A Safe Place & the Space to Imagine
Tony Gatewood shares how the Staff Catalyst Fund gave him room to imagine his ministry in Iowa City
Tony (middle) and "the Crew" volunteer at the Soccer Festival during Iowa City's International Welcome Festival
This story is part of our Vision 2030 initiative to sustain leaders like Tony through the Staff Catalyst Fund. You can support this work at https://www.servantpartners.org/donate
"My dad's a pastor, but he's cool." Most days, Tony Gatewood’s house in southeast Iowa City is filled with teenagers looking for a place to belong. He keeps a Costco-sized box of pancake mix on hand as they regularly eat him out of house and home. Over pancakes and bacon, conversations sometimes turn to faith. “Are Catholics Christians?” someone asked. Instead of answering right away, Tony felt the Spirit lead him to wait until he was asked directly. “It’s a safe space,” Tony shared. “To be fed, to engage, and slowly experience the incarnational Jesus.”
“The Crew,” as he calls them, began with an invitation. When Tony’s oldest child wanted to go to an anime convention, he encouraged them to invite their friends. Seven responded: “We’ve been waiting for an invitation like this!” From there, the Crew came over every day to eat and play tabletop role-playing games. Dubbed the “Dungeon Pastor” by the youth, Tony has made his home and house church, Eastside Lighthouse, a safe third place for teens and adults alike.
Along with the church plant, Tony is also developing a Bible & Art Storying Project to help folks across generations understand and share the gospel creatively. “The question came up when I was praying with the Lord,” Tony said. “‘What would it look like to raise a new generation of storytellers for God?’ Stories drive the current generation; you can see through social media that we have all these stories, yet we’re still disconnected as a people. Storytelling’s a universal language. Every generation has a story and its storytellers. The Bible & Art Storying Project is an experiment in being incarnational and bridging the gap between generations and their ability to tell the story of God.”
For over two decades, Tony taught Scripture engagement, innovation, and contextualization. He sees this project as an extension of his previous work. At a recent Bible & Art Storying night, he started by having the middle schoolers tell dad jokes to get their energy up before delving into Proverbs 3. A kid who normally doesn’t show much spiritual interest piped up, “Can we change the word ‘heart’? That seems so mushy to me. Can we say, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your might’?” The question opened the floodgates; they all started participating and rewriting it in ways that made sense to them. Excited, they ran to share it with the adult house church downstairs.
Tony’s vision for ministry grew in the space created by the gift of support. When he transitioned from his previous organization, not all of his ministry partners followed him to Servant Partners. The financial pressure could have narrowed his focus to only raising support. Instead, the Staff Catalyst Fund gave him room to think beyond the immediate need. “I felt like I could actually breathe and think creatively,” Tony said. “Lacking funds makes it very difficult to think creatively. You’re only thinking about how to sustain yourself, worried about what you’re going to eat next. The Catalyst Fund gave me a renewed mindset to reimagine the possibilities, took the pressure off so I could pray and find the right partners, and gave me the space to strategize how I wanted my fundraising to look long-term. It allowed me to reconnect with donors and travel to share renewed vision.”
Historically, we put it on the missionary. If you’re called, you’ll get funded. But the Catalyst Fund says, ‘You’re called, and we believe in you.’ There's a calling from the organization to the missionary as much as the missionary is called to the mission.
The experience has also given him time to write about fundraising and who gets the opportunity to lead. “The structure of sending a missionary was not originally designed for women and people of color,” Tony shared. “We were the welfare recipients, the object of missions. Fundraising as we know it today was designed in the ’50s — it’s entrepreneurial. Historically, we put it on the missionary. If you’re called, you’ll get funded. But the Catalyst Fund says, ‘You’re called, and we believe in you.’ There's a calling from the organization to the missionary as much as the missionary is called to the mission.”
Reimagining begins by recognizing that God calls leaders from everywhere. “There is no theological space between a leader from the slums of Manila and a leader from the suburbs of Chicago,” Tony said. “If we ignore leaders in marginal spaces, we’re ignoring Jesus in those spaces. The Catalyst Fund enables people in marginal spaces to have a voice in our missional direction.”
Now that Tony’s ministry has launched, he hopes to recruit new staff and mobilize leaders across the Midwest. As a member of SP’s mobilization team, he recently presented the Storying Project at a church in Chicago’s Little India.
The Fund allowed Tony to build his ministry before he was fully funded — pastoring his house church, teaching kids to find their voice within God's story and serving pancakes to teens who need a place to belong. For him, mess is part of the ministry. “My home may be a little messier than it usually is, but embodying being a local house church doesn’t only mean people are coming to a Sunday service. The place where they’re experiencing something good about God is also our home, in our space.”
To read more stories or give to the Staff Catalyst Fund, visit www.servantpartners.org/vision2030.
