News & Stories

LIFE ‘98 Church Plants Celebrates 10 Years

March 13, 2009

 Gateway (Alliance) Community Church in Draper, Utah, will celebrate its tenth anniversary in a special service on March 15. Hundreds of lives have been impacted for Christ at the Salt Lake City suburb church.

“Gateway Community Church has a great heritage,” says Ray Van Gilst, who serves as church multiplication director for the Central Pacific District and participated in Gateway’s humble beginnings in 1999.

“It started through the prayer walking and giving of students at LIFE ‘98 in Salt Lake City.” Gateway was planted with the assistance of 300 youth through Operation Good News and received a boost of $40,000 through a special offering taken at LIFE ‘98. The LIFE conference is a gathering of approximately 10,000 Alliance youth that meets in a U.S. urban center every three years.

“Utah has some of the highest percentages in the nation for antidepressant use, teen suicides, pornography use, and bankruptcies,” says current pastor Shawn Bagley. “We want to be a light of hope to people who look great on the outside but are broken inside.”

Those who leave the Mormon religion for a personal relationship with Jesus face challenging obstacles and often lose the support of their families when they come to Christ.

 ”About one third of the members of each of our churches formerly were Mormons who have become believers in the true Jesus Christ,” says Van Gilst. “We keep praying that blind eyes would be opened by the Holy Spirit, and we rejoice to see it happen as often as we do.”

Living out a core Alliance distinctive of becoming a self-sustaining, self-governing, and self-propagating church, Gateway continues to expand, with three daughter churches.