Woven Into His-Story: Our Family’s Prophetic History with Phoenix, AZ
If you would rather listen to this article read by Tyler, click here to be directed to the YouTube video.
Here we are, on the brink of a grand new adventure! The hot desert sun eagerly awaits us as we prepare to say goodbye to the familiarity of the cold and damp Midwest. But how did we get here? How did it come to be that our family was plucked from the comforts of the life we had built to instead pioneer a new path into the unknown?
What you are about to read is a story of the grand adventure preceding our pioneering adventure yet to come. If I am being honest, taking the time to record the account of how God divinely placed Phoenix in our family’s path is written primarily for my benefit.
I pray that you as a reader are encouraged and edified by this testimony, but ultimately, I need to be reminded of how God got us to this point. Like the Israelites who crossed the Jordan River on dry ground, I too need memorial stones (Joshuah 4) to remind me of the miracles God has done to bring our family to this pivotal transition.
Our journey of arriving at where we are now has been unique to say the least. God’s unconventional yet profound wisdom has eclipsed every “normal” way of pursuing a new location to move to. But why should I expect anything less?
This is the same God who devoured a nation with plagues, parted a sea, led as a cloud by day and a fire by night, provided an unknown food source, brought forth water from a rock and stopped the flow of a river, all so His people could relocate to the place He desired them to be. So, after considering the history of Israel making its way to the promised land, is our story really all that strange?
A Childhood Memory
My (Tyler) history with Arizona began during spring break in the early 2000s. My family was heading south for a short reprieve from the frigid temperatures of Northern Michigan. It wasn’t uncommon for us to take a family vacation over spring break, yet this trip stood out to me.
Maybe it was the unfamiliar red-colored earth, the mountains, the hiking excursions with my dad scaling terrain well off the beaten path, or the time when I scared my Mom half to death by climbing over the railing to get a better view of the Grand Canyon.
Regardless, as I look back on our family vacations growing up, this trip to Arizona was among the best I could remember. This begs the question, was God already drawing me?
A Warm Place for Sabbatical
Fast forward about 20 years, and I found myself with a much different viewpoint. No longer was I the pimple-faced youngster pushing his limits in the great outdoors. At this stage of life, I had settled into a more mature persona – the husband to my beautiful wife Sarah and the father of three exceptional children. Yet again, I felt a beckoning to consider Arizona.
After being in ministry for nearly five years, Sarah and I sensed the need for a sabbatical. We were ready to rest and reset for all God had in store for our next season of life. We considered taking our leave in December, and out of all the warm places available, the Lord placed Arizona on our hearts.
After much consideration, nothing came of our desires. It turns out Arizona is a fairly expensive place to visit, especially in the winter. We even went so far as to send letters to churches asking for a place to stay for a month, but alas, nothing came of it. Though the trip was never actualized, I don’t find it a mere coincidence that the Grand Canyon State was beginning to spark intrigue in our hearts.
A Season of Liminality
Often I find the Lord stirs vision with a length of time before its actualization. The following season of our prophetic journey was one of the most challenging. Though the tension we experienced was brutal, we did get to learn a fancy new word to describe what we were feeling. This word was shared with Sarah and me while on a Zoom call with a church planter exploring a new decentralized way of doing church. The term fit our season perfectly: Liminality!
In his article “What Is Liminality And Why Does Your Story Need It?,” Joe Bunting defines liminality in terms of characters in a fictional story:
Liminality is the in-between moments, the space between an inciting incident in a story and the protagonist’s resolution. It is often a period of discomfort, of waiting, and of transformation. Your characters’ old habits, beliefs, and even personal identity disintegrates. He or she has the chance to become someone completely new.[1]
Yep, that was us! We knew God was doing a new thing in our lives. He had been disintegrating our old identity in many ways and had been opening new possibilities of what it meant to thrive in His kingdom.
One of the primary ways we noticed Him taking us through a divine transition was regarding our understanding of the church. Though we appreciated how God had used much of the traditional church structure to grow and guide us up to that point, we sensed something new was on the horizon. He was doing a new thing, and we wanted to be part of it!
Though we were aware of the looming season of transition, we remained in the dark regarding how this shift would affect us. So, we waited; I wish I could say patiently, but truthfully our patience was regularly tested. Yet as we struggled to dwell in this place of “in-between,” God was on the move!
An Unexpected Shift
Those who know me know how little I pay attention to the news. In fact, it is sometimes embarrassing when people bring up a significant global event, and all I can do is nod as I try to fake knowing what in the world they’re talking about.
So, it came as a great surprise to me (and my wife) when all of a sudden, my eyes were glued to the news stories about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. My heart was caught up in the suffering I saw and the velocity at which people’s lives were being uprooted.
One night as I sat on the couch watching another news story, I leaned over to Sarah and said something along the lines of “I think I’m supposed to help with this somehow.” Now I believe heavily in the power of prayer to change things, but the “something” I was referring to felt more hands-on. I soon discovered that God was leading me to uproot myself from the normalcy of life to serve refugees who had been forced out of every sense of routine they had once known.
This is an important event in our story because this was the time when a fundamental shift began to occur. My time in Poland and Ukraine was humbling and powerful, but the shift I’m speaking of started taking place a few days before I was set to return to the US. It was at this time that God began making it very apparent that a transition was imminent!
Leaving a Legacy Behind
Though it still wasn’t clear precisely what God was calling us to pursue, it became obvious what He was asking us to leave. The “baby” that a core group of us had given birth to over five years ago was meant to be put on the altar before the Lord.
Sarah and I (of course with the help of so many brothers and sisters in the Lord) had given much of our lives to establish a house of prayer in the Illinois Valley. It was a beautiful work filled with joy, pain, excitement, sorrow, and every other emotion that comes with leading a ministry.
Regularly I would come home for lunch, and Sarah would ask me how my morning was – nine times out of ten, I would respond with something like, “Great! I love my job!” And I meant it! Directing the Illinois Valley House of Prayer was immensely rewarding and gratifying. In many ways, the role was a perfect fit for all God had called me to be and do in His kingdom.
And now He was asking me to give it up! Though it felt painful to leave behind the legacy we had built, God was also gracious to give us an exhilarating anticipation for the journey ahead. This is the point where the story really gets good.
Undeniable Prophetic Confirmations
As we pursued an honorable ending to our assignment with the house of prayer, God began opening up a new opportunity for us. At first, it felt pretty random, but as you will soon see, there was nothing arbitrary about it.
We sensed that He was beckoning us to explore this new expression of church that He had placed on our hearts a couple of years before. Since that time, we had planted two “house churches.” We experienced many joys and frustration as we experimented with this new form of church (well, at least new to us). We knew we were onto something, but we still sensed something was missing.
Now it wasn’t the mission He was calling us to that felt random; it was the location. Once again, Arizona enters the equation and, more specifically, the city of Phoenix.
The deposit that the Lord placed in Sarah and me for the city of Phoenix was undeniable. It had begun to hit both of us right around the time I was transitioning back into the US from my month in Eastern Europe. It is hard to explain what happens when the Lord speaks clearly to you about something. You don’t necessarily have any tangible evidence of the call, but you just “know” He is in it.
Well, gracious as He is, He did not hang us out to dry with mere sentiment. The Lord also confirmed these promptings by giving Sarah and me prophetic confirmations of this new call to explore Phoenix. Here are just a handful of the prophetic experiences I had previously recorded from May & June of 2022:
After not watching UFC shows for a while, I began watching a series that follows the main fighters on their journey leading up to fight night. The specific series I started watching – unbeknownst to me – was leading up to a fight event taking place in Phoenix, AZ.
I sensed God leading me to explore some continuing theological education, so I started listening to Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology Course. In one of his teachings, he mentioned the location where he was delivering the course lectures was from a church in Scottsdale, AZ (Scottsdale is a suburb of Phoenix). When I heard this, I was running on the treadmill at the YMCA. During that run, I happened to glance up at the tv and noticed an ad for Grand Canyon University. Toward the end of the ad, I read the small print revealing the school’s location was in Phoenix, AZ.
·Pulling through the parking lot one day, I noticed a young man in front of the YMCA covered in Arizona State University clothing (ASU is located in Tempe, AZ, a suburb of Phoenix). On a run later that week, I saw a couple walking together, also wearing Arizona State University shirts (keep in mind I am living in the small town of Ottawa, IL, which is over 1,600 miles away from Arizona State University).
Sarah was excited about finding a movie we would both like, only to discover that we had already seen it (bless her heart … this happens a lot with us). Her second choice was a movie called The Marksman. This movie was about a man who found a mom and son crossing the border from Mexico to America via Arizona. SPOILER ALERT: After just crossing the border, the wounded mother’s dying wish is for the main character to take her son to family she had living in Chicago, IL. The remainder of the movie reveals the thrilling journey of the man and her son from Arizona to the Windy City.
One night, Sarah and I watched a documentary called Flying Cheap [2]. One of the B-roll shots for the movie was of a screen at the airport with a list of the upcoming arrivals and departures. There were multiple cities listed, but two of the cities on this screen were Phoenix and Tyler (I didn’t know I was special enough to have a town named after me).
This is a screenshot from the actual documentary!
Now I am usually the first to raise an eyebrow when people begin making “prophetic” links between things. Unfortunately, I have seen this form of “discernment” abused way too many times in my course of ministry. So, I take seriously the need for multiple streams of discernment on any significant decisions that arise in life.
Standing alone, I probably would not have given much credence to the events listed above. But the sheer quantity of these confirmations occurring in such a short span of time really got my attention. I was now quite curious about the Lord’s outward confirmations of the inward calling He had placed in our hearts for Phoenix.
An Enjoyable Let-Down
After it became evident that the Lord was not going to let this go, we decided to take some practical steps toward investigating Phoenix. We emailed multiple pastors and ministries asking for a video chat to discuss some of the practical and spiritual dynamics of the area.
On one of those calls, a very generous pastor offered us a place to stay and a vehicle to use if we ever decided to come scope out Phoenix. I am not sure he knew how quickly we would take him up on that offer, but before we knew it, we had our flights booked.
Sarah and I sincerely enjoyed our time in the Phoenix area. We met some great Christian leaders and got a good feel for the city. The only problem was we did not experience the confirmation we were hoping for. It remained unclear whether Phoenix was where we were meant to live.
Truthfully, we had sort of set ourselves up for failure. We both admitted we were hoping for some supernatural experience where Jesus came down from heaven to announce, “here is the land I have prepared for you; come and dwell in it!” Well, I guess it didn’t have to be that extreme, but you get the idea. Instead, the ongoing conversation between Sarah and I was, “we don’t understand why we’re here?”
The Best Birthday Ever
That sense of confusion about moving to Phoenix continued from June to early August, when finally, a breakthrough came. A dear friend of ours texted Sarah on her birthday about a podcast that she had just listened to. The podcast was an interview between Ken Fish & Putty Putman.
Sarah was familiar with Putty as she had been a student of the School of Kingdom Ministry several years earlier. Putty was the founder and primary leader of that school, which ended up being one of the most powerful ministry experiences in Sarah’s life.
It was during this podcast that we began seeing the connections God had been preparing. During the interview, Putty shared about God’s call for him in this upcoming season to pioneer a new expression of church. That alone piqued our interest, but what came next was remarkable. After doing a deep dive researching societal demographics in the US, Putty believed that the place most primed for this new expression of church was Phoenix, AZ!
Now you have to understand, Putty is a physicist turned pastor. I mean, this dude is smart. The way that he arrived at choosing to plant a church in Phoenix was far intellectually superior to anything that I could wrap my mind around. Sarah and I went off of a Holy Spirit inspired “gut feeling.” Putty had the research to back it up! Isn’t it amazing how God works?
A fun fact to add to this story was that someone had prophesied over Sarah earlier that year that her birthday was going to “take her breath away.” So now here Sarah was, on her birthday, doing dishes at the kitchen sink (I know I am a terrible husband for letting her do dishes on her birthday), listening to this podcast, and having the physical reaction of gasping for air because of what she was listening to. By the end of the day, she could genuinely declare that it had been her best birthday ever!
Finding Our New Tribe
One of the most confirming experiences through this journey has been finding a new tribe! We certainly had been blessed with a beautiful spiritual community in Ottawa! God was so good to surround us with a loving family during our time in the Illinois Valley, and it was a bit unnerving to think about heading to Phoenix on our own. But God had other plans. It was in His heart to fold us into another amazing spiritual family who shared a common vision for reformation in the body of Christ.
After listening to the podcast on Sarah’s birthday, we quickly reached out to Putty to share our story and how we sensed God might be calling us to pioneer together. This started our “dating” phase with the church planting team, who were located just a couple of hours north of us in Chicago! I mean seriously, Putty and this team could have been anywhere – but no, they were close enough for us to visit on a regular basis.
After “dating” for a couple of months, the team and our family took the leap into an “engagement.” We were now committed in a serious way to this spiritual community. With our new degree of dedication to the team, we began sensing the need for closer proximity to our spiritual family. Time for another leap of faith!
From Homeless to Lakehouse
“It’s time to sell your home.” That sounds good God, but we first need to find a place to live.
“You need to put your house on the market.” I would be happy to do that Lord, but I need to know where we will be living next.
“Sell your house!” I will God, but you need to open the door for us to live somewhere else first!
This conversation continued for a while before God made it clear that I would not be winning this argument (come to think of it, I’ve never won an argument with Him). He was calling us to sell our house without having the safety net of another place to live. And so continues the upside-down ways He’s invited us to live in this season.
Well after a few weeks of hard work to spruce the place up (I find it funny how we finally finish all those lingering household projects as soon as we decide to no longer live in it), we were ready to sell. The offers on our house came in quickly!
This is typically a good thing! But remember, as far as we were concerned at that moment, we officially became homeless once we sold our house! Now I exaggerate a bit in this regard, for I believe that our friends and family would have taken us in had it come down to the wire, but it did not reach that point because God was at work once again.
Sarah had been in contact with a real estate agent in the Chicago area to help us look for a temporary place to land. The agent didn’t mince words when describing how challenging it would be for us to find a place to live for a few months (most landlords want, at minimum, a six-month lease) and especially with the budget we had.
But once again, God proved His faithfulness to our family by connecting us with a wonderful lady looking to rent out her Airbnb lake house over the winter. As Sarah spoke with her over the phone, the elephant in the room remained. I won’t give specific numbers, but the house we were interested in was well out of our budget to say the least. But God …
Please hear this in our story. We are not special, but God is. When things have felt impossible, we continue to see the injection of God’s divine hand to crush the impossibilities and barriers that stand before us.
Sarah finally confronted the elephant in the room, assuring the woman that she was renting the house at a reasonable rate, but the amount was not doable for our family. How did she respond? She said, “You choose the rate you can afford, and I will make it happen!” And so continues His miraculous provision!
Divine Crosshairs
So we finally find ourselves in Northern Chicago in close proximity to the team. The question now becomes, will that be the case once we move to Phoenix?[3] You see, Phoenix is not your average run-of-the-mill city. It is the 5th largest city in America and the fastest-growing one. The Phoenix Metro area is 14,587 square miles in total![4] Phoenix is massive, and during our visionary trip in June, God had highlighted a particular area to consider should we decide to move.
So as we sat with the team in a strategic planning meeting, ready to hear where all of our (well, Putty did most of the painstaking work) demographic research had led us, Sarah and I hoped that the location that we would be planting the church would at least be in the same vicinity to the area God had placed on our heart during our visit.
And wouldn’t you know it, God did it again! The same way we were first led to Phoenix is how we were led to this specific suburb in the Phoenix Metro. For us, it was a “gut feeling,” a divine prompting that resulted in a settled peace in our hearts as we traveled through a particular part of town.
And just like Putty had arrived at Phoenix as the city to plant a church through a largely scientific and demographical approach, it was through this statistic-driven method that he and our team arrived at the location best suited to plant this new expression of church (our team of course had sought the Lord and visited the area in the discernment process of our location – we weren’t leaving it solely to the numbers).
To give you a fuller picture, let’s consider that “four million people call the Phoenix metro area home, and the Valley of the Sun extends even farther with more than 55 cities and 150 ZIP codes in the region (so far).”[5] Out of those 150 zip codes, we chopped out some of the extreme outer ones leaving us with 118 zip codes to include in our demographic research.
Now is the moment of truth … drum roll please! The zip code Sarah and I were most drawn to ranked 4th on the team’s demographic research list. The suburb that was second on our hearts had a zip code ranking 2nd on the list.
To describe how improbable this is, let me share some statistical data. Now I had to outsource these numbers as I did not trust my personal ability to do this type of math. Here are the rough results from a very qualified source:
The likelihood of any specific zip code being selected at random would be 0.85%. To have multiple of the top zip codes in proximity is a much lower percentage, and that is much harder to compute. It surely isn’t the same as selecting two of these zip codes at random, as zip codes have a fair degree of continuity between them in many of their factors. That being said, there are 6903 different pairs of [zip1, zip2] that can be selected. If the top two were randomly chosen, the odds they’d be adjacent to each other would be something like 0.1%.
Selecting a zip code at random and having it in the top 4, is something like a 3.3% chance. Having that zip code randomly next to another one in the top four (if it was random, which again it is definitely not) would be something on the order of 0.002%.
So because of the multiple factors needed to be considered, it is hard to arrive at a perfect statistical analysis. Still, I believe the point has been clearly made. To have our initial prompting of where to live within the Phoenix Metro line up with the location produced by the results of the demographic research conducted by the team is extraordinarily unlikely. What a jolt of faith to be led to the same general location through two very different means of discernment!
Eventually, we all agreed that the top four zip codes were so closely situated in the Southeast region of the Phoenix Metro that we could pursue housing in any one of them and still be close enough to do life together. God was making a way!
The Miracles to Come
This now brings us to the end of our story … or is it the beginning? I have come to realize that we are never really at the end or the beginning when we participate in the divine dance of a transcendent God. We are always amid the narrative of a greater reality: the story of God’s redemption. He is making all things new, and we are in the midst of His ongoing process of “Re-Creation.”[6]
Alright, I’m done with my philosophical rabbit trail. Let me get real! As I mentioned at the start of this article, I am writing this primarily for me. I do this because, like the giants and fortified cities that stood against Israel’s journey to the promised land, we too have giants standing in our way of reaching Phoenix.
Sarah & I felt pretty good about the amount we sold our home for in Illinois. We had nearly doubled what we had originally paid for it, leaving us with what we considered a reasonable down payment for our next home. Then came the reality check. The same house we just sold in Illinois would likely cost us triple the amount in Phoenix.
Add to this that we are only in month three of raising financial support to supply my salary as a church planter. Needless to say, we are well off the mark of where we need to be to even apply for a mortgage. If we’re being honest, we view Phoenix as some sort of fairy tale land. I mean seriously, how do people afford to live out there? This has brought us to our knees, crying out and reminding God that this was His idea, not ours (which I am pretty sure is exactly where He wants us to be).
We once again find ourselves in this liminal space of living in the “in-between.” Sarah likens it to the trapeze artist that has just let go of one bar and is suspended in mid-air waiting to grab the other bar (fun fact: Sarah’s dream growing up was to be in the circus as a tight-rope walker). That place of weightlessness is exhilarating, uncontrollable, and downright terrifying! Yep, we can relate.
But amid all the tension of the unknown lies a core confidence that we are smack dab in the middle of God’s will. Is there anything more comforting than that? We don’t know how we will get to Phoenix, but He has made it clear that the move will take place in February.
The temptation lingers to make things happen in our own strength. I imagine we could manipulate a path to get to Phoenix, but if that path is not in direct alignment with what the Lord is doing … we are not interested! So once again, we wait.
We wait for the right home to present itself. We wait for the needed provision for an economy well beyond our current level of income. But, ultimately, we wait for God! And we can do this with confidence, for He has promised that “they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31 ESV).
Just like the Israelites preparing to enter the promised land, we stare down our giants, understanding that on our own we are hopeless, but with God we are unbeatable. Recently, as I was reading the book of Deuteronomy, I felt a strong synergy with the following passage:
When you go out to battle against your enemies and see horses and chariots and people more numerous than you, do not be afraid of them; for the Lord your God, who brought you up from the land of Egypt, is with you. When you are approaching the battle, the priest shall come near and speak to the people. He shall say to them, “Hear, O Israel, you are approaching the battle against your enemies today. Do not be fainthearted. Do not be afraid, or panic, or tremble before them, for the Lord your God is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you (Deuteronomy 20:1-4).
And so we trust God to do the same for us! Though the challenges of our upcoming season appear more numerous than we can handle, we have faith that the Lord our God is with us! We need not panic nor be afraid, for God goes out to battle with us! It is He who fights against every hindrance that tries to stand in our way. It is He who saves us and delivers us for His glory! Amen … do it Lord Jesus!
[1] Joe Bunting, “What Is Liminality And Why Does Your Story Need It?,” The Writer Practice, accessed on January 26, 2023, https://thewritepractice.com/liminality-story/.
[2] You can watch the documentary for free on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xms1akNhhg&ab_channel=FRONTLINEPBS%7COfficial. The point I am refereeing to of the arrival and departure screen is at minute 50:12 of the movie.
[3] At the time the research was being done, the specific location Sarah & I were drawn to felt very important to us. We have now arrived at a place where God’s mission through our team is more important than the specific location of where we plant the church. Looking back – I think Sarah and I would have joined the team regardless of if it was in our specific location, but how kind is God to connect both things together!
[4] “Regional Overview - The Phoenix Metro Area,” Maricopa Association of Governments, accessed on January 26, 2023, https://azmag.gov/Programs/Maps-and-Data/Community-Profiles/Regional-Overview#:~:text=The%20Phoenix%20Metro%20Area&text=The%20Phoenix%2DMesa%2DScottsdale%20Metropolitan,County%2C%205%2C364%20square%20miles).
[5] “Zip Code Map,” Phoenix.org, accessed on January 26, 2023, https://www.phoenix.org/maps/zip-code-map/#:~:text=Four%20million%20people%20call%20the%20Metro%20Pheonix%20area%20home%2C%20and,the%20region%20(and%20counting).
[6] I recommend reading All Things New: Joining God’s Story of Recreation by Pete Hughes for a greater understanding of God’s redemptive and re-creative process in all spheres of life!
