We are Dan and Debbie Conklin, and we are excited to begin a church-planting movement in Concord, North Carolina! We would invite you to prayerfully consider becoming a partner with us through prayer and finances.

We have been involved in several different ministries over the years--worship leading, youth, children's ministry, discipleship pastor, and senior pastor--but this year God has opened up the door for us now to begin a new work. We feel that all of our life has been preparing us for this moment in time!

What we envision doing is creating a network of house churches. We have already found that many unchurched people we speak to are very interested in becoming a part of a church that is more relationship-driven than what they see in most existing churches. We have personally been a part of a house church for a couple of years, and from the first night we were there, we felt connected and loved. As much as we have enjoyed it, it has stirred our hearts to create a way to make this kind of powerful, relational ministry available to more people by building a network of house churches throughout our county, united in mission and vision.

So, we have created Bethel Family Fellowship. We have spent the past couple of months building vision, strategy, and plans to be able to launch in May of 2023. While it will begin as one house church, we already have a few of our core people who we believe will be leading their own house churches soon. Our model is to recruit, train, develop, and support our house church leaders. We believe that, when properly trained and equipped, every healthy, mature Christian has the potential to lead others toward Jesus in a godly community, and we have been developing the materials and resources to facilitate these leaders. When such leaders are trained, developed, deployed, and supported, we believe the ministry can grow exponentially.

So why do we need to raise support for a house church? Great question! There are several reasons:

First of all, it is a network of house churches, not just one house church. Dan's role is executive director, not pastor. Our pastors are the house church leaders, and they are the ones we want the people of the church to be primarily connected to. Although Dan will lead the first house church, his primary responsibilities will be to share the vision with our community and to find, equip, and deploy new house church leaders, as well as to evangelize. To be able to build it as a movement, it requires a major investment of time. He is currently working another job, and the amount of time available for administration, networking, and casting vision is very limited. We don't want to be just another small church where some really neat things happen but the church isn't really growing. We want to be a movement that expands rapidly and changes the community. And we want to be in a position to help the movement grow quickly.

Second, we want to always be pay our workers fist. It takes a while for a new church to build up its giving patterns. We plan to pay our pastors (house church leaders) and to resource them from day one. We also plan to pay their coaches. This will be a very part-time salary, but the Bible teaches us that workmen are worthy of their wages, and since we believe that our pastors are the most important part of our work, we want to make sure to resource them adequately. We project this to be about 30% of the budget from the church's giving, which comes to a few hundred dollars per month for each house church.

Third, we want to be aggressive in our ability to support local, regional, and global missionary efforts. Since we won't be spending the amount of money on a building that many churches do, we are freed up to be aggressive in directing our Kingdom resources to directly impact people's lives. Our budget plan directs about 55% of the church's giving toward strategic and targeted mission. Again, we want these percentages to be in place from day one. It would be easy to say, "We will begin supporting missions once our church is financially viable", but a lot of times, that never happens. We are serious about being missional, and we feel it is important to set the bar high from the very beginning. We believe that if we put God's Kingdom ahead of our own needs, he will provide and bless.

We anticipate that it will take about 10 to 15 house churches in our network to get to the point where the executive director's salary is able to be fully covered by the church. So, we will be seeking financial partners for the first year. That will be a different campaign. If anyone would be interested in such a partnership, please contact us.

This campaign is for the purpose of establishing start-up funds. We plan on doing community public worship events, so sound equipment will be needed. Other up-front costs include websites, literature, and providing basic resources for the house church leaders so that they will be able to handle 12-25 people in their homes. We also plan to begin doing a large celebration/outreach meeting for all of the house churches to come to once a month, which will involve additional costs. And we will include a couple of months of initial salary until the support-raising begins to fill in.

We believe incredible things are going to happen at Bethel Family Fellowship! We are trying to create something that is scalable--that can expand indefinitely. We are envisioning a network of hundreds of house churches in our county alone. And when the resources, training, and church culture are in place, we believe that we are going to see house churches spread out into surrounding counties. In fact, our long-range goal is to see a network built in every county in North and South Carolina. We dream not only of starting a network of churches in our county, but of changing the very way church is done in America! But that's down the road. Right now, we are starting in Concord!

We are looking for some visionaries who want to partner with us to do big things for the Kingdom of God. If you can catch some of this vision and would like to be a part of something revolutionary, we invite you to support this campaign for Bethel's start-up funds. We believe there are people whom God has been preparing for this very vision. Maybe you are one of those people.

We thank you for your prayers and your consideration, and for your commitment to God and to His Kingdom. May God bless you and guide you in all of your endeavors!

Blessings!

Dan and Debbie Conklin