an elder and join our staff full-time overseeing our Next Generation ministries. The student ministry took over 50 students to summer camp with several trusting Jesus as their Savior and has continued to see nearly 60 students/week in our midweek gathering.
Please join us in prayer as we ask God to help us find a permanent location that we can use as both a church/community center to better serve the eastside.
God has blessed us and challenged us in 2022. We enjoyed returning back to our pre-Covid routines and were happy to see that essentially all of our church family returned to in-person services. We launched a new Jr High Youth program to separate the Sr High and Jr High youth and the new group has already grown quickly in just a few months. The Lord has blessed us with continued giving above our projected annual budgets which we have and will continue to use to send out more missionaries and reach our local community.