Greg Fraser pastors The Father’s House in Sturgeon County, Alberta. Over the past 18 years the church has grown by leaps and bounds and they have recently completed a beautiful new church building. On today’s episode of The Evangelism Podcast, Pastor Greg talks about how the church has become an essential part of the community and about how to reach Canada for Jesus.
Website: https://www.tfhchurch.ca/
Transcript:
Evangelist Daniel King (00:00):
Greg Frazier pastors, the father’s house in sturgeon county, Alberta. Over the past 18 years, the church has grown by leaps and bounds, and they have recently completed a beautiful new church building on today’s episode of the evangelism podcast. Pastor Greg talks about how the church has become an essential part of the community and about how to reach Canada for Jesus.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:36):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast with Dr. Daniel King, where Daniel interviews, full-time evangelists, pastors, missionaries, and normal everyday Christians to discover how they share their faith, their powerful testimonies and amazing stories that will inspire you to reach people with the good news. And now here’s your host, missionary and evangelist Daniel King.
Evangelist Daniel King (01:01):
Welcome to the evangelism podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest pastor Greg Frazier. Thank you for being with me today.
Pastor Greg Fraser (01:11):
Great to be here, Daniel. And how are you doing?
Evangelist Daniel King (01:14):
I am doing well. Thank you.
Pastor Greg Fraser (01:16):
You’re visiting us in Canada here. So we wanna make sure you’re, you know, you’re having a good time and, and God’s using you.
Evangelist Daniel King (01:23):
Yeah, absolutely. Jessica and I have had a wonderful time. It was really great to preach here at the father’s house. Yeah. Just a few weeks ago. And then my wife has helped lead worship a couple of times. Yeah. And so this, this church is very special to us because my wife grew up in Warrenville Alberta, right outside Edmonton. Yeah. Small city, but she grew up here and this church has been her church for many, many years.
Pastor Greg Fraser (01:52):
Yeah. We love you guys. And so excited that you’re when you can make it back. It’s been three years since you’ve been able to come back with all that’s going on around the world. So it’s fantastic that you’re here right now.
Evangelist Daniel King (02:03):
Yeah. We really so much love and appreciate you guys so much. And this church has just loved us and supported us and just been a, a tremendous blessing helping us to, to preach the gospel. So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about this church. When my, my wife went to the school that the church has. Yeah. She’s a graduate of the school. And then she became a missionary and this church supported her and over time, the church dwindled down to it just had a few members. Yeah. And then you came. Yeah. And since you came, God has just done amazing things here. Kinda walk me through that process of what God has done here at the father’s house.
Pastor Greg Fraser (02:51):
Well, I mean, we’ve been here for 18 years now and it’s, you know, when we first came, there was, we were probably down to about nine kids, I think, in the Christian school and, you know, 25, 30 people in the church. And so they were kind of, Symbio staying the, the church was supporting the school, the school, the church, the only families that were left were the few families that were in the school. And we were pastoring in a church of about a thousand people in Northern Canada in a very economic hotspot of Canada and felt the call to come to this little tiny community. And it was quite a significant change for us because we were you know, kind of in a position to take over that church and to lead in, into its next season. But the Lord called us to this tiny community.
Pastor Greg Fraser (03:40):
And, and you know, when God’s on you and you, you just can’t push that away. And when we first came, I remember our first Sunday here, I just had this, you know, unction from the holy spirit. And I think we had that first Sunday, there was about 17 people in the service. And I said, this church will plant churches. And, you know, we just had this destiny, this thought, and really that’s where it all began. And, and quickly God began to, to bring growth and began to call people home to the father’s house. That’s kind of our, our tagline is help people find their way home to, to God and to a relationship with him and then to live as disciples who care. And so from there, the church just began to burgeon and grow. And we were meeting in a little strip mall and then we moved to the community center.
Pastor Greg Fraser (04:32):
And then we moved from there as we continued to grow into the local high school. And then we rented the local cultural center. And and then we just had this vision and dream of, of building a church and, and dis and desiring to see more and more people find their way home. I think our, our whole methodology of even evangelism is just authentically calling people back to the destiny and the purpose and the calling that God has for. And that you’re created in the image of God, you’re an image bearer, but that image has become marred by a thing called sin. And God has sent his son to restore us to restore that image, to bring us back into relationship with himself and ultimately to give us incredible purpose. I think that so many people are misguided in the purpose of their life.
Pastor Greg Fraser (05:22):
And so that’s kind of where our church leads people into is back into a relationship with God back into incredible purpose. And that purpose is really in learning to take dominion over ourselves so that we can better serve and love others rather than taking dominion over others. So they can better serve us, which I think is kind of the pattern of the world. And so in doing that, you know, we’ve become a real family. That’s our theology. That’s how we, we think in terms of relationship, this is the family of God, God you know, we’re members of that family. And really everyone outside of that family is being called into a relationship and an adoption into that family. So from that authentic kind of
Evangelist Daniel King (06:09):
Love
Pastor Greg Fraser (06:10):
For people and our community, we’ve seen many people come to know Christ and have planted a few churches and, and seen God just do great things.
Evangelist Daniel King (06:21):
Yeah. Let’s talk about reaching out to people here in the Canadian context, because Canada is different than the United States. It’s different than the ministry that we do in Africa. Talk to me a little bit about what you feel works here in the nation of Canada for, for reaching out to people. Often they know about God. They’ve had some exposure but there’s many people that are living far away from God. How can we reach them?
Pastor Greg Fraser (06:54):
Well again, number one is always to call people to the revelation that God is for them and not against them. I think that Canadians typically they’re not antagonistic toward God, but they really don’t understand the, the, what he wants to do in their life, how he wants to have that relationship and bring them back into really living with purpose for him and within his kingdom. And I think that’s probably the greatest way in which we in our context evangelize and see people come home to the father’s house is we’re. We have the distinct advantage because we’re in a, a community of about 10,000 people and we’re highly involved in the community. So we’re involved in the government side of it. We’re involved in social services, quite heavily. We’re involved in many of the things that happened within our community. So in terms of methodology, one of the things that we’ve just done is partnered with our community.
Pastor Greg Fraser (08:00):
And so when they are holding different festivals, we’ll say, where can we serve? You know whenever we have an election, one of the things we do is we bring all the candidates in and we say, you are God’s servants. We’re here to pray for you. And we’ve seen incredible fruit from that. Including, you know, mayors getting coming to know the Lord and, and different things. So just very much involved in the rhythm of the community and a vital member of the community. We’re not on the outside of the community, we’re in the community and really calling people to understand that God wants to be part of this. I remember speaking at a businessman’s luncheon and just saying, you know you know, businesses, God wants to bless you as businessmen. His, his desire is to prosper this community. You’re actually in the serving God, by being a businessman, you know, to give people a vision of God, wanting to work in their lives, in whatever they’re doing. So that’s been really how we’ve operated in a, in a big way.
Evangelist Daniel King (08:58):
One of the innovative ideas that the father’s house is using to be in the community is right in the middle of town. You have a coffee shop yeah. Called higher grounds. Right. And it’s run as a service to the community. Almost everyone in there is a volunteer serving. And, and why do you feel like that’s important to, to be there in the middle of the community?
Pastor Greg Fraser (09:24):
Well, I mean it’s just, again, because we’re, we’re in the community there we’re accepted that way very much. And all the proceeds from that coffee shop go back into the community. So one of the interesting things, and this is what I’m talking about when we’ve developed such a positive partnership with our, with our community, that during COVID the government paid us to feed families that were having trouble feeding you know, making ends meet. And so we got a large government grant through, for about two years that just helped us. They, we were the engine that was putting out food into various families throughout our community. So that kind of partnership is just incredible. You know, we’ve, we’ve through higher grounds. We, we have a large military base outside of Morville that we in Canada the month of November is remembrance day, which is a a solemn time of remembering those who gave their lives in the service of their country. And so we’d make a huge focus on our military families and our families that have men or women deployed and doing something special for them and that month. So those kind of things, teachers we celebrate our, our police force. We celebrate our firefighters. We do different things to just make sure that we’re serving within that community and taking care of physical needs of people as part of that. So it’s been a great, great ministry of our church.
Evangelist Daniel King (10:52):
Let’s talk a little bit about C because it has presented challenges for churches all over the world. Yeah. People on both sides of the issue come at the pastor and think the pastor should have all the answers and, and think the way that they think. And so how has the father’s house thrived through this season of, of great challenge?
Pastor Greg Fraser (11:16):
Well, I think number one and the largest narrative that because you have two camps, you know, you have the extreme, I’ll say you won’t even label it, but you know, this is a, this is everybody needs to comply and everybody needs to wear a masks and everybody needs to be vaccinated. And then you have the other camp. That’s like, this is all a smoke screen. It’s all terrible. And really, it’s been interesting as a pastor because I get pulled in both directions. Why aren’t you saying more about this? Why aren’t you saying more about that? What, the one thing that we have done throughout the entire season of COVID has been to say, we are focusing on one thing. We preach the kingdom of God. And, and so we have labored tirelessly to call both extreme camps to live within the kingdom of God, because the kingdom of God is not affected by things like COVID right.
Pastor Greg Fraser (12:15):
And what I mean by that is that we, you know, the desire of God is that we live within a community of faith. That loves one another, even though we are different, even though we may have totally different opinions the one, one constant that we can hold to is Christ and, and his call to, you know, they will know that you are my followers by your love for one another. That doesn’t mean that we agree on everything. And so calling the church to that place of you may totally disagree with your brother right now, but you still love him. And I think that’s been a huge success for us is that we’ve not gone in any one direction, but we’ve just stayed straighten in narrow down that road and said, we are gonna hold to the kingdom of God. There’s life there, there’s life abundant there. And this is what we hold to.
Evangelist Daniel King (13:02):
Let’s talk about the miracle of this church building that we’re sitting in, because I saw a picture of, of a huge church building, literally coming down the highway on a huge truck. And, and so it, it tell, tell me about that and the church on the move. Yeah,
Pastor Greg Fraser (13:23):
Well, a little bit of history is of course we’re, as we continued to grow, we, we were renting every space. I remember one time we rented eight spaces in a span of seven days to house the, the ministries of our church. And we said, Lord, we need a building. And you, a little bit of our history is we had a church building that we were renting that burnt to the ground. And we, we went through floods and fires and all kinds of things. And we were believing God for a new building. So we had purchased some land and we drew up some plans and felt the, the word of the Lord came to us to go into the land, to take our provisions and to go into the land. And what that meant for us at that time was we, we prepped the land.
Pastor Greg Fraser (14:09):
So we spent over a million dollars just doing dirt work and prepping the land and building up the land and getting our services in and all that stuff. And then we said, all, we, we were gonna build the foundation. We had a plan for a church and we were gonna, we had enough money to lay the foundation. We thought, no, let’s wait until we have enough. The, the total of the funds that we need little, did we know that the Lord had a, a totally different plan for us and long I’ll jump back for a moment ago. A friend of mine who’s very prophetic in nature came to us when we first moved here and he said, I just see, I see your church. I see the angel of the Lord picking up a church and moving it onto the highway, and that you’re gonna become a regional church.
Pastor Greg Fraser (14:52):
And this was his, every time he’d come, he’d say, I just keep seeing the angel of the Lord picking up a church, moving it to the highway. You’re gonna be a regional church. And we, we thought we, we didn’t understand, God bless those prophets. They always have interesting visions, you know, so we had no concept. We’re like, well, sure. Okay. And then all of a sudden, so we’re, we’re we prepped our land and we were nowhere near having the funds to be able to build the building we were gonna build. And there was a building in a neighboring city about 19 kilometers away. And, and the building was a church building and it had been the congregation sold that building to a developer. And it was just sitting there. My wife, we would drive by it and we go to this community probably twice a week.
Pastor Greg Fraser (15:37):
And my wife would say, you know, we gotta call them. Like, we should do something with that building like, well, I wonder what they’re gonna do with that building. And, you know, the man of faith that I am, I said, well, what are we gonna do? Move it like, you know, but my wife was unrelenting. She just had an unction from the Lord. Like we gotta call them something’s up. And then we were as a church family, we we’ve done multiple. I call them collective fasts where we’ll fast as the entire body for 40 days or 50 days, whatever. So we started a 52 day Nemiah fast. And so they rebuilt the walls in 52 days. So we said, collectively as a church, we’re gonna fast for 52 days as we were fasting. I finally relented to my wife, constantly pushing me as another woman in our church started to say, I really feel the Lord saying something about that building.
Pastor Greg Fraser (16:27):
So we phoned them and said, well, what are you doing with that building? The, and the, the owners at that time was a developer said, well, you can have it. You can have this building for a tax receipt. In Canada, we can do tax receipts on charitable donations. And so I took all of our contractors. So remember, we’re in a 52 day fast, nobody knows we’re doing this. I took the contractors from our church. I said, guys, what would it cost us to deconstruct this church and move it? And would it be worth doing? And so they started the math and they started doing all the processing and all the thing. And we figured we would save well over a million dollars by doing that process. And so that’s what we did at the end of the 52 day fast. We were able to announce to our congregation guys, we have a church.
Pastor Greg Fraser (17:17):
And so we began for the next year, that whole process, we deconstructed this church, cut it into four pieces. They weighed about a, oh, I don’t know it was 135,000 pounds a piece. We ended up moving them down the highway and across 18 farmers fields. We drove in the middle of the winter because the ground had to be frozen. And we drove these four pieces of this building. We put it on a foundation with a, a large basement as well, which then housed our Christian school and our church. And that was two years ago. And God has just done this incredible miracle of in the middle of the greatest downturn in the economy, in the middle of COVID. We built a multimillion dollar facility and God has just done an incredible work. And the church has been growing since
Evangelist Daniel King (18:08):
It’s a huge miracle. And, and we rejoice at what God has done. It. It’s a wonderful, beautiful church building now all over Canada in rural cities and villages, there are church buildings like this church building that used to be vibrant congregations, but now maybe they’re not being used. And God has actually given you a, a plan, an idea for reviving these churches. Tell me about that.
Pastor Greg Fraser (18:40):
Well, one of the things that we, we run a multi-site model and but we’re a little bit different of a multi-site model. I don’t, I don’t telecast to the multi sites. What I do is I train up younger leaders and they go, and they’ll, they’ll speak at those multi sites. And so our dream, my next now, you know, having during COVID nobody had 2020 vision in 2020 to see COVID coming. Really, if we were honest as pastors, but you know, now God is beginning to birth. Another dream, that dream back into getting ready to start planting more churches again. And so for us, it’s always been about discipleship. And so we raise up young leaders, they basically follow a week behind us in our messages, so I’ll preach, and then they’ll take that message and adapt it and go to the multisite and, and speak that.
Pastor Greg Fraser (19:29):
And then anyway, the whole process is quite powerful for us because we had three, two multisite going, and one of our multisite leaders got, had an aortic aneurysm. So we had to cover him for a year. Our other multisite leader was on maternity leave for a year. So we had to cover all three sites simultaneously, but because of our methodology of, I would speak on the main Sunday. And then the following week, the other multi sites would follow behind. We were able to manage it sending younger staff members and really training them to do that. So it’s been a great methodology. And our dream is to see more of these church buildings. We’ve been given completely given a church building already. And that’s, our dream is to go into these communities that have small churches or churches that are lying dormant or congregations that are saying we’re dying. We don’t know how to take the next step. Our desire is to go in and say, Hey, let us come in and partner with you. And let’s put little father’s houses all over Canada, Northern Canada. That’s kind of the dream.
Evangelist Daniel King (20:35):
Amen. Well, the dream shall shortly surely come to pass in Jesus name. Let’s finish by praying for Canada and praying for what God wants to do in this nation.
Pastor Greg Fraser (20:51):
Amen. You want me to pray? Go for it. Okay. So father, God, we just thank you that Lord, I just thank you for our national Anthem Lord that God, we stand on God for the, for Canada, Lord, I thank you that we pray in our national Anthem. God keep our land glorious and free. Holy spirit. I ask you to flood this nation, flood this nation with your presence, flood this nation with your power Lord, God, cause the revelation of Jesus Christ to flood this nation God, in our nation’s capital Lord, you you’ve en engraved that scripture on our parliament building God that the people perish for a lack of vision and Lord, we, we pray for the vision of God, the revelation of God, to flood Canada, that people would know that you are for them and not against them. Lord God that you love them. I pray that you would open the eyes of their heart tear. The veil that has kept it, them blinded to the revelation of Christ and made Jesus Christ have dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth in this nation in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Evangelist Daniel King (22:10):
Amen. Pastor Greg, thank you so much for being a guest on the evangelism podcast.
Pastor Greg Fraser (22:14):
Woohoo. It’s a blast. Thanks for having me, Daniel.
Evangelist Daniel King (22:17):
Thanks so much for listening today. I am excited about telling people about Jesus. And I want to invite you to be a part of helping us to rescue people from hell and take them with us to heaven. There’s two things you can do to help. First of all, can you go find the evangelism podcast on apple iTunes and leave us a positive review by giving a review, you will help other people find these valuable resources about sharing our faith. And second, would you become a financial partner with king ministries? Every single dollar that people give us enables us to lead at least one person to Jesus. And so that means for only $1, you can help start a party in heaven. And so today I want to invite you to become a monthly partner. You can start out for just a dollar, but if God puts it on your heart to do more, of course you can do more. But please go to king ministries.com and become a monthly partner with us today to help us to lead more people to Jesus. Thank you so much. And God bless you
Evangelism Podcast Host (23:36):
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