I knew God was at work when I started seeing potential church plants everywhere. Every empty building looked like a great place for a church to start. Every crowd of people seemed “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

I saw possibilities for ministries that I knew I couldn’t bring into being on my own. God wanted to reach people, and He was willing to work through someone like me to do it. Slowly, I awakened to an unusual calling on my life — to help pastors start churches.

Helping Helpers

Many of the churches Freedom Valley launched were nestled in rural places, in towns most people have never heard of. We decided to help anyone who wanted to receive help. Freedom Valley established three simple standards for new church start-ups: belief in the Word of God, submission to oversight, and faith in abundance.

If someone had a heart for reaching spiritually lost people around them — and trusted God to build His kingdom through them — we wanted them to be a part of our network. Our share of the challenge was to provide fellowship, oversight, and, in some cases, financial management.

Investing without Credit

My mentor, Omar Beiler, has often said, “Imagine what we could do if we stopped caring who gets the credit.”

Other churches asked whether we could help them start a church. They wanted to know whether we were willing to assist without getting any credit for it and without claiming that church as our own. I told them we would, and I wrote an agreement guaranteeing it. Quite a few churches took us up on that offer. Many of them chose never to join our fellowship network, but some did join.

Nurturing Relationships

Each of our network churches chooses which level of partnership they want with Freedom Valley. They may choose relational, partnership, parent affiliated or video church levels.

Relational level congregations want to be in relationship with us, but they have outside governance. Partnership churches want to associate as Freedom Valley congregations in another location; they enjoy common governance with Freedom Valley. Parent affiliated churches (PACs) are wholly owned and managed sites of Freedom Valley, and video sites streamline our preaching by video at their locations.

God wanted to reach people, and He was willing to work through someone like me to do it.

Each of the four levels includes the cumulative features of all the levels below it, which means level two operates as level one and level two, and level three operates as levels one, two and three.

Providing Organizational Support

Freedom Valley manages finances for all network churches that wish us to do so. We also provide legal services for all churches at level two or above, and offer them free privileges to borrow church property, such as vans, baptismal pools and sound equipment.

Weekly call-in meetings happen via video, with frequent guest appearances. Guests offer special insight and powerful instruction. Calls generally last an hour or more, as we fellowship, pray for each other, and offer support for pastors.

Some of our network churches contribute 5 percent of weekly tithes to a common church planting fund to help more new churches get started, while another 5 percent goes to world missions. All churches share freely whatever God has shown them, including insights for reaching people.

Coaching and Supporting

In addition, Freedom Valley offers Heart and Soul meetings four times a year. These events provide opportunities for pastors and leadership teams to gather, hear leadership principles, celebrate wins, and set goals for the period ahead.

We also started offering credentialing for pastors who could get more done if they carried an Assemblies of God credential card that said someone in the church believes in them and their ministry. Currently, more than 40 pastors carry a Freedom Valley license to preach the gospel, essentially a local church credential.

As of this writing, we have helped approximately 104 churches get started. But 104 churches will not change a nation. We are believing God for more than a thousand churches, and many more networks that will help get thousands more churches started after that.

Jesus promised, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). This divine building project continues to this day — and Christ invites every community, every congregation and every believer to join Him in following His redemptive blueprint.

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2017 edition of Influence magazine.