Stand with Pastor Glenn and JESUS’ Dwelling Place Church

As I started to write a little bit about my story, I had to stop and laugh for a moment because just me drafting this at 3am in the morning after working my third of my 3 jobs tells the story. So thank you in advance for reading about our church, our community, and my story.

I’ve been the pastor of JESUS’ Dwelling Place Church for 15 years now. On May 5th, a young man came into our church and tried to harm me with a gun during my service. After this experience, just about everything changed about mine and my family's life overnight. I went from already being a busy man with 3 jobs to suddenly having even more on my plate - interviews, investigations, conferences, community repair, increased security measures - but nothing was removed from my plate.

I've been blessed to have a decent job so I am grateful that I've been able to personally give my resources to the church, but after all the strain on my family, my schedule, and my life, I've come to a point where I'm asking for additional financial support to prioritize some very important improvements needed for the church building.

We are a small church in a low income community. We have about 70 people in our fellowship, around 15 children, 10 teenagers and 45 adults. Most of the adults are older and on fix incomes and we only get about 30 to 40 per service. At the church I wear many hats, from cutting grass, to plumbing, to preaching, to bookkeeping to engineering, even our live-streaming is done from my phone.

Since May 5th 2024, when that young man came into our church, from that day I had to put on a couple more hats. Prior to that day we did make my brother Pastor Gary Germany the Senior Pastor in order to take some things off my plate. But because of that incident my life has now taken on many new challenges in which I now seek support.

Once the incident occurred, my first concern was for my family and my church family and how the trauma would affect them, so I took off work from my other two jobs (bus driver and Uber driver), in order to care for the needs of the people. Between caring for my family and others and being over come by the media, I didn’t even have a chance to care for myself and two weeks later I found myself laying on a hospital bed trying to bring down my blood pressure from having migraine headaches.

I did 42 interviews and podcasts in 24 days. Once the interviews slowed down, I started having meetings with 4 different government branches seeking to get funding to help our Church.

Because these meetings was pulling me more away from working my primary job, not only have I been falling behind financially, but the church also started falling behind also because I play a major part in financially supporting the church. And now a part from doing all the teaching and everything else I do, we have this big event coming to our church which I am leading, in order to help all churches get funding or explain to them how to get funding to help secure their churches but yet, once again this big event does nothing for my personal finances.

I have FEMA, the Department of Homeland, the department of justice, the FBI and over 100 pastors from different churches and also the Lt. Governor, State Reps three different Mayors and other government officials and agencies coming to my church on August 29th, plus I have one month to prepare our church’s paperwork for the State grant that just open for security. Along with rolling out our new mental health services.

The greatest need we have right now is raising funds for the state match grant that closes mid August. The State offers grant money to help secure places of worship, but in order to receive the funding we need to be able to come up with 33% - to do half of the work we need done, this means we need to come up with $25k. At this stage, we just don’t have the resources available. The money will be used towards improving security measures, making our church more accessible to our community, and supporting church programs to alleviate some of the pressure of these expenses coming out of my pocket.

So until I get more help I am taking off work just to work and get somethings done, please don’t get me wrong, anyone who knows me knows I love multitasking, I have to stay busy, I love to do 10 things at once, but until this event is over and until I get the things our church need and the things my people need, I will continue to work endlessly nonstop.

I do have a background in early childhood education and I am working towards opening a child care center at our church and then I can be the director and be there and receive an income from it as well as hire others at the church and in the community, but until I secure the resources, I will continue wearing 50 hats.

I feel like I am working for the world but the world haven’t noticed it, but GOD sees HE notices it and although I’m tired, I feel I’ve been given a burden to carry and I won’t stop carrying that burden until every church in every place of worship is safe.

Thank you again.