Dear Church Family,

August is a special month for me as your pastor and here’s why. On August 16, 2015, a small church in Howard County, NE, voted to hire me as their pastor.

I was sitting at lunch with my family at our family farm in Iowa when I received the phone call. I recognized the number, said, “Oh, boy” (with a lot of trepidation), to Rachel and stepped out on the enclosed back porch to take the call. As I sat down on the steps leading to my dad’s basement, Jim Eslinger informed me that the church had approved unanimously to extend a call to me to be their pastor and then asked, “Will you accept our call?”

At that time, I had been unemployed since February. We had two churches that, at different times, were both literally two weeks away from a church vote on hiring me when something happened internally within those churches and we were told they were not ready to hire anybody yet. Frankly, we expected the same at Grace.

We had sold our house in Omaha at the end of July and my whole family moved in with my dad. Thirty-five years old, married with four children, unemployed and living in my dad’s house. Great times indeed. Since June of 2015, we had meetings and conversations with the Grace Church pastoral search committee, but again, after having been burned twice, I was feeling pretty discouraged about actually being hired.

Then I received the call.

I can’t express to you the emotions that went through me:  relief; joy; fear; a sense of, “Holy cow, what am I doing?” “Is this really happening?” Long story short, in case you couldn’t guess, I said, “Yes!”

My life hasn’t been the same since. God has done some incredible things. The church tripled in size, shrunk during Covid, and has now more than doubled again from its original size. We completed a $400,000+ building project in 2019, paid it off in 2021, and are building up a new fund for a future project.

We have had many, many people place their faith in Christ, have baptized more people than was in the original congregation, and have seen people step into roles where they never imagined they would serve. It has been an amazing journey!

The most important thing I want you to know from this article is this:  God has been and is faithful! The second most important thing I want you to know is this:  I love being your pastor!! Thank you for entrusting me with this honor and for being patient with me as I’ve grown into a role I first dreamed about when I was 18 and a freshman in Bible college.

I truly do love you all!

Pastor Daniel