This is the third profile from our "Faces of the Pastorate" series. These are stories of ministry in various contexts, in the face of various challenges, from people with different perspectives. In essence, it's the story of God's church, writ large. Today we're featuring Michael Warren, the family ministry pastor at ChangePoint, a church in Anchorage, Alaska.
Michael Warren was 21 when his mother died. A junior at Villanova University in Philadelphia at the time, her death sent him into a tailspin. Despite a childhood of Catholic education and church attendance, the grieving Long Island native didn't find himself turning to his faith.
Instead, upon graduation, he accepted a volunteer radio gig in Nome, Alaska. Population 5,000.
Warren threw himself into the community. "I figured if I chose a place where just living would be hard, that I would get closer to the heart of 'giving your life away' to serve others."
"There's a survival aspect to living here," said Warren. "When you make friends, they're your family."
After two years, Warren—feeling guilty for not using his teaching credential, and with friends and family bewildered by his stint up North—returned to Philadelphia and became a high school teacher. But he was determined to stay in touch with the people he'd met in Alaska, and as "a single dude with massive amounts of free time," he found himself in Alaska over Christmas, during Easter, and most of his summers.
During one of his trips, Warren took his friend up on an invitation to attend a megachurch in Anchorage. In the middle of the service he "felt the spirit of God" and broke down, an experience he wrestled with for the next several months. When the church recorded its 9/11 service and posted it online, Warren recalls watching it over and over again.
Warren continued to visit ChangePoint, and several years later, became a Christian. Warren moved to Alaska and accepted a middle school teaching position.
'There's a survival aspect to living here. When you make friends, they're your family.'
Simultaneously, he and his wife Tara, whom he met in Anchorage, were increasingly interested in a theology of family. As parents of four children, they found themselves exploring the subject often, eventually discussing what larger plan God had for their passion.
"When ChangePoint offered me a position that let me cast vision and help families understand what discipleship could look like in their homes, I was in."
Now in his fourth year of ministry, Warren, 39, leads a team responsible for up to 1,000 children from birth to fifth grade over two Sunday morning services. In addition to preaching, he organizes workshops on child dedication and raising teenagers, and leads a parent-child discipleship class.
Located in Alaska's largest city, ChangePoint averages about 2,700 people on weekly basis. The city is home to hundreds of Native Alaskans, Americans from the lower 48, and Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Samoan immigrants.
"People move to Alaska with a spirit of rugged individualism," said Warren. "The things people do in their free time are pretty extreme. Last night, there were probably more than 100 people that went fishing and caught over 100 fish, filleted them, vacuum packed them, and drove back at two in the morning in time for work the next day. It's pretty extreme."
The state has some of the highest rates of suicide, domestic violence, rape, and sex trafficking, says Warren. But along with those challenges comes a "unique openness to the Gospel."
"They've come all the way to Alaska to search for it."
It's an impulse Warren knows as well as anyone.
