Our Newest Staff Member

Signing his life away!

Well Substance, I’d like you to welcome Substance’s newest pastor:  “Reverend Mark Mellon” (O.K., but you don’t actually have to call him reverend).  Yes, indeed, the Substance staff family is growing!  And I know that hiring Mark won’t surprise hardly any of you.  After all, he virtually runs all of our Sunday morning ministry teams.  Most of you thought he was already on staff.  But, no. He was just a crazy servant leader!

Believe it or not, I met Mark because he wanted to plant a church in Saint Paul.  And back in the day, Substance was going to help him launch.  I actually told him to join our leadership team and recruit as many people out of our church as possible.  How cool would it be to be able to plant a new church starting with 200 people!

Of course, in the meantime, Substance has been exploding.  In fact, the average church size in Minnesota is 269 members.  Yet, last September alone we grew by twice that number. In other words, every couple months Substance is basically planting another church inside of itself; so, we need to be hiring savvy leaders.And who better than a guy who’s all ready living a true pastoral lifestyle.

So, after talking about it, Mark and Bonnie decided that they wanted to stay!(Yippie!) But seriously, Mark has already had an amazing impact on our church community.I bet you that he knows more Substance people than I do!And to boot, the guy is really really smart.(He’s a year or two ahead of me at seminary… so he always gives me “the scoop”.)

And what is Mark going to do?Believe it or not, I’m not quite sure.He’ll probably just pick up my coffee and shine my shoes (just kidding).Actually, he’s gonna help us launch multi-sites (i.e., Plant churches inside of our church).But, pray for our staff!This is a big year.In old-school Pentecostal circles we used to say:“New Levels, New Devils.” So pray!And give Mark a fist pound this Sunday!