work full-time to be a financial blessing to missionaries and a helpful layman in
our church. I felt if I did that, it was the easy road. I tried to give good excuses
to just run my business but God’s call back in Bible college kept coming up and
I could not shake it. Then one day in 2019, I can vividly remember the Lord
telling me to not continue the business but to go plant churches. That is what
this world needs.

One of the things that also made me hesitate stepping into church planting was
that I felt as though I still had so many things to improve in my spiritual life
before I could be a pastor. It seemed I had the excuses to not step out into church
planting, but then in Scripture one does not see the disciples with their “ducks
in a row” before they went into ministry. After the resurrection of Jesus, the
disciples still did not believe what Christ had already told them that He would
rise from the dead after three days. They were scolded by Jesus for their unbelief
and right after that Christ tells them to Go ye into all the world, and preach
the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15). I believe many hesitate going into
ministry because they fear failure or they have not attained the spiritual level of
their pastor or other great men of faith. One does not have to attain the spiritual
level of some of the great men of old before stepping out in faith to serve God
in full-time ministry. The reason many of these men reached that spiritual level
in their lives is because they took steps of faith into the ministry God had for
them. Many times they did fail but those failures grew their spiritual lives. I do
believe there needs to be a doctrinal foundation, but that does not mean that
one has to be a biblical scholar.

At the beginning of January 2020, the Lord began to again lay the city of
Portland on our hearts. I was at a pastor’s meeting in Washington and the need
for Portland came up as it always did in the Northwest. While sitting there, I
was having a conversation with God and wondering “Why does not anyone
do something? We always talk about it, but why has someone not gone?” In
the eight years we had been in Salem, we had not seen one church started in
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