Pastor Alan Kern and Laurie
Hello and welcome to our web and church. We pray you will feel at home with us and meet with Jesus in each service. I am Pastor Alan Kern and my wife's name is Laurie. I'm a "seasoned" pastor with twenty-plus years of cross-generational and cross-cultural experience. By "seasoned" I'm thinking of seasoned meat or wine that gets better with time and not just older! I'm people-orientated and principle-driven. My heart breaks for lost souls as the result of being a broken man before God. I try to live my life and walk with God in a transparent way and by being a living example. I consider myself a student of the Word as I'm ever studying, reading, and live in place of desperate dependence on God's leading. Although I am Pentecostal preacher, I do not believe in "extra-Biblical" manifestations, but do very much contend for all the Biblical gifts of the Holy Spirit. So you can expect God's Spirit to move freely but "decently and in order" in our services. And that's all I will say there, as Proverbs says, "Let another man praise you."
I have pioneered from scratch and been the Senior Pastor of a church in Arizona, two in Canada, and two South Africa, and am now happily pasturing this church that had been without a pastor for twenty months. As this is our first time to take over a church, not start one, I'm on a sharp learning curve. It has been an exciting adventure to see God moving and how He has been leading us so far. We have seen the church double, with some powerful conversions, and we have also seen some couples restored and return to the church. Laurie and I are involved in the Crisis Hot line here in Sun Valley, and we are also currently laying the groundwork to begin a Celebrate Recovery program out of this church and working with area churches. The needs in this Wood River community are staggering--suicides are the third highest in the nation.
I have pastured and built all of my churches on the preaching and teaching of the Word, evangelism, and on the power of the Holy Spirit, especially in the area of healing and deliverance. I have found that the Gospel, delivered with love, compassion, and humor works in every culture. I try to present the Word in a form and spirit that is culturally relevant, winsome, and always, uncompromising.
A key to the revivals I have been a part of has been to release on-fire youth to use any unconventional means in outreach to their generation. For example, to let the teens and twenty-somethings run a concert night with their Christian music, drama, and videos, in their own flavor, language, and style. In South Africa, for instance, it was Christian rap/kwato music and gum-boot dancing. In Canada, it was Monty Python-type humor, coffee houses, street dramas, and parade participation. As I was saved in the revival of the "Jesus people movement," I am forever grateful that the church opened their arms to us "hippies" and reached us with our own music and a radical Gospel message.
We have been blessed to have had the opportunity to plant ourselves for the cause of Christ all over the world, and to have been used to reach the next generation in relevant ways. I would hope to inspire and help you use all of your giftings to facilitate that here in Hailey as well. Long term, I look forward to one day taking missionary groups to South Africa and Zimbabwe, having Saturday Night Alive Christian concerts, park concert outreaches, strong small-group Bible studies, Celebrate Recovery ministry, and restoring all of the Assembly of God ministries that are relevant to this community.
My vision is simple: To restore the broken and lost, build up the church and lives of all the people God sends into the church, and ultimately, to send and release trained couples into the harvest field out of this church.
And that was, and still is, the mission statement of Wood River Assembly of God: Restore, Build, Send.
May God richly bless your life as you pursue His will,
Pastor Alan Kern
for more info go to http://www.greatisyourfaithfulness.com