Leadership

Leadership

Meet our pastors:

Charlie Meyer serves as a pastor in Living Hope. Charlie and his wife Roxanne are the proud parents of four children: Arielle, Elisa, Christopher, and Joel. When Charlie has free time he can be found in his other favorite elements: The love of music, motorcycles, and God’s creation.

Paul Johnson serves as a pastor in Living Hope and also leads our music ministry. He and his wife Christie have three sons and one daughter. Paul enjoys playing and building guitars, being outdoors, working on his house, and coffee, lots of coffee.

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In late 2022 Clifton Barth was raised up as a pastor. He and his wife Charis have four  children. He continues to work full time as a Physical Therapist Assistant while serving our faith family.

We believe the scripture teaches that there is one office of church leadership for which the terms elder, pastor and bishop are used interchangeably.  Living Hope is led by a plurality of co-equal elders.  These men are appointed by the elders of the church after being tested against the qualifications listed in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.  While Living Hope is a self-governed autonomous church we exist in close fellowship with other local churches and are a member of Great Commission Churches.

Additionally, we believe God has appointed Deacons as servants of the church.  Deacons carry significant responsibility and must meet the qualifications outlined in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.  It is our understanding that the office of a deacon is open to men or women.

In mid 2022 we recognized four Deacons: Tony and Kirsten Hill, David Coleman and Joshua McKnight.

Leadership is influence flowing from our love for people and our character not an office.  As coheirs of His Kingdom,  God has given all believers gifts of His grace for the purpose of building His church.  Our desire is to help men and women to discover their gifts and grow in love and character so they may lead in the church as God intends.

Why Would you Teach the Bible?
You may wonder why we teach through books of the Bible at our Sunday services. Most churches have messages focused on some aspect of our daily lives – marriage, parenting, emotional health etc. The goal of such an approach is easy to understand. Exactly how teaching through books of the Bible would be helpful to you may be less clear. To many, the Bible is unfamiliar. It can seem foreign to our busy modern lives. It talks about history and places you may have never heard of. It contains strange language – you’ll find many words you may have never heard before. And some of its ideas even seem wrong by today’s thinking. How could understanding such a book be of any value?

But, perhaps that is just the point. The Bible is old, very old. What we call the Bible is really a collection of ancient manuscripts. These were written by 40 some authors, from many different cultures, over a period of more than 1500 years. And yet these manuscripts weave such a coherent story of God interacting with the world that they have been collected into one volume. The story it tells about life and the world around us is different, very different. It contains ideas that are not found anywhere else.

The writings contained in the Bible claim to be the account of God’s dealings with the world and his message to us. This is a fantastic claim. It may strike you as unbelievable. And yet the Bible contains some amazing things – like promises claimed to have been given by God that were fulfilled hundreds or thousands of years later. If the Bible’s does contain knowledge from God, it is information worth knowing. It would, in fact, be the ultimate source of knowledge for life.
Jesus said you would know a tree by its fruit. If the writings contained in the Bible really are from God and tell us how to know him, it should produce some pretty good fruit. We have found this to be true. We invite you to test the fruit by coming and learning the Bible. And by getting to know us. What you hear may seem strange at first – it did to us, but we keep coming to hear more because of the living hope that God has given us through his words.