by Rev. Jason Waeber
Foothills Reformed BP Mission, Adams County, OH
the Missions Banner, February/March, 2025

I want to begin by saying that it is good to be back with PMU, working to spread the kingdom in difficult places. I have come to the realization over the last several years that rural America is actually one of the most neglected fields available to us anywhere in the world today, but the Lord is blessing our work with growth and strength that I would not have imagined.

The work in Adams County actually began several years ago, as I helped with occasional pulpit supply in a small country church in Adams County, Ohio. The Lord blessed this period, and the church began to grow while I was tending that pulpit with the help of others. My intentions were to move the church toward the BPC and conservative, confessional Christianity, but the church wasn’t willing to make a clean break with certain previous practices, like women in church leadership. While I was disappointed that the church as a whole could not be brought along, this did lead to my being approached by several folks who saw the need for a conservative and Reformed church in the county. They saw my preaching at this small church as a note of hope in a place where this type of work was not being pursued at all. My reply was that, if there were enough people to form a core group, I was willing to pursue the work, and the Lord provided.

That group began meeting on a porch in the fall of 2023 with a few families. By early 2024, we had worked out a situation where we were able to use another church’s space in the evening, so we began worship services. The Lord blessed this period and we began to pick up some interest and momentum, but the evening service time and lack of visibility proved to be substantial barriers to seeing visitors. There is a certain class of people who will come to an evening service, and they tend to be the ones who are already very serious about Christian living. While our core group was made largely out of such folks, given how few people there are in a place like Adams County (which only has a population of 27,477 in a land area of 584 square miles) we knew that the work would not be sustainable only with our extremely dedicated core group.

This led to our looking for a space to begin morning worship services, and the Lord provided in the fall of 2024 with a small space we were able to rent from an Amish family who owned a local store. It was a much smaller space than the church we were previously using, but it enabled us to start morning worship services in September. This was a move that the Lord blessed almost immediately. Our ordinary attendance for the summer had been somewhere in the 20’s, but we jumped up immediately to over 30 and now sit comfortably at over 40 regular attendees after only a few months in this new space, even with continuing visibility issues (we are only allowed to have signage up on Sundays).

With size now becoming an issue (the space can only accommodate, at most, 50-60 bodies, and people will not generally attend a church where they feel uncomfortably crowded), we began looking for new options for location. The Lord provided, in that one of our core families offered to close in and finish a storage barn on their property, so that we could rent the space for worship. This was an answer to prayer, since we didn’t really have the money at this point to put a down payment on a building. The Lord has blessed even this process, as the construction has gone more smoothly than anyone expected (concrete finished just before bad weather comes in, septic put in and inspected in a single day, new local contacts who did amazing insulation work for way under price, a neighbor who happened to need fill dirt disposed of right when we needed it – the list goes on and on -see construction photos). At this rate, a project which could comfortably have taken into the summer to get wrapped up should be finished and able to be occupied as early as February, right as we seem to be nudging toward the point that our current location is infeasible. This new location not only solves our size problem (our napkin math suggests it should handle around 150 or so), but also puts us in a highly visible position, directly on a major throughway, with plenty of parking. Without even a sign being put up, the family doing the construction is already getting questions about what is going in. We are convinced that the Lord has had his hand on this entire process thus far, and that this location should give us a visibility in the community that we haven’t had since we started.

There are many more stories to share about how the Lord brought this work together, but it’s sufficient to say that He has blessed us beyond measure. We are finding a real hunger in this area for solid, substantial gospel work which is free from both liberal compromise and charismatic frenzy, and have all expectations that the door here for work remains wide open and the fields white for harvest.