When Dan Jacko isn’t busy helping people learn to walk again, he’s assisting his church members with their spiritual walk. Pastor Dan, a professional physical therapist, is also serving as lay pastor for the Mountain View Conference in the two church district of Elkins and Parsons, West Virginia. He also teaches biology and chemistry to the academy level students at the Highland Adventist School in Elkins. His wife, Cheryl, is an educator and registered nurse, and serves as the principal of the K-12 school. Their son, Jeremy, teaches Bible, math, and history.

Image © Lars Justinen from GoodSalt.com

Believing mission is important, every other year, Pastor Dan leads the students and church members on a mission trip. So far, they’ve been to Mexico, Panama, Honduras, and in 2014, Costa Rica.

While in Costa Rica they built a church during the day, and presented evangelistic meetings and Vacation Bible Schools in four different churches in the evenings. In spite of his own full schedule, Pastor Dan was impressed with the dedication of the pastor in Costa Rica, who shepherds six churches, and doesn’t have a car.

Not only does Pastor Dan and his members build churches abroad–they also build them at home, where they recently completed their own church and school, located on five and a half acres (2.2 hectares), and are completely debt-free.

The most recent challenge for Pastor Dan and the 80-member Elkins church is keeping up with the many Bible study requests coming from their community. Over the course of three mailings in 2013 and 2014, everyone in the state of West Virginia received an invitation for the Voice of Prophecy’s Discover Bible course. The response was overwhelming–with 10,000 people indicating that they would like to have Bible studies. Of that number, more than 200 came from the Elkins/Parsons area.

Some are face-to-face Bible studies, explains Pastor Dan, and others prefer to take them by correspondence, which are then graded by our local church members. The local churches are responsible for purchasing the lessons and providing postage for correspondence students.

What makes this area even more of a mission field, says Pastor Dan, is that you’ll get a lot of people who say, I believe this, but if their family isn’t in favor of it, a lot of them just won’t make the commitment.

Nevertheless, Pastor Dan and the small churches he leads see reaching people for Jesus in their territory as an important mission and are willing to give the time, effort, and funds needed to help it succeed.

Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission.
Find more stories at www.adventistmission.org

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