Tulsa World published about our church plant (site) there

An article in The Tulsa World newspaper today...


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Freedom Valley hopes to attract church dropouts

By BILL SHERMAN World Religion Writer Published: 5/29/2010 2:20 AM

Nine households in Gettysburg, Penn., 33 people in all, left their homes and jobs several months ago and moved to Tulsa to start a church.

They are the second group of people who have moved to Tulsa in recent months to start an Assemblies of God church, part of a national emphasis on church planting in that denomination.

"My philosophy is, if you're going to live for God, it's going to be an adventure," said the Rev. Jason Fitch, founding pastor of the Freedom Valley Church in Tulsa, a church plant of the Freedom Valley Church in Gettysburg.

"It's scary, but it's fun," he said.

The church meets at 10 a.m. on the first Sunday of the month at the Tulsa Cinemark Theater, 10802 E. 71st St., where they rent three theaters, one for an adult service and two for children's services.

(In July, they will meet on the 11th to avoid the July Fourth holiday.)

Fitch said he fell in love with Tulsa in the 1980s when he lived here from ages 6 to 16 and always felt drawn to move back.

He graduated from Valley Forge (Penn.) Christian College in 1999 with a bachelor's degree in Bible and went to work immediately at his own church, Freedom Valley, first as a youth pastor and then as executive pastor.

Freedom Valley's primary focus is starting other churches, he said, with about 30 church plants in that area. In March 2009, he said, he felt God told him it was time to start a church in Tulsa. As he told his plans to people in his home church, several families decided to come with him as part of a start-up team.

Team members are committed to helping launch the church, he said. When weekly services begin Sept. 12, the members will be free to leave. However, he expects many to remain, especially those who moved here with children.

The Gettysburg church provides financial help to the Tulsa church, their most-distant church plant.

Why start a church in Tulsa, which already seems to have a church on every corner?

"Tulsa has some of the best churches in the country," Fitch said. "I'm blessed and honored to be here.

"But we want to reach people who have given up on church, who have had bad experiences with church."

The Rev. Frank Cargill, superintendent of the Oklahoma district of the Assemblies of God, said the denomination has a renewed emphasis on church planting, a challenge that came down from the national office.

"It's our feeling that, in order to reach this generation, we must be renewed in our focus for evangelism and outreach," he said.

"We do our best to connect with the societal needs of the community so that we become, hopefully, the church that Jesus built, which was more concerned about people than about buildings," he said.

Cargill said both Freedom Valley Church and the new City Church, meeting at the Tulsa Ballet building in Brookside, were in communication with his office as they developed their plans to move to Tulsa.

Steve Pike is coordinator of the Assemblies of God's Church Multiplication Network, a new organization charged with equipping, funding and networking church planters and those who help them.

"Church planting has always been a part of our culture as a movement," he said, "but now it's more intentional."

"We've seen an uptick in plants" since the initiative started, he said.

For decades, the denomination has started about 270 churches in the U.S. each year. The goal is 500.

"We're not there yet, but we're starting to see acceleration," he said.

And new churches partnering with the network tend to be stronger in attendance, giving and numbers of baptisms, he said.

Pike said at least 70 percent of Americans are not involved in a worshipping community, and every study shows that the best way to reach those people is to start churches.

There are exceptions, he said, but generally in older, established churches, relationships are more developed, people know and love each other and reaching new people becomes more difficult, he said.