Grace Bible Church has been a part of Converge long before I became the pastor as they were founded and led by the late Pastor Rod Walker. I became pastor in March 2020 right at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. Thankfully, Converge MidAmerica has been there for me through prayer, encouragement, extremely helpful seminars, and personal visits by Bryan Moak and Gary Rohrmayer.

We are serving our local communities through praying for our community. We provide prayer request forms for them to submit. We do prayer walks through the community to engage them through prayer. We have partnered with our local Urban League to provide food for families who are hurting because of job loss. We also have a civil servants’ day where we honor and encourage our first responders and other civil servants.

The pandemic hit our communities very hard, and we had to shut our live services down and go to virtual services in March 2020. We provide a livestream via Facebook for our Sunday morning service using a “skeleton” crew. We also transitioned to virtual Zoom meetings for our Bible study and Children’s Ministry.

We have been doing live services this year with a limited capacity, socially distanced seats, masks, and temperature checks. In order to keep many of our older members engaged, we started a front porch prayer ministry where myself and an associate pastor go to members’ homes and pray with them and encourage them on their front porches.

Please pray with us that God would keep us focused on the mission of “loving God, loving people, and making disciples.”

Pray that God will bless the partnerships we have with our community to expand ministry beyond the walls of the building.

Pray that God would continue to give us innovative ideas and methods to expand our reach to be the salt and light throughout St. Louis, MO.

Ulysses Ross III
Grace Bible Church
Florissant, MO (northern suburb of St. Louis, MO)

When our church celebrated our one-year anniversary, I realized that we were actually going to make it as a church.  We had all the things going that a healthy church seems to have from outside appearances.  We had weekend worship services, children’s ministry, outreach events, small groups, and a few other teams in place that were needed to be a church. However, we knew there was something missing.  We were great at gathering people, but honestly, we stunk at defining clear next steps for growing in Christ. 

Next Steps to leading a missional church was an event that we attended when Grace River was 18 months old, and this event changed everything for us. We learned about how to create and execute 8 healthy systems to make our church thrive.  It was these systems and the Natural Church Development Survey (NCD) that enabled us to take this next step as a church.  

We didn’t see a harvest of people meeting, knowing, and following Jesus until we started really focusing on the systems that would make our church healthy.  What I didn’t know back then is God wanted to grow our church way more than we did.  He was just waiting on us to have the systems in place to help make disciples.  If you are looking to remove some barriers and make the practical changes necessary to impact your community for Christ, Next Steps is for you!

Chris Highfill
Planter and Lead Pastor
Grace River Church, St Peters, MO