Getting Serious

A message from our executive director, Dr. Terry Goodwin.

We started Sun Ministries in 2006 with no experience at running a ministry or non-profit. We have been in training for many years now. As we begin 2020, I feel like we are just getting started with the growth of the mission. God has shown us how to enter the most devastated areas of our country. He has given us teaching and resources to launch a movement of disciple multiplication in America. The movement will take place outside the institutional church.

We are now focused on recruiting, training and relocating Missionaries to America. We currently have locations in St. Louis, Missouri and Barnsdall, Oklahoma. We have pathways to help you engage in an active and authentic Christian faith. We can connect you to the mission field right here in America. We can train you and support you, no matter if you want to be a part-time volunteer doing your part in the bigger picture or a full-time laborer in the field.

God has brought the nations to us. We don’t need to travel overseas to reach the nations. This great melting pot called America has lured them to our shores. Maybe it is time for you to send that email and explore the harvest fields of God. The harvest is ripe and plentiful. It is the laborers that are few. terry@sunministries.org

Returning to Action

A message from our executive director, Dr. Terry Goodwin.

It has been a long time. Life goes on and the ticking clock pushes us closer to the end of this life. Tick – tock – tick – tock clicks the passing of the chronos  - the finite time we have on this earth. A few years ago I came face to face with my mortality. I had 16 surgical procedures in 2 ½ years. I thought I may never work again. The end of my calendar was staring me in the face. In that dark and desperate time I found a second chance at life. The Kairos of God swept in and I was lifted up again to continue the work He had called me to do all those years ago.

I am no different than you really. We all will leave this earth. We will all succumb to the Chronos ticking clock. No one gets out alive. Throughout the New Testament there is an urgency proclaimed: Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand. They lived and acted as if the return of Christ could happen at any time. The measure of our service will not be placed upon scales balanced by wealth, possessions or church attendance. The other side of the scales of God’s justice are balanced by obedience, sacrifice, and the deeds we do in service to God on behalf of others.

Now I am focused on the Kingdom of God. I am looking at my mortality as an unknown deadline to complete the work I have been assigned to do. I cannot afford to waste another moment of self-indulgence or indifference to the hurting. We all end up in the cemetery. The Chronos seeks to put us there. The Spirit of God seeks to give us life in this age through the selfless service to others on behalf of Jesus. That is where I found life. I will not exchange it for the fleeting temporary pleasures of this world.

Planting Faith Communities

As we've stated in the last few blog entries, Sun Ministries is focusing on what we've always wanted to do: make disciples and plant faith communities.  The Church@HydePark is the first faith community planted by Sun Ministries. We say planted because like a seed we will nurture it and help it grow. Modern Christianity in America is largely an institutional endeavor. The New Testament contains no instructions for establishing an institution over the church. It does contain ample instruction on how the church should be organized, led and operate. We are looking to help people discover the organic and mission oriented nature of the Christian faith as instructed in the Bible.

Sun Ministries supports the leadership and provides resources to stabilize and establish the local church. Then Sun Ministries releases the faith community to pastor the community by sharing the Gospel of Jesus and meeting the needs of those around them. Sun Ministries plays an ongoing leadership role by promoting unity through service among the local faith communities.

For many years we have referred to those supported by Sun Ministries as “Missionaries”. We did this because without a local faith community it was hard to put what we were doing into generally understood terms. We are no longer using this designation. The staff of Sun Ministries is simply spiritually gifted leaders who have dedicated their whole lives to the vision and mission of Sun Ministries. Our goal is to plant faith communities that operate on the basis of spiritual gifts under biblical leadership and function by God's design. In order to facilitate that we must start with spiritually gifted leaders who will equip people for the works of ministry. These leaders are the staff of Sun Ministries.

What is the Resistance?

The work of Sun Ministries is established in the vision of the Isaiah 61 Initiative, which we've covered in length on this blog. It is a work of rebuilding ancient ruins and setting captives free. It comes from the very heart of God. It is a calling that costs you everything, just like any other call of God.

“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be my disciple.”

“Go forth from your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, to the land which I will show you.”

“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross , and follow Me.”

“None of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.”

“Follow me.”

God called us from our “father's house” a few years before He brought us to the land which He would show us. Truthfully, our individual callings came years ago, through various and conflicting means, and followed curious paths, most likely due to our denial of the call. However, God specifically started stirring in us, before some of us knew each other, a desire to be the church we found in the Bible. We were discontent. We knew God was real, and we knew there were real problems in the American church. We saw a disconnect from the organic, sacrificial, interconnected lifestyle we saw in Scripture.  We knew there was a bigness to the Good News that had been laid aside.  We saw the pain in the world and knew the Church should be bringing the answer.  But this wasn't a call of bitterness and rebellion. This was a call to intimacy with the Father. It was a call of surrender.  He started showing us the cost of love, and how that makes it valuable. He started showing us the beauty of the Body that functions according to each member's gift. He started showing us the power of discipleship – of obeying Christ's command to make disciples and teach them everything He taught us.

We have come to find out that we are not alone in these longings or this discontent. There is a trend, or movement, present in American culture. It has been studied by survey groups and sociologists. Barna.org and Pew Research Center have conducted numerous studies documenting the declining attendance in the modern American church. A sociologist named Josh Packard has dubbed this population “the Dones” and is studying the phenomenon in what he calls the church refugee project. These individuals are “done” with church as usual, but are far from done with God. They love the Church, which the Bible says is His people, and long to see the Bride living free.  Because of this frustration, they often end up leaving the traditional, institutional church.  Some find serving and gathering opportunities, while some do not.

Historically, addressing issues in the church has been labelled as “reformation”. We've chosen another way of looking at it. We call it, “The Resistance.”

We have learned a lot since we first set out from our “father's house” and into the unknown territory of discipleship, sacrifice, and sharing resources. We've unlearned just as many things as we made our way to the “land which He would show us”, a land that happened to be located on the north side of St. Louis. A land that has a well-documented history of neglect, oppression, and racism.  A land which, surprisingly, our families had a connection to.

As we discussed and dissected and developed all these things God had shown us, we stumbled into the opportunity for a talk radio show. Through even more discussion and dissecting, “The Resistance Radio Show” was born. It was recorded and broadcast live on 1010 AM right here in St. Louis. We decided to put our hearts on our sleeves and use humor, satire, drama, music, Scripture, history, testimony, and lots of discussion to explore God's design and how man has diverged from it, and how we can start to make our way back. We shared a lot of our experience ministering in the inner city and the challenges it involved.

We have since made those recordings available as a podcast. You can find archived shows here: https://theresistanceradioshow.wordpress.com/ You can also subscribe and receive the most recent episodes on iTunes or stitcher. Because we're not the most technologically savvy, our oldest episodes don't appear on our iTunes feed, but they can all be found at our wordpress site.

To get you started, here's our eighth episode, where we discuss our work at Sun Ministries.

Pallets and Pews

We enjoy taking custom orders in the Opportunity Center woodshop. It gives us a chance to try new things and expand our skill sets, which means we can make better and varied products, and we have more skills to teach. All of our missionaries who work in the woodshop were amateurs, so we've been learning as we go. We try to fund most of our operation with the products we can make with our hands, so improving the quality and variety of our products allows us to become more sustainable.

Our biggest indoor custom order came from Alderman French of the 21st ward, which is our neighboring ward to the north. The ward has purchased an old church building, and is in the process of turning it into a community center, that will also include offices and meeting spaces. Since it was a church, it was full of old oak pews. Alderman French asked us if we could turn the old pews into a conference table. Of course, we said yes.

The project took an exceptionally long time, as the Opportunity Center was very busy from Spring through Summer, and we made the table for free. When we finally got down to it, we discovered that the backs of the pews, which were nice and wide, were bent plywood, so they would not make good table tops. The seats, although upholstered, were solid oak. So we disassembled the pews, cut the seats to a width that would fit into our planer, and planed them down so they would be nice and flat. We ended up gluing five seats together, to make a 5 ft. by 8 ft. table top.

We originally thought we could use the carved oak ends of the pews for feet, but found it to be a huge problem logistically. So we ended up building a supporting frame out of the recycled pallet wood.

Attaching table tops to their frames is a delicate business, as wood swells and shrinks with changes in humidity. Furniture makers have discovered a variety of ways to compensate. We, however, were unaware of all that. So we got decorative bolts and bolted the table top onto the frame. It gave the table a slight industrial feel, which we felt worked, as it was all recycled material.


We stained the whole table a nice dark brown, and sealed it with polyurethane. The table top was exceptionally beautiful, as it was furniture grade oak. A lot of the wood from the pallets looks great, but to get free furniture grade lumber (although it cost some processing time) is a sustainable way to make more traditional looking furniture.

The Alderman loved his table, and we enjoyed the opportunity to make something unique and learn a bit as we did. This coming winter, we are going to try to develop more indoor products. If you have ideas of wood products that you think would be desirable made from recycled wood, and some price ranges, you can contact our executive director, Dr. Terry Goodwin, at terry@sunministries.org, or leave a note on our Facebook page.