Church plant impacts Texas, Tanzania and beyond

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 - 1:57 PM CST

Before Gateway Fellowship Church officially launched last year in Helotes, Texas, Pastor John Van Pay and the launch team determined that giving to missions would be a priority.

They established this precedent during the church's inaugural service in February 2008, when the very first offering, totaling $4,500, was taken to plant a church in Tanzania.

Pastors Dixon Kanganga and John Van Pay outside of Kanganga's church in Tanzania.

After much prayer and the recommendation of AG missionaries, Gateway Fellowship's leadership chose Pastor Dixon Kanganga as the recipient of the church's first offering. Kanganga planted a church on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania with 1 million people, approximately 98 percent of them Muslim. The church members have encountered a great deal of opposition to their Christian faith. People have even thrown rocks at Kanganga while he preached. But in the face of these difficulties, the church has grown to 800.

With the funding from Gateway Fellowship, Kanganga's church constructed a building with a palm branch roof and small windows for a new church plant on Zanzibar.

More than a year later, Van Pay and University of Texas at San Antonio Chi Alpha Pastor Johnny Hauck traveled to Tanzania to see the church they had funded and to meet Kanganga. By American standards the simple concrete structure is by no means remarkable.

"As a church planter who worships in a movie theater, we have accepted the fact that churches are not defined by buildings, but people," Van Pay says. "However, seeing how effective Dixon's church is reminds me not to be dependent on equipment and buildings, but Jesus, prayer, discipleship and church planting."

In addition to visiting with Kanganga and his church, Van Pay and Hauck's trip also served as a Fire Bible fundraiser. The Fire Bible is a Pentecostal study Bible made available by the Assemblies of God Bible Alliance.

Bibles are typically easy to come by for Christians living in the United States, but around the world, most believers are not that fortunate. Kanganga's hunger for God's word, despite having only one Bible, left a profound impact on Van Pay.

"He had this paperback Bible that he literally was just clinging to," Van Pay recalls. "It was everything to him and when I began to tell him about the Fire Bible and how it has study notes and commentaries and that it is really a Pentecostal library in one, you could see his eyes light up. He's already doing so much with what he has and you could see the vision almost come alive in what could be done with greater study notes."

To help pastors with limited resources, like Kanganga, Gateway Fellowship is supporting one of Bible Alliance's current projects – translating the Fire Bible into the Pidgin English language for the people of Papua New Guinea. While in Tanzania, Van Pay and Hauck set out to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, which, at 19,298 feet, is the fourth tallest mountain in the world. They asked the Gateway congregation to give $10, the cost of putting a Fire Bible into the hands of an overseas pastor, for every 10 feet they climbed.

While climbing, Van Pay says he prayed for the church in Tanzania and for Gateway Fellowship – that his church members would have a love for Scripture.

Two days after reaching the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, a tremendous feat of endurance, Van Pay was back at Gateway Fellowship, receiving an offering to fund the translation of the Fire Bible into the Pidgin English language. More than $9,742 was raised, which Van Pay says is four times larger than the church's average monthly missions giving.

According to Alton Garrison, president of Bible Alliance, "Producing the Fire Bible in the major languages is an awesome task. The only way it can be accomplished is to have pastors, churches and individuals partner with the Bible Alliance to make available Fire Bibles to national pastors and lay workers overseas in a language they can read and understand."

Currently, the Bible Alliance has 26 language editions in print and another 32 in process. Funding the translation of the Fire Bible requires the support of multiple churches and districts, but as churches like Gateway Fellowship catch the vision to provide God's Word to pastors and lay workers throughout the world, the Bible Alliance is able to carry out its mission.

Of Gateway Fellowship's and other churches' contributions, missionary Phil Combs, Fire Bible director, says, "We couldn't take the steps of faith that we take to go into more languages and countries without knowing they are behind us."

To learn more about the Fire Bible, go to the Bible Alliance Web site.

Click here to visit Gateway Fellowship Church's Web site.