Who What Where Why and How?

Who are we? What is the plan? Where? Why? How?

To answer these questions as a beginning for this website...

The founder Gabriel, is a missionary who has been moved to Northern Georgia USA by what could only be understood as a move of God, literally. Arriving in Lawrenceville in 2021 in hopes to expand a profitable business into Georgia and South Carolina, all hopes fell short due to life threatening health issues and the subsequent failing and then "fire sale" of his formerly successful business.. During the 18mo or so of recovering in bed, there was a lot of time for The Lord to rekindle the passion for full time ministry again after having stepped out of that role in 2008. 
The initial plan was just to take whatever house was on the market that could fit his family and get moved to Georgia as soon as possible. The Lawrenceville address was only supposed to be a stepping stone to open 3 more stores in the area so they could build and move to their desired permanent home in the Georgia mountains. During the many months of down-time, God moved Gabriel's heart away from running businesses that support ministries and churches to return to being the one running ministries and churches. Thankfully, the "retire early" dream is long gone.
Gabriel surrendered his life to Jesus at an Assembly of God church in 1998. He was discipled through Calvary Chapel Bible College to end up as a pastor and worship leader in The Christian and Missionary Alliance church. He served on mission trips in Ecuador, Alabama, North Carolina, & South Carolina with World Servants and Mission-Fuge. He has also worked with and volunteered with many other organizations historically and now volunteers at his church and food pantries as needed in addition to sharing his faith with strangers several times a week as he meanders around Grayson and Loganville etc. 

That being said, the IsaYah 61 mission is truly the work of The Lord in his life over many decades and benefits no unique doctrine or denomination. It is based solely on Scriptures which highlight God's heart toward the plight of mankind and how God seeks to have His people meet the needs of those around us. 

Why do we emphasize the unique spelling of "IsaYah"... 
IsaYah means YAHWEH (YHVH) IS SALVATION.
We want to AMPLIFY the fact that the very Name of God is significant in our English transliteration of IsaYah's Hebrew name. Other than that, Gabriel just always thought having an "i" in that name looked weird like one should be pronouncing it as "Eye Zay E uh" instead of "Eye Say YAH" or "Ee Sigh YAH" Since he got the website, he got to name the ministry, and here we are.

In the summer of 2023, Gabriel started getting better reports from the doctors and also started realizing how God had been in nearly every part of moving his family to the Loganville/Grayson area specifically and that his sudden nearly fatal (stress induced) illness was used by God to refine him into a usable vessel again. There is more to that story you can ask when you meet him, just make sure you have 20+ minutes to hear the testimony! During that time, Gabriel started writing detailed business plans to get funding for as he was beginning to understand the local demographics of Northern GA. These plans then morphed into ministry plans which then grew to a systematic and cohesive ministry plan for the area, nearly erasing all the original business motivated aspects except as needed sources of capital for the ministries. The Lord continued over many months to refine out all financial benefit to Gabriel & his family in the context of these plans. This moved him to get a Real Estate License again to help these ministries acquire the properties needed for the work. He has pledged to remain financially humble and shall derive as much of his household income from part/flex time work in real estate. Gabriel believes that if God is the One who created all these business/ministry plans, that God will fully fund each aspect of it at the proper time if not all up front, and against all human understanding to emphasize that this is a work of The Lord and not a man.

Furthermore, all initial staff will be people of prayer and from different church backgrounds. Hundreds of hours of prayer have already been involved in the planning stages and by God's grace, many hundreds of hours will lay the foundations of each aspect of the mission. 

Now the main details that we can share right now, listed in no specific order:

We seek to purchase several parcels of land about 10 minutes South of Loganville, GA. The land will be used for our "Orphans & Widows" mission. It will include housing, education, vocational training, and recreation opportunities. The staffing need will start around 30 persons in Phase 1 and likely reach over 150 by Phase 3 in 4 years, the bulk of them hopefully being volunteers. We believe that God has preserved these parcels of land for this purpose based on their location and that it seems rather miraculous that they have been on the market as long as they have. 

We seek to purchase a vacant and run down church building with good potential in order to provide a needed House of Worship in that declining area. We seek to place a multi-denomination "church" there with the general feel of a non-denominational church where we employ leadership (pastors etc) from different actual denominations to meet the needs of the community broadly, while accurately teaching the Bible without pet doctrines. The main service times will initially be Saturday evenings and Wednesday evenings with specialty meetings for specific groups the rest of the week with the intent that the ministry will lead to hosting prayer and worship services several hours a day if not 24/7. Since there is a 24/7 prayer and worship service currently only 30 minutes away, we would have our worship staff to volunteer there when their schedule has no other demands. In all aspects of service to God, we will disciple the staff to work with every other Christian church to support the body of Christ and His work in the area. And, we do plan to be irreverent towards denominationalism to the extent that we can see the lines soften between hardliners in the area. We all have something we can do well in service to God and we all have areas where we lack. We expect God to provide the leaders He has chosen for His work in this area. The long-term goal is to save the vacant church building, install good leaders with Kingdom minded hearts, install a board of elders from local churches to ensure the mission stays on track, and when fully self-sufficient, release them, then find another abandoned church building to plant a work there taking lessons from the first venture. 

We seek to initiate a comprehensive para-church ministry. Currently, independent pastors/leaders have little prayer covering outside of their direct denomination or circles. They have stresses that only others in their positions can understand. The enemy stalks them. They often burn out or turn to secret sins. We seek to end this through direct calling every church and ministry leader who will talk with our staff. We will pray with them, for their ministries, and for their own walk with Jesus and health. We will connect them with other leaders in the community for support according to their needs or desires. We will lift them up and have a plan also to use part of the land mentioned above to give leaders time alone with their spouse since that is their first ministry and often the most threatened by the cares of ministry. 
The para-church mission will also raise money to give free roofs and cover unexpected repairs for churches whose congregations cannot raise the funds themselves. Basically, if water is pouring through the roof on Sunday morning for 4 months straight with no solution coming soon, that is where we will focus some finances. For accountability, we will also set in place safeguards to ensure that the funds are truly needed and will determine if it should be a zero interest loan or a gift from God. This program will extend into tornado, fire, or other calamities within the State of Georgia also and beyond if it is determined that no other entity is coming to help where a group of believers was gathering and can no longer gather. One of the other important aspects of the para-church mission is to unite church bodies with other bodies in their area to accomplish specific needs or evangelistic opportunities. If the Presbyterians plan a Revival Meeting for their church and need help with childcare, parking, and baptizing, and we know that the Baptist church a few miles away was looking for a community outreach opportunity... we're going to try to get the two bodies together for that event. If the Flu takes out most of the leadership at the Community Bible Fellowship and we call to check in and hear that their pastor and worship leaders are out, guess who we're calling... the local charismatic church who always have extra musicians and excited young pastors who are ready on the spot to take the stage! The Church should just be The Church in all matters at all times. 

The bulk of the other ministries in this system are support ministries. They interact with each other to provide either a supply chain (food, assets, finances) to support the other related entities or provide resources for use by those we're ministering to (i.e. Christ-centered recreation, media, counseling, a Christian school, jobs, mentoring, etc). 

Congrats if you made it down to this part! This is literally a rough draft and will be edited several times a week till this section is 5 short paragraphs. 

To finish; The How...
Prayer, God's favor and provision, and grants/donations.

We believe that God Himself will accomplish this work but how He does that remains to be seen! We're being faithful with this first step and trust God to be faithful to being it all to pass as He has already planned to do. We believe the timing is now. Funding for the entire system of properties, improvements, assets, staffing, and initial expenses is beyond the scope of rational human expectation. That is what makes this venture so exciting. If it is to be, no man or group can claim any glory for it. It will prove that God Almighty was the true Author and Finisher of this work. We and all who get involved are just the vessels and happy observers of His amazing orchestration. Why can we have faith in the nearly impossible? Because everything about Jesus is by itself only possible because of His eternal power and God-ness! We say we believe in the supernatural stories recorded in the Bible, right? Jesus said in John 6:63 that His words are spirit and life. All things Jesus wanted to teach us were indeed spiritual and thereby incapable of being apprehended by the natural mind. Believing we can simply "put our faith in Jesus" and thereby suddenly become adopted forever into God's family and be looked at by God with the same love which He loved Jesus with... is also a concept that our minds cannot wrap around; it is a spiritual knowing that we now inexplicably can never un-know. HalleluYah! 

Thanks for reading this draft. May God bless you today and always! Amen