One Through One - Saturday Night!

This event is this Saturday on Mizzou's campus! Come join me hear about racial reconciliation!

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Photo Update 02.08.15

Drinking some Turkish coffee at Olive Cafe while reading Systematic Theology. Interesting to be reading about Christ's ascension while in the midst of people who reject it.

Ali took me to the Roasterie for breakfast on Saturday morning. Tour of the facility, taste-tasted some sole source seeds, and bought some Sporting KC coffee. 

Taste-testing this was an awesome experience. Buy this... Only 22 dollars for such a rare coffee.

Brazilian shop at City Market.

(Randomly placed picture) Kevin, Lead Pastor of Karis Church, preached at the Mizzou BSU. 

Bought some coffee from this Brazilian shop.

Negro League Baseball Museum was awesome. Such a historic look at a messy yet amazing time in baseball history.

Ali, my beautiful wife.

Triston is such a good kid. Funny, full of energy, and full of questions. 

I Am Thankful For...

During this holiday season most people are seeing family, eating way too much food, and catching up some sleep. I doubt that many people will even read this due to the busyness of the season, but I thought I would reflect on ten things that I have been thankful for in 2014. Obviously, this is the most cliche thing to do, but cliche is sometimes good for the heart.

10. Legacy Conference

Ali and I attended a conference in late July that focused on Christians living and ministering to diverse people groups in diverse neighborhoods. I was mostly encouraged to see God’s people come together and worship Him.

9. Free Prayer

My friend, Scott, and I have been walking around the neighborhood on Friday afternoons and praying with our neighbors. Asking to pray for people reveals what they value and what God wants to speak into. There have been many amazing stories of God working in the hearts of others, but God has been working on my heart just as much as anyone else.

8. Saturday Morning Prayer

A group of people gather each morning to pray for the needs of the people present, their spheres of influence, Karis Church, churches in Columbia, and the city of Columbia. Ali and I have been meeting on Saturday morning and God has been revealing our need to depend on His strength in all areas of our lives.

7. Douglass Park

The Douglass Park neighborhood has been a warm and welcoming place for my wife and I. I have met so many people that it would take months to write down the names and stories we have heard. Not only have we gotten to know the history of the neighborhood itself, but we have gotten to know the people of the neighborhood as well - which we value very highly. Such a grace from God to know and love so many people.

6. Douglass Park Missional Community

Going along with the last one, I am very thankful for the community of people that have committed to be on mission in the Douglass Park neighborhood. We call ourselves Douglass Park Missional Community (#DPMC), but we believe that God has called us together to live out the gospel of Jesus Christ as a community of believers who love each other and go out on mission in all areas of our lives.

5. New Friendships

This year God has led so many men and women into my life. He has called people like… Scott, Angela, Vincent, Jessica, Chris, Triston, Christina, John, Angie, Ron, Mark, Mike, Brian, and Nate. This is not an exhaustive list, but it gives a picture of all the people God has placed in my life. Thank you to each of you for being great friends this year!

4. Internship

The Karis Church internship has been very challenging this year, but I have grown to see a clearer picture of the gospel. Growing in this has not always come in some miraculously beautiful way - most of it was difficult and challenging. I am thankful that they have not given up on me and that they are being to faithful to discipling me.

3. IMSD

The Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity is the grant program that I work at in the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of Missouri. My boss, Brian, has been amazingly gracious and encouraging during my first couple of months. I have made genuine friends there and I am thankful that God has blessed me with a job that is flexible and expects a lot out of me.

2. My Wife

Ali is my best friend, my wife, and my sister in Christ. She is making me a better man of God, and she pushes me to seek after Jesus more and more each day of my life. God has been good to me by giving me a woman of God who is also pursuing a deeper relationship with our Lord and Savior. I am going to grow in my thankfulness for her over the course of our marriage, which I am looking forward to each and every day.

1. God

God has given me the best thing in the entire universe: Himself. I have been made alive in Jesus Christ due to His works, not mine. Over the course of my walk as a Christian I have found that I am much more sinful than I originally thought, but He is much more loving, gracious, and forgiving than I could ever imagine. I am thankful for the life that He has given me, but I am most thankful for Him.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Baptism Sunday at Karis Church

FEATURED ARTICLE - With new building, Karis Church deepens roots in Columbia

By: VICTORIA TRAMPLER

COLUMBIA — In 2005, the members of Karis Church fit around the kitchen table of lead pastor Kevin Larson. The cars were all parked neatly in his driveway.

"I told Kevin, 'You know, there's going to be a day when I'm going to have to put on a little traffic orange vest and I'm going to have to go onto your street and help navigate parking. This is such a beautiful thing we have here that it's going to grow," Executive Pastor Rob Gaskin said.

Now, the parking lot behind Karis: Westside, formerly Bethany Baptist Church, fills up on Sunday mornings. More cars park up and down Spencer Avenue in northwest Columbia.

"I just remember joking with him about parking, and here we are at Westside. It was the parking that was just a little bit sentimental for me," said Gaskin, who was a graduate student at MU when Karis got started.

Inside the church, the floors are still unfinished and some walls have yet to be painted. The basement renovations haven't started. But this doesn't stop the congregation of Karis from gathering there every Sunday morning at 10.

After nine years, the church has gone from an idea to a congregation of 220. The recent addition of a building is a brick-and-mortar testament to the church's deepening roots in Columbia and will provide a launching point for continued growth.

"There are three elements that sort of make up our DNA: gospel, community and mission," Gaskin said.

The church is independent, but has received guidance and is affiliated with Acts 29, a network dedicated to helping "plant" gospel-based churches, which will in turn plant more churches.

Karis received its new building at 1703 W. Worley St. as a gift from the Bethany Baptist congregation, which decided to disband a few months ago. This is the first time Karis has had a permanent home, though it also rents out The Bridge on Walnut Street for Karis: Downtown, the Sunday evening worship at six.

"With a space comes the potential to get in a rut where you think the building is the church and not the people," Larson said. "But at the same time, as we looked at it, we were a people that gathers together regularly for worship, and these people were gracious enough to pass it on to us."

A new opportunity

Although the building was a gift, Karis also raised $50,000 for renovations. The renovations included updating the flooring, installing carpeting, installing a new stage for the worship band and painting the church.

Volunteers, including congregants, friends and people from other churches across Missouri who wanted to help, have done almost all the renovations.

The goals of the changes were to make Westside both welcoming and well-functioning, Gaskin said. He estimated the volunteers put in more than 3,000 hours working on the building, which would have cost the church about $250,000 to do through a company.

"My first thought was, 'Wow, this place has potential, but it’s going to take a lot of work. It doesn’t look like us,'" Gaskin said. "We’ve always been a mobile church. We’d meet in nontraditional places, whether it's another church building, The Tiger Hotel, Missouri Theatre, the basement of our pastor's house."

The Westside building includes much more room for Karis Kids, the children's ministry, as well as for storage. In addition to working better for the congregation, Karis also hopes Westside will help serve the neighborhood around it.

"Because we own this building, there are things down the road that we can do during the rest of the week. We would obviously love to be a place where we can open up to the community," Larson said. "It is right next to public housing in a neighborhood that we’ve been at for a while, so I think it provides some opportunities throughout the week to do some really cool things."

Karis has a partnership with Love INC, an organization that works to help churches provide needed services to the community. It also provides classes to help develop career skills, which Westside may offer in the future, Larson said.

"I just want Westside to be an active, flourishing gathering for the people, living among and caring for the people in that area of town," Larson said.

A dedication to serve

For the people of Karis Church, their motto of "In the city, for the city" means more than just the building's location.

Jacob Gonzales and his wife, Ali Gonzales, moved to their Worley Street home specifically to serve their neighbors. 

"It’s not something we have to do — it’s something we get to do," he said.

The couple recently started the Douglass Park Missional Community, which meets Wednesdays at their home. It is one of 14 missional communities Karis has. They are meant to be small gatherings of the congregation throughout Columbia and Jefferson City to serve different neighborhoods.

The second meeting of the group drew six people, including two other Karis members and two neighborhood children. Laughter rang out as Ali Gonzales served pasta and steamed vegetables. After dinner, Jacob Gonzales gave a lesson to the group about how to best serve the area.

"The only way we know what needs to be done is if you know the people," he said. Trying to meet needs without knowing them lacks humility, he said. At the end of the lesson, Ali Gonzales let the children pick out school supplies that had been purchased for the neighborhood residents.

Jacob Gonzales cautioned against what he called "drive-by evangelism," where Christians serve a community for a bit and then leave. He believes Christians are called to invest their whole lives into serving others.

"I think that investment is rare — because it's hard," he said.

Before the missional communities were created, congregants met in small groups. But in some cases, the groups drifted away from their purpose: investing in people outside the church. This led to the change in name to missional communities three years ago and reaffirmation of their key reason to exist.

"We just felt like the further we went, those groups were about just coming together with your friends," Larson said. "That group is not meant to be an end unto itself. It’s meant to point out to the city, to the world."

Earlier this year, Karis started an additional gathering in Jefferson City and, more recently, sent a member to plant a church in Fayetteville, Ark. The hope is to plant another church in North Carolina soon.

At the older Southside Missional Community, the gathering looks quite different than the Douglass Park one. Aimed at serving the people of southern Columbia, especially families, the members of this community are all parents. On a recent Saturday, 10 children ran around the house until their parents called them to the living room for the sermon.

Scott Schilb, the leader of both Southside and Karis Kids, calmly spoke to the group as his three daughters crawled over him. The children tried to remain attentive, taking turns to pray for the church's health and growth.

"This group is hard," Schilb acknowledged. "It is really challenging to have all the toddlers and all the activity distracting us."

Nevertheless, he thinks it's important to have this family-centered gathering because faith should be a family affair.

"I think that church has become so program-oriented that we've forgotten how to worship as a family unit," he said.

At Southside, members have helped each other financially, he said.  At one point, the larger church even helped a family with the costs of adopting a child.

"One of the things that's so evident is that the people truly love each other: genuine, sacrificial love," Schilb said. "I feel like it's rare and it's hard."

A look into the future

The new building means more stability for Karis. Since the church's founding, the congregation has moved six times. In key ways, though, that created internal stability for members.

"If I had to leave my family every time I had to move out of a house, it would destroy me," Gaskin said. "But moving is not that big of a deal because we’re doing it together. And when I go in new house it’s still me, it’s still my wife, it’s still our family."

Gaskin said the metaphor fits the church because "the house doesn’t make the family, the family makes the house. The church is not a building."

In the future, the members of Karis hope to continue reaching out into Columbia by creating more missional communities.

"We’re a people that is fully convinced of our brokenness and our need for grace," Larson said. "We’re called Karis — we mean grace — and we’re a people that are constantly aware of our sin and our need for a savior. We want to extend that grace to other people in our community."

To see the article online -- Karis and Douglass Park MC Article

Photo Update 07.17.14

Naomi's odd face before our last service at Calvary Baptist... Keep looking at the photos to see the new building!

Trying to grab the phone from me...

Bobby Schembre, the Worship Leader at Karis Church, doing some final touches on the painting near the front door to Karis Westside.

Jessica Hoyos, intern at Karis Church, watching the team do some final touches on the front door area. 

This is the (almost) completed front door entrance to Karis Westside!

Yes, those are spots. I dressed up as a cow to get free Chick-fil-a with Ali. Totally worth it!

... FREE FOOD!

Chris, one of the kids from our neighborhood, helping out at Karis Westside. 

Karis Church's new logo!

Breakfast and Jeebus

This afternoon I saw this beautiful plate. Oh, Jeebus. 

Elders Kevin Larson and Rob Gaskin treated the interns to breakfast at Cracker Barrel. They are very generous and loving to spend as much time with us as they do, and I am very grateful for all that they do for Karis and the city of Columbia.

... This just looks good...

Lass Wedding Ceremony Photos

Karis Jeff City

Karis Jeff City from Karis Church on Vimeo.

Karis is the Greek word for grace. That’s what our church is all about – the grace that flows abundantly from the cross of Jesus. We’re excited to take that message to our capital just to the south, in Jefferson City, Missouri. Since the beginning of Karis Church, we’ve talked about planting there. That time has come. We can’t wait.

God has provided the right couple for us. This past Sunday we commissioned Josh and Harmony Zeichik. They have a new home in Jeff City. They’re moving there soon. They plan to kick off a new JC Missional Community in January. A tentative plan for our first worship Gathering there is for the fall. Josh is a gifted, godly man. He will make a great pastor. We are grateful to God for him and Harmony. Check out the video below. If you’re interested in being a part of Karis: Jeff City or know someone who might be, contact Josh Zeichik. Pray for him. Pray for Harmony. Pray that God’s grace would spread to the people in our capital. 

- See more at: http://kevinplarson.com/2013/12/12/karis-for-jefferson-city/#sthash.Awy3XHD0.dpuf

Three Days, Three Pictures

Saturday night Ali and I went out to drive around Columbia and we ended up walking around the Mizzou columns. It was a nice walk right before Missouri begins to snow! 

Karis ended the book of Exodus on Sunday. It was a great sermon by Pastor Ryan. Preaching through the OT is always harder, but we learned quite a bit.

Last night, as I was waiting for Ali to get home, I walked in our backyard while listening to some new music. Our backyard looks a lot less epic without all of the tall trees and their leaves.

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Men's Breakfast: Becoming Men on Mission (Photos)

Karis Membership Class - November 17th

This Sunday is the next Karis Membership Class! This time around we will be focusing on Gospel.

Karis is passionate about church membership. We believe God had called us to live in biblical community. The best way you can experience that is by living as a committed member of a church family.

The membership process starts with attendance at Karis Intro. After attending that, you’ll continue the process of becoming a member by signing up for and attending the three-part Karis Membership Class (Gospel, Community, and Mission). Classes are held once a month, and the second class is this Sunday, October 27, from 5–7 p.m. in the the Calvary Fellowship Hall. (The three classes can be taken in any order.)

If you are at all interested, let me know!

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Men's Breakfast - SIGN UP NOW!

God is missional and he has commanded us to go to the ends of the earth to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. As men, we need to be on mission in community to boldly proclaim the good news of salvation. Love God. Love others. Proclaim bodly.

SIGN UP HERE: https://karisonthecity.wufoo.com/forms/karis-mens-breakfast-111613/

Men's Breakfast - Becoming Men on Mission

God is missional and he has commanded us to go to the ends of the earth to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. As men, we need to be on mission in community to boldly proclaim the good news of salvation. Love God. Love others. Proclaim bodly.

Men, if you want to join Karis Church at the Men's Breakfast let me know and I can get you signed up!

Jacob Luis Gonzales

Lead School - Session #3

Yesterday morning Ali and I attended the third session of Karis Church's Lead School. Rob Gaskin, the Executive Elder at Karis Church, taught about productivity that is godly and righteous.

As the leader of my family, I definitely needed to hear this. Ali and I are always working on being productive and efficient with our time, and Rob definitely helped us see that the Bible gives amazing insight into productivity and getting things done with righteous motivations.

If you are interested in the material, I can definitely post more about it! Let me know!

God is good and gracious.

Jacob Luis Gonzales