Category: Announcements

Greg Williams, director of GCI-USA Church Administration and Development (CAD), recently announced several changes to the CAD team:

1. Lorenzo Arroyo has retired after working for GCI for over 14 years (click here for details).
2. Jeff McSwain has left GCI employment. He plans to devote time to writing a couple of books on theology and to continuing his work with the Reality Center in North Carolina.
3. Anthony Mullins has replaced Jeff as national coordinator of the GCI-USA Intern Program.
4. Jeff Broadnax will replace Anthony as the national coordinator of GCI-USA Generations Ministries (GenMin) in January. In the meantime, Jeff and Anthony will co-lead. Jeff will continue serving as lead pastor of GCI’s congregation in Columbus, OH.

Our thanks to Lorenzo Arroyo and Jeff McSwain for their years serving GCI. We wish them both many blessings in the years ahead. And our congratulations and well-wishes to Anthony Mullins and Jeff Broadnax on their new roles on the CAD team. Our prayers are with all of these men and their families as they transition into new phases in their lives and ministries.

Lorenzo Arroyo retired recently after over 14 years of employment with GCI as a denominational leader. Prior to his time with GCI, Lorenzo was Executive President of the North American Conference/Evangelical Church of God. He led many of the congregations in that fellowship in becoming part of GCI.

Within GCI, Lorenzo served as a District Superintendent and then Regional Pastor in the Western U.S., a member of the Church Multiplication Ministries (CMM) team, and ecclesiastical supervisor of GCI churches in Mexico and Spanish-speaking churches in the U.S.

At a special church service in San Jose, CA, Lorenzo and his wife Rita were thanked for their many years of service to GCI. As a token of GCI’s appreciation, they were given a Thomas Kinkaid painting.

Following the San Jose service, elders and wives prayed for Lorenzo and Rita as they enter a new phase in their journey with Jesus Christ. We know there will be many opportunities ahead for them to serve God and his people. We extend our deep thanks and hearty congratulations to Lorenzo and Rita!

Cards may be sent to:

Lorenzo and Rita Arroyo
4035 Mount Day Ct
Antioch, CA 94531-8279

GCI-Italy is hosting a worship festival in Montegrotto Terme, Italy on August 24-27. Members and friends around the world are invited! For information, click here.

Effective leaders are good communicators. To grow in that vital competency, it’s important to understand one’s own leadership voice and the voices of others on the leadership team. To help us do that, the upcoming GCI Denominational Conference in Orlando will have plenary and breakout sessions with Dr. Tom Nebel of GiANT Worldwide. To learn more about what he will teach, click here. For additional information about the conference and to get registered, click here.

Tom has served as a church planter, pastor and Director of Multiplication for Converge Worldwide, where he helped start over 800 new churches across the globe. For the last three years, he has served as a Senior Associate with GiANT Worldwide, a leadership consultancy that “builds leaders worth following who lead organizations everyone wants to work for.” GiANT believes the best leaders are secure, humble, and confident: David not Goliath. Tom is recognized as an engaging biblical communicator and effective coach of those seeking to increase their personal, team and organizational capacities. He specializes in recognizing and removing the obstacles standing in the way of success.

GiANT’s leadership tools are highlighted in two GCI Equipper articles:

• Know yourself to lead yourself
• Commitment to high support-high challenge

God has answered our prayers! On April 20, we finalized purchase of the office building shown below. Sometime next year, we’ll move GCI’s denominational Home Office from Glendora, CA, to this building located in the Charlotte, NC, area. Thanks for your prayers concerning the search and purchase process. Please now pray about the logistics involved in the move.

Concerning the purchase process, GCI Treasurer Mat Morgan shared this:

It just felt blessed! I felt the Holy Spirit’s guiding hand from start to finish. The closing process took only 30 days—a speed seldom accomplished in commercial real estate. The seller went above and beyond in assisting us. He stayed with our team late into the night to help us both understand and then transfer building systems and contracts. God’s hand was in it all—I think he wanted us to connect with the previous owner, and so we have.

This announcement from GCI IT Manager Bret Miller, is a reminder about the changes announced in December 2016 concerning GCI’s website hosting services being discontinued in mid-2017.

We currently provide website hosting and support for many GCI churches, camps and other ministries. We believe that a more efficient, consistent and secure way to maintain these sites is to have local entities work directly with a web hosting company. This avoids a middle layer of support that can sometimes delay service if Home Office staff is not available. Web hosting companies are well-equipped to upgrade, monitor and maintain security on the hosted sites in a consistent and cost-effective manner, without the necessity of technical direction from GCI.

Therefore, our central web hosting services will be discontinued by mid-2017. Please start now to evaluate the options available for your local website(s). Because 2017 will be a very busy year for the Home Office staff as we prepare for our Denominational Conference in August and the pending Home Office relocation, the sooner you move your site to a hosting service, the more likely we will be able to help you with that move.

The most common question we are receiving at the Home Office is whether we have a recommendation. We are recommending DreamHost “Happy Hosting” shared hosting for U.S. churches and camps because it’s a fairly simple process to apply for it, and the hosting itself is free for non-profits. The local church or camp will need a new domain name if you are using one of our domains (__.wcgweb.org, __.gcichurches.org, or __.gci.church). That currently runs $12.95 per year at DreamHost. Some of you already have your own. Registering it there simplifies the setup and renewal so that’s what we recommend though you can register it separately if you wish. Here’s how it works:

1. Contact our legal office (legal.office@gci.org) to ask for our 501(c)(3) letter and a statement saying your church is covered by our group exemption. You’ll need both in PDF.
2. Sign up with DreamHost for shared hosting and your domain name. Note that you can use the option to “do this later” if you already have a domain name. This will require a credit/debit card.
3. Submit a support request to DreamHost asking for non-profit hosting and attach the two PDF documents to the request.
4. Wait for them to approve it. At this point, they will also refund the cost of the hosting plan.

Once you have the free hosting, we’ll be happy to help you move the website, or move it for you, as our time permits.

We have been a DreamHost customer for many years and while they’ve had ups and downs, so have all the hosting companies we’ve dealt with. They have served us well, and that’s why they earned our recommendation. There are cheaper options out there if you don’t qualify as a U.S. nonprofit organization.

Note: DreamHost offers a managed WordPress service called DreamPress. Other website hosts also tend to offer similar services. We have NOT had any success moving a WordPress website hosted with GCI to any of these services. Therefore, we would strongly recommend moving it first to simple shared hosting and then if you want to pay for the upgraded service, let your website hosting company do the migration into their upgraded service. We do not believe the upgraded service is necessary for most church or camp websites.

As for the “template” we announced, that will be for WordPress and probably won’t be available until August or September at the earliest. For websites running on WordPress, it should be fairly easy to install the new “theme” as WordPress calls it and activate it to get the new look without much change to the content.

Here is a list of the names of men and women recently ordained in GCI as elders. Our congratulations to them all, and to their families and congregations.

• Aubrey Toli 1/29/17 Gauteng, South Africa
• Jennifer Gregory 4/2/17 Chicago, IL
• Anthony Gregory 4/2/17 Chicago, IL
• Vanessa Burtin 4/2/17 Chicago, IL
• Walter Burtin, Jr 4/2/17 Chicago, IL
• Toni Puentener 4/1/17 Uri, Switzerland (see picture below)
• Martin Beumer 4/16/17 Adelaide, Australia
• Lisa Williamson Barker 6/12/16 Chicago, IL

GCI’s family in Spain extends a warm invitation to join them on October 4-12 in Majorca to celebrate God’s love and grace in Christ. Come to enjoy the worship along with sunshine, beautiful beaches and the clear waters of the Mediterranean at the beautiful Barcelo Ponent Playa Hotel (pictured below), which offers special prices for families. For information and to register, click here.

GCI Pastor Tom Smith and his wife Pam are excited to share the joy of their middle daughter’s marriage. On April 1, Carrie Smith and Greg Osborne were wed. Carrie is a member of the pastoral team at GCI’s congregation in Clarksville, TN, and Greg works for the State of Tennessee, Dept. of Human Services. As shown in the picture below, Tom had the pleasure of officiating the ceremony.

Several of GCI-USA’s newest pastors and pastors-in-training (pastoral residents) were interviewed at the New Pastors Orientation Conference held in February at GCI’s Home Office. Here are videos of interviews with Pastors Lawrence Evans and Michael Guibord.

On YouTube at https://youtu.be/9Ch7h2NrIlw.

On YouTube at https://youtu.be/xvRCd8gjDZg.