Hurdles to clear, a passion to share at Faithway Church

The Rev. Michael Sawicki has endured many changes at Faithway Church.

By RJ Walters, Editor

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.

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More than a kiosk, no less than a church: 21st century ideas take root in Tri-City area

 
By RJ Walters, Editor

Sixty-dollar jeans bagged? Check.
Over-priced food court meal finished? Of course.
Finger muscles sore from texting? The norm.
Stopped by that kiosk where God is alive and working like it’s a 21st century Zion?

I-75 is Michael Sawicki’s road to Jerusalem and Fashion Square Mall in Saginaw is his pulpit, where he is proving taking risks to save souls isn’t so radical, and giving away peanut M&M’s is never a bad choice.

The head pastor of FaithWay Church — a new faith community of the UMC in the Great Lakes Bay region — is living out his call to discipleship in what might be considered a less-than traditional fashion, but one he calls essential.

Instead of spending money on ad space in local newspapers and trying to run around from one social hotspot to the next, Sawicki decided that being a couple hundred feet from Macy’s was the perfect spot to begin his new ministry.

Sawicki uprooted his family (wife Patty Sawicki and their two children) from the comforts of Piegeon, Mich. where he was the pastor at a thriving church, but he believes the road less traveled is the trail once blazed by Jesus.

The transition has not been easy and a process that began more than two years ago was almost derailed more than once.

Nonetheless, the fruits of the Sawicki family’s labor and willingness to respond to God’s call has already prompted four preview services in a strip mall storefront, and 35 people attended the March 28 service, six months before the church is set for its’ “grand opening” on Oct. 10.

Called out
Michael Sawicki heard his calling loud and clear a few years ago —in his car on the way to a church conference.

“My wife and another passenger were in the car, and I’m on I-75 and I hear the Lord tell me there was a church that should be planted there,” he said. “And I said, ‘OK, God,’ and just chuckled. I knew one needed to be planted, I just thought maybe I’d leave it to somebody else.”

Roughly a month later he opened a letter from Eugene Blair — the current Flint District Superintendent, who was the Director of Congregational Development at the time — and in the envelope was an invitation to be the driving force behind a new church.

Upon reading that letter on Easter morning 2008 Sawicki knew his experience behind the wheel was not just a nudge, it was a full-out push.

It wasn’t an elementary kind of change though.

Patty Sawicki said she did not feel called to the new ministry and plenty of Michael’s friends shared their reservations about relocation.

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