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| The Rev. Michael Sawicki has endured many changes at Faithway Church. |
Michael Sawicki is the lead pastor of a of a congregation that meets at a resort, but that title might be a bit misleading to people unfamiliar with his story.
He leads worship at the Midland Resort and Convention Center, the home of Sunday services for the new church start Faithway Church, but the current location is just the latest remedy for yet another roadblock Sawicki has encountered.
In Saginaw, Sawicki started in a storefront that he called “relatively ineffective for ministry” before securing a building that was all but a done deal — until word arrived that “the township’s opinion was we could use it for anything except Sunday morning worship.”
Then he found a prime location at Delta College, but the Thursday before the first service was to be held the school’s board of directors told Sawicki the church couldn’t use it.
One transition led to another — with Sawicki losing several families along the way — and eventually a location nearly half an hour away with different demographics and new challenges was his landing spot.
Saginaw Bay District Superintendent Jeff Maxwell says the giving and ministry participation has exceeded the benchmarks for a church that has regular worship attendance of 55-60 people with roughly 85 people involved, but the worship attendance is far from the critical mass of 225-250 the Detroit Conference was hoping to see in the “post-launch” phase of ministry.
Sawicki likens the journey to a “rollercoaster.” He said it’s often difficult to balance the excitement of seeing new people serving the Lord and joining in Christian community with the reality that the church is “woefully inadequate to where I wanted to be at this point.”
“We’ve got a few small groups going and you’ve got people there who know nothing about the Bible, literally, and these are adults who are coming to their very first Bible study and exploring faith for the first time. They have so much enthusiasm, passion and excitement that they bring,” he said. “Yet on the other side of that there is the side of discouragement and just not being where I want to be. Psychologically it has much more to do with expectations over reality than it does reality.”
His ministry is 100 percent portable. Sawicki hauls a trailer to the resort each Sunday, setting up for worship starting at 8:45 a.m. and tearing equipment down roughly four hours later.
The Rev. Brad Kalajainen, lead pastor at Cornerstone Church in Caledonia, has been Sawicki’s coach through the ups and downs.
He said Sawicki is wonderful at networking — evident by his months spent engaging people at a kiosk at Fashion Square Mall in Saginaw — but there are a lot of variables that determine the success of a newly planted church.
“A lot of times we’ve tried to put planters in places where nobody checked to see if there was any rental space — we’ve had that happen 100 times,” he said. “Somebody really needs to go in ahead of time and say, ‘Ok this, this, this and this are available, so there’s like five rental spaces that are good options. That type of stuff has the chance to make or break a start.”
Kalajainen said it’s also essential to remember the emotional turbulence new church start pastors go through.
“I think fear is one thing that a lot of existing pastors don’t relate to because they walk into established things almost whether they do nothing or not,” he said.
One bright spot for Faithway Church is its youth program, which Sawicki said has about a dozen committed members who can now take full advantage of a racquetball court, basketball court and swimming pool at the resort.
Maxwell, who has attended several services at the church and preached there once, said the youth involvement is wonderful to see because many churches struggle to integrate the younger generation.
“There’s a lot of signs of life and there’s a high percentage of worshippers involved in ministry and that too is a good sign of vitality and life,” he said.
Sawicki is also excited about the recent baptism of a family of four. The father had a Catholic background, while the mother grew up un-churched.
Sawicki met the family at the Midland Mall when he was passing out candy and the transformation he’s seen in a short time has been exceptional.
“(The mother) shares with her friends at work what God is doing in her life and she can’t believe her life could be this different,” he said.
Sawicki said he is counting on his regular members to continue connecting with the community and inviting new people to worship, but he knows the church is nowhere near where it needs to be.
Kalajainen said is always quick to remind Sawicki that this adventure has a purpose no matter the end result.
“Whenever he’s at a low I just remind him his self worth isn’t all about if the project succeeds or not. Sometimes people do their best and give something all they have and it doesn’t succeed — and that happens a lot,” he said. “Either way he’s going to (one day) end up at another church and either way he’ll end up being a really good pastor because he will have learned a lot of things that many pastors don’t ever get to experience.”
Sawicki said every obstacle has been an opportunity to recommit himself to trusting in the Lord.
“I’m seeing God’s hand of provision over and over and over,” he said.
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