The City Church

The Story of The City Church (as told by Pastor Wendell)

In the winter of 1991, the Lord began to stir up my heart to consider pastoring a church of our own. We had been faithful associates and youth pastors for nearly two decades and the Lord was starting an unsettling process of stirring up our secure little ministry nest and making us uncomfortable enough to want to leave. I began counseling with my Pastor at the time, Dick Iverson, while we were still in Portland at the great Bible Temple church. We had been there for twenty years, on staff for eighteen and had just helped Pastor Iverson complete the beautiful 100,000 square foot Domes, the new church buildings overlooking the Columbia River and the Portland International airport there in the Rose City. The dedication of that facility and the celebration of the Iverson's 40 years of ministry had just happened in November of that year and by December I was being deeply stirred by the Holy Spirit.

I had known for five years that this time would come in our lives — a time to pastor a church of our own. We had been associates, youth pastors and evangelists during our tenure there, but the Lord was leading us strongly to shepherd our own flock. I didn't realize it would come so dramatically and emotionally. For several weeks following the dedication services for the new Bible Temple facilities, I could not sleep. I was extremely restless and agitated in my spirit. My wife, Gini, and I had taken some time off and were also scheduled to do special meetings in the Boston area. During that entire time period, I could not sleep at night but instead found myself pacing the floor, trying to pray, and restlessly seeking some answer to my agitation.

The answers began to come in a little motel on Cape Cod where we were booked during a youth gathering where I was speaking. It was to be one of the last DragonSlayer youth seminars we held. We had traveled across the nation for five years, criss-crossing thirty some states, holding over 60 seminars with more than fifty thousand young people attending. My wife had left the room to go shopping, not being able to endure my agitated state, and I fell on my knees beside that motel bed and began to plead with God to speak to me and show me what He wanted me to do. That very night the Holy Spirit began to open the Scriptures to me and confirm in my spirit what He was indicating. Scripture after Scripture came alive for me and I began to highlight them in yellow ink in my new Bible. These verses of Scripture became our guiding map for the days, months and years that lay ahead of us. They became a "rhema" resource of words from the Lord that helped us know the direction of the Holy Spirit.

Within the next few weeks, in December of that year, after much prayer, fasting and counsel, we determined that the Lord was directing us to pioneer a church in the Northwest. We soon settled on the Seattle area, with our Pastor confirming the decision. Although it was not an easy decision, and caused much emotional turmoil in our hearts, leaving the only church we had known during our married years, we had a growing excitement in our hearts that the Lord was leading us and confirming His direction in a multitude of ways.

We spent the first three months of 1992 planning, dreaming and doing research for our new beginning. One of the first things we did was to get away to a remote place where my wife and I could talk, pray and hear from the Lord. During those few days in an ocean front Hotel room on the Oregon coast, we wrote down everything that was in our hearts, everything we wanted in a church. We used our 20 years of experience in ministry and the five years of traveling throughout the body of Christ to get a good idea of what we wanted and what we did not want. After days of writing and brainstorming, we summarized our thoughts into what became known as the Covenants of The City Church. These became the core values of what we wanted in a church and the emphases of the Spirit that would be the spiritual DNA of our new congregation.

A second and very important step we took was to travel to the city of Seattle several times and begin to spy out the land and get a feel for the place where God was sending us. I was born in the area but had never lived there as an adult. These trips were paramount to our decision-making process, especially in deciding on the exact community that would be best for our new congregation. On one such trip I took my son and two other men who had decided to join our church planting team and spent three days driving through the streets of Seattle, asking the Lord to lead and guide us in finding a place for our church.

Beginning each day with an hour of prayer together in our hotel room, we drove for miles over the three days turning up and down every main street looking for indicators of the direction of the Lord. We could find no evidence of the Lord's leading to a specific place, until we drove over a bridge from the downtown Seattle area across Lake Washington to what is called the Eastside. As soon as we made that drive, our hearts began to leap within us, doors began to open, signs began to confirm His will and we knew in our spirit that the Lord was confirming His direction for our location. It was through those hands-on experiences, coupled with fervent prayer, with other accompanying Scriptures, that the Lord guided us and showed us the community where we should start.

My wife and I also met with pastors from the Seattle area and asked their counsel and blessing regarding our proposed new church in their backyard. Since these were friends of ours in ministry, we asked them what community they thought needed a good church. Their answers all confirmed the same basic region, on the Eastside and particularly the Bellevue area. This gave us even greater confidence that the Lord was leading us.

We began meeting in Portland in March of 1992 with a handful of people who had expressed a desire to join us and help pioneer the church. This team met frequently from March until July when we began to relocate to the Seattle area. During that period of time we met about every two weeks for prayer, worship and sharing. By May we started actual mini-services, with preaching, offerings, etc. Although not all those people actually moved with us and helped pioneer, they were all a great encouragement to the process and gave us more prayer power in those early days of dreaming and planning.

Knowing how important it was for our own children to get a word from the Lord for themselves, we asked them to seek the Lord also. Although they obviously had to go with us, we wanted to involve them in the process of seeking God and knowing that He was confirming this new direction to their hearts as well as ours. Both Wendy and Judah received very specific Scripture references that the Holy Spirit used to speak to them and confirm to their parents that this was indeed the hand of the Lord working in our lives. One verse became especially significant to our daughter who later met her husband, Pastor Benny Perez, by moving to Seattle.

When our home church sent us out, we had a special service where our Pastor had us preach and share our vision, those on the team going with us came to the platform and we were all prayed over together, with prophetic words to confirm God's sending and finally a love offering to help us get started.

Our first staff member was Jude Fouquier and his wife Becky who left a secure position as youth pastors in Missouri, sold their own home and left everything to come and join us and help start the church. From the very beginning, Jude raised his own financial support and worked alongside us in the foundational stages of planting the new church.

The City Church began with meetings in the Spring and Summer of 1992 with forty people in attendance. Our first meetings in Seattle were designed as interest meetings, to discover who might join with us. We held the first meeting in May of 1992 at a Christian campground, near the community where the church was to be planted. Forty two people attended that first meeting. Our daughter, Wendy, played the piano. My brother-in-law Jerry led two songs of worship and I preached a 30-minute message on the goodness of God. We invited everyone from friends and relatives to our real estate agent who was helping us find a new home to come to that meeting. It was a classic gathering, with a little children's activity, a short worship time, some brief introductions and testimonies and my first message. It was a fun time to see who would come, get something started and plant the initial seeds of our new church. We held a second interest meeting about a month later in June of '92 and had 65 people attend a meeting at the Bellevue Community College auditorium.

The team members began moving to the Seattle area from as early as July to as late as December. Those who came later drove three hours, one way, from Portland every weekend until they were able to transition out of their jobs, sell their homes and relocate.

Official Sunday services began in August of that year at the Bellevue Marriott Courtyard Hotel in two conference rooms, one for 17 little children and the other for our new little congregation. Those two rooms were quickly outgrown and the hotel asked us to leave since our worship was starting to bother some people. On our last Sunday in that hotel, we announced to our small flock that we would be in a new place next Sunday but didn't know where. Our phone list was small enough at that time that it took only 30 minutes to phone everyone! Jude Fouquier and I spent the entire week traveling around town with a real estate broker looking for space to lease for our growing group. On Thursday of that week, the Lord led us to an amazing location with empty space in the heart of the Bellevue community.

On Sunday, September 13, 1992, we moved into an office complex at the Kelsey Creek Center on the corner of 148th & Main in East Bellevue. The center was a strip mall adjacent to a K-Mart anchor store. On the second story above numerous little shops, was 11,000 square feet of vacant office space for us to use. The Lord sovereignly led the church to that location, intersection and neighborhood. The decision was confirmed with several miraculous signs, including a prophecy by a seasoned prophet, David Schoch, who five months earlier had told us "there is a place where you are going that is going to be the crossroads of two main boulevards." The neighborhood was called the "Crossroads" and one of the boulevards was called Main. Those wonderful words were an amazingly accurate confirmation from the Holy Spirit.

We set up simple offices upstairs and a meeting area while negotiating with the owners and the city to lease the space. Although not zoned for religious use, we did get permission to move in under the social service banner of our ministries--something to which we were committed and a ministry which the Lord also seemed to be confirming. By Christmas of 1992, we had 100 people gathered and boldly signed a five year lease for over $8,000 a month. Although seemingly over our heads, our advisory board of business leaders and our three elders knew that this was the will of God. We believed strongly that He would supernaturally provide. We signed a contract that gave us three free months to begin to accumulate funds and believe for this exorbitant rent. If God wants you in a high rent district then He will provide. We just had to be sure we had a word from God and were not moving in presumption. This is something I would never counsel anyone to do, since it seemed so ridiculous and so expensive. Only confirmed words from God, wise counsel, lots of prayer and supernatural peace could validate such an extreme move.

Originally, when we first began, we only met on Sundays and got together with some of our key people during the week for prayer. Eventually we added a Wednesday night teaching time to our weekly schedule of activities. From the very beginning, however, even before the Sunday meetings began, we started a Men's prayer meeting on Saturday mornings at our home. That prayer meeting has grown into hundreds of men meeting in Care Groups and praying for each other with a once- a-month Men's Prayer Breakfast. Gini started a ladies Bible study on Tuesday mornings within the first year as well. Within the first several months we also started children's classes and a weekly youth meeting. Our first staff member was our youth pastor and eventually we added a secretary and slowly other pastors.

During the first few months, and actually prior to arriving in the city, we did a great deal of research on the history of our city, our community and the surrounding area. These demographic and historical insights helped us in the initial forming of our ministries and strategies. I also did a personal study on the history of the Oregon Trail which led pioneers out to the West and settling in the Northwest Territory during the 1800's. I would recommend this to other pastors as well, not because of where you live geographically but because of the insights you will gain in understanding the pioneering mentality. Many of these insights were woven into the messages of the first six months. My wife and I even had a picture taken along the Oregon Trail and used this in one of our first video presentations.

By January of 1993 we had remodeled the space and proceeded to invite all our friends to a dedication gathering. The congregation was obedient to another word of prophecy that came during those meetings through Pastor Dick Iverson, at the dedication of this first remodeled auditorium space. The word was to "follow the cloud" and move when the Lord said move and not worry or be threatened by the enemy. After our move to 148th & Main and remodeling an unfinished upper room space into an auditorium for the Lord, the church was soon forced by the Fire Department to move downstairs. They had problems with a growing group of people our size in an upstairs area. Persistent appeals to the city came to no avail and we soon realized that the Lord was leading us in spite of our plans and placing us downstairs near the sidewalk traffic of people walking by our zealous little evangelistic church. Many times, in ensuing months, people would be drawn into our meetings, walk in off the street and get saved in our meetings. We grew to appreciate the leading of God, even when we couldn't reason it out.

We reluctantly moved into an old piano store downstairs and set up our makeshift sanctuary for a few months before being forced to move again. We relocated once more into an old bakery a little further down the sidewalk in the strip mall where we were leasing space. Within a year and a half we needed to enlarge our space again and buy up the leases of three adjacent shops in order to house our increasing flock.

In December of 1994, the Church experienced a fresh touch of the Holy Spirit after we personally visited and returned from attending revival meetings. Although cautious about some of the reports, we nevertheless recognized the hand of God and that the Holy Spirit was being poured out around the world in similar ways. We also researched and carefully examined the movement of the Spirit in several other streams of the Body of Christ, observing that the church worldwide was in a time of awakening and spiritual revival.

During that month, a Saturday evening meeting was launched as the Holy Spirit began to move in mighty ways in the church, transforming people's lives. The renewing touch of the Spirit has continued with unusual demonstrations of God's power and a new release of the anointing during the corporate gatherings of The City Church. Without copying any other ministry or attempting to program anything artificially, we prayerfully attempted to allow the Holy Spirit to move and operate in all our meetings with liberty.

1995 was a year of great growth in faith and the things of the Spirit with several special renewal meetings held in the church, the foremost being the tent meetings during the period from September to November. During the fall of 1995, the church had to move into temporary accommodations in a large tent pitched in the K-Mart parking lot, a miracle in and of itself in a city like Bellevue. During the 68 days we were in the tent, it drew people like a circus. Again we had people walk in and give their lives to Christ. During those weeks, people were converted to Christ in every meeting and over 2000 people visited the church, including people from over 100 different churches and more than 7 nations. The entire city took notice, since the tent acted like a great amplifier and sent the sound of our services (which were never quiet) out into the surrounding neighborhoods. People complained to City Hall until they found an old ordinance and eventually shut us down. The final service we held in the tent was without amplification. We called it "The City Church unplugged"! Within a few days the church moved back into the strip mall shops, into another remodeled auditorium. It was November of 1995.

Not everyone who joined the church during those first few years stayed. Many the Lord sent to us, as one pioneering pastor described them, to be "scaffolding for the building." And later, when the church was fully under way, they dropped off. Some of them went on to help other churches get started. And so it seems that some people are called to be pioneers and others settlers. Some have to keep moving, others are waiting for you to stop moving, because they like a sense of permanence.

There was an increasing grace and anointing on the young people during 1996 as a merger was arranged bringing the high school and college ministries together, a move that later incorporated the junior high young people and became known as Generation Church. The gathering has grown rapidly and many young people are still coming to Christ and being changed by the power of God.

1997 was an historic year as the church made arrangements with Overlake Christian Church to purchase their beautiful facility on 132nd Ave. in Kirkland, six miles to the north. The City Church family moved into the spacious building in November of 1997. The Lord did many wonderful miracles to confirm His will, and gave the elders great faith to step out and sign a purchase option on the building. The years of expensive and ever-increasing rent at the K-Mart shopping plaza prepared us for the next step of faith in purchasing an $8 million piece of property.

The City Church grew to over 300 by the first anniversary in September of 1993, over 500 by the second anniversary and to over 1200 people by the time the church moved in 1997 to our new home on Rose Hill in Kirkland. People have often asked how we pioneered a church like ours and grew to over 1000 people in the first five years. We tell them it actually took 25 years--twenty years of training under Pastor Dick Iverson and then those first five years of reaping. We pay our dues one way or another. There are no shortcuts in God. There is also no substitute for experience, maturity, and Holy Spirit inspired strategy.

In 1998 we planted our first church when we sent out our Executive Pastor and his wife, Jerry and Tami McKinney to launch a new church in the San Diego area of Southern California. This was the first prototype of what we believe will be many church plants as the Holy Spirit directs. By 2005, the Lord added to us until nine other congregations became part of our personal network of churches.

Through our own experience in planting a church and in sending out others to be planted we learned principles, dynamics and lessons that we are now able to share with others. Our prayer is that God's wisdom will be joined with your faith to bring about the birthing of the perfect will of God and the accomplishment of the purposes of God for your life and calling.

Multiple Campuses

In 2003 the Lord began speaking to us about reaching our city in unique ways. After about a year we prayerfully determined that the Lord wanted us to step out and start looking for other sites where we could enlarge our church's influence in the greater metropolitan region of Seattle.

The first place we located possible facilities for purchase was downtown Seattle. Although we looked in other areas on the Eastside and in the University of Washington district on the west side, the Lord closed doors at that time and we were directed to the urban core of Seattle. Although I did not want to go there at first, the Holy Spirit reminded me of the word that had first come to me early in the founding of our church, in 1992, that we were to "cast our net on the other side." The Lord spoke to me clearly again that He knew where the harvest was and that I was to trust Him to open the doors for the Gospel.

We settled on the Belltown area when an old Union Hall came up for sale. In the process of considering a downtown church I called a pastor friend of ours who had been in the city for many years and asked for his counsel.

The Bethel Temple miracle

It seemed that every time we stepped out in faith to do what we believe the Lord was asking us to do, He supernaturally provided for us. We launched out into the deep and let down out nets, and He was faithful to fill our nets with a miraculous catch. I made a call to Pastor Dan Peterson of Bethel Temple (Bethel Christian Ministries) in downtown Seattle. I called him to discuss ministry in the Belltown district of our city and to ask his counsel regarding our potential new Satellite Campus.

In the process of those discussions, Pastor Dan and I talked about the prospect of combining our efforts to more effectively reach the city. We wept together as we sensed the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon our conversations. I made an offer for Pastor Dan to join our staff and he determined to join his church with ours. It seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit. And then the Board of Elders of Bethel unanimously voted to dissolve their corporation and join The City Church. In addition, their Board bequeathed all their assets to our Church, including a $1 million donation toward the purchase of the new Belltown Campus on 1st and Clay. We were humbled and honored as we accepted their decision and this substantial and generous gift that would help us reach our city with the Gospel. Not only would we be doing what the Lord wanted us to do, but also the vision and mission of Bethel Temple would be fulfilled and continued as well. Our Board of Elders met and signed a resolution between our two churches in agreement toward this end of continuing to promote the Kingdom of God in Seattle.

This was not a little thing because of the amazing history of Bethel in Seattle. Bethel Temple had been a landmark church in the city of Seattle since 1914. Founded by Pastor W. H. Offiler, it grew into one of the West Coast's largest Pentecostal churches with nearly 2000 people attending the church as far back as the 1950's. And the church was instrumental in starting hundreds of other churches around the world, including over 33 churches in the Northwest, and countless churches and Bible Schools in Asia and other parts of the world through passionate missionary efforts. It had a dynamic radio broadcast in the city for many years also. And it purchased the old "Crystal Pool" on 2nd and Lenora and was at that location (just seven blocks from our new Campus) until the year 2000.

We determined to honor the heritage of Bethel Temple and its many godly pastors and missionaries. The City Church had been strongly influenced by ministries that were converted or trained or raised up under Bethel's influence--including Pastor Offiler, Pastor W. W. Patterson, Rev. W.V. Grant, Apostle Dick Benjamin, Prophet Ernest Gentile and Dr. Kevin Conner. Our Pastor Dick Iverson from Portland had also been strongly influenced by this great church and its history in the Northwest.

We also believe there will continue to be a strong missionary anointing that The City Church will inherit and continue to propagate. We are doing our best to honor that heritage and maintain that calling to both reach our city and to send workers to the harvest fields of the world as the Lord enables us on into the 21st century.

In 1992, Pastor Gini and I had received a prophetic word that said, "You will inherit what others have labored to produce" (Mel Davis). That word had already came to pass in a measure when we moved into the wonderful facility on Rose Hill in Kirkland (a beautiful facility that the Overlake Christian Church family built over the years of 1974-1997). Now, once again, we were going to inherit a godly heritage and a spiritual grace that generations of believers who lived in Seattle have passed on to us. Thousands of people prayed and preached and prophesied in Seattle before we were ever born. Now we were walking in the fulfillment of those prayers and promises. And a great cloud of witnesses who laid down their lives in Seattle years ago, for the sake of the Gospel, were now watching and cheering us on!

The first Satellite campus then was established, with the assistance of the Bethel Temple family, in the Belltown community in Seattle. Our Belltown Campus has grown and multiplied now filling two services on Sunday with over 600 new people.

The Plateau Campus

Our second Satellite campus came available while we were still getting settled into the Belltown campus. Within that first year, the headlines of our newspapers ran a story of a large Lutheran Campus on the Eastside that was selling its college facility to relocate elsewhere. It was a beautiful 40-acre property with over 200,000 square feet of buildings including chapels, classrooms, a library, a commercial kitchen, dining halls, offices, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, outdoor fields, parking and over 150 dormitory rooms.

Although it was a thrilling possibility, we felt stretched at the prospect of trying to raise financing for this new option while still working to establish the other campus downtown. But through a series of negotiating miracles, and divine favor, we secured a lease-to-purchase contract with the Lutheran organization and started our second extension campus in 2004, meeting in the beautiful stained glass chapel for services.

The Lord directed us to use video broadcasting to multiply our efforts in being "one church" with one pastor. Wherever I spoke from the various campuses, we would broadcast back to the others via video simulcasts. With live worship and pastoral leadership and ministries operating at each site, the message would be preached by video so that I could communicate with the entire congregation no matter what campus I was preaching from.

We have learned since then that many churches across America have been using this new method to reach their communities in similar fashion by broadcasting services to multiple locations.

The University Campus

For several years we advertised our church as "One Church in 3 Locations," but that quickly changed also as the Lord opened another door in 2006 in the University District of our city within two blocks of the University of Washington.

Our son and Generation Pastor, Judah Smith, had started a special gathering on the University of Washington Campus in 2004. They met in Kane Hall on the campus and the Wednesday night 9:00 PM service quickly grew until over 600 students were meeting every week. It was a phenomenon of the Spirit as the Gospel was preached boldly and the presence of the Lord was manifest in dynamic and passionate worship.

The leaders of the Generation Church ministries began a seven-month fast in the fall of 2005 and it concluded in March of 2006. The very week the GC leaders finished their fast, the Lord opened a door to purchase an old church building just two blocks from the gates of the University on a street that is called "Greek Row" with fraternities and sororities lining the street on both sides. University students walk by this building constantly and it is strategically located in the heart of the student activity of the campus.

Through another series of miraculous interventions, we were able to buy the building in April of 2006 and services were scheduled to begin by the summer.

Washington DC, 2006

While expanding our sphere in Seattle to reach more communities, the Lord began to enlarge our vision beyond the borders of our own region. On a flight to visit Washington DC in July of 2005, I had an unusual and divine encounter. We were traveling to the nation's capital to meet with Pastors Ken and Connie Wilde, the founders of the National Prayer Center. We were going to attend a White House event and spend some time with the Wildes in DC.

At about 30,000 feet, flying somewhere over the heartland of America, I was praying and asking the Lord why I was going on this trip during a time of health challenges and a full schedule. Sometimes when we pray we don't actually expect instant answers. But I got one. The Holy Spirit spoke clearly to my heart, "You are going to start a church!" I was shocked and surprised by this. We had never had any particular vision for DC outside of cooperating with Pastor Ken and his efforts through the Prayer Center. I asked the Lord for a Scripture to confirm this and He had me turn to Acts 17 (that day happened to be July 17th). As I read about the Apostle Paul and his journey into Athens, I was amazed at the parallels between the city of ancient Athens and modern Washington DC. There were monuments with inscriptions, people from all nations, and a place called "the Hill" where philosophers gathered to "hear" and consider new things. Paul preached the resurrection there and the Lord touched people's hearts and a church was birthed.

I felt the Lord was confirming this additional step of faith for us as He was challenging us to plant another church in our nation, and this time, in our nation's capital--a strategic city that had the potential to reach nations around the world.

We began praying fervently and seeking the Lord's guidance as to what to do. By the Spring of 2006 the Lord gave us an apostolic strategy for starting the church. We established an Apostolic team made up of myself, Pastor Ken Wilde and Pastor Frank Damazio, from City Bible Church in Portland, Oregon. We also selected a group of covenant pastors to stand with us in bringing this vision to pass. And we also asked a group of world class leaders to lend their names and reputations to the effort on an International Advisory Board.

We also began the process of raising up a core group team that committed themselves to relocation to DC and becoming the foundation for the new church.

We started the church in May, 2006, meeting in a rented church facility within two blocks of Capitol Hill. The vision of the church is to reach government staffers, leaders, young professionals, university students and families in the area. We believe to see a strong group of committed Kingdom ambassadors raised up to influence not only our center of government but also other nations of the world that are represented in DC.