who we are
Our Vision is to be a welcoming community that seeks to help people experience a bold, authentic, life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ.
Founded in 1884, Gainesville Church has a long 130 year history in the Gainesville community. We moved to our brand new facility from our original church building in 2006. This new facility has enabled the growth of the congregation to over 1,000 members, and has enabled the missions and ministries of Gainesville Church to expand and flourish.
John Patterson
Senior Pastor
Pastor John has served as the senior pastor of Gainesville Church since 1997 and has led the church through numerous transitions from a small, country church of less than 100 to our current campus of more than 1,000 people. He is a Western Pennsylvania native, and he is married to his wife Daleen, and they have four adult children.
Benson Mcglone
Lead Pastor
Benson grew up in San Antonio, Texas and received his undergrad at Kansas State University. He later received his Masters of Divinity from Duke University in North Carolina. Benson first pastored a church in Virginia Beach and then joined the staff here at Gainesville Church in 2017 as the church planting pastor of our second campus, Revive House Church. Continuing to see the church grow, sharing Jesus and reaching people who have never been to church is Benson's passion! When he's not serving the church he enjoys spending time with his family, wife Alicia, their young son & their two energetic dogs named Bean and Duncan. If you've met Benson, you know he is a self proclaimed "nerd" & "super goofy", and on long weekends you can find him riding his bike and spending time with family & friends.
Service Information
We have 3 Sunday worship services with various styles of worship. Whether you prefer a traditional choir or a band playing worship music...we strive to be inclusive in our Sunday morning worship styles.
9:30am - Modern Worship
8am & 11am - Traditional Worship
Sunday Classes
9:30am & 11am - Children's Classes (Birth-5th grade)
9:30am - Youth Classes (6th-12th grade)
9:30am & 11am - Adult Classes
Loving God
Whether you have loved Jesus your whole life or are just beginning your faith journey, we believe the most important thing for us to do is love God through worship. We believe that worship doesn’t have to look the same for everyone, but rather should be an authentic expression of how someone best connects to God. So we offer a variety of expressions of worship like traditional services, more casual modern services, and even new expressions such as a small group of people gathering in a home together to praise Jesus.
Our love for God is not just about our hearts but also our minds. Therefore we believe that we also love God by going deeper in our faith, learning to think more and more about our creator and his love and grace for us. But don’t worry, you are not alone on this journey…
Loving Those we Know
We are called to love others. One of the easiest ways we do this is by regularly gathering with a small group to share life's joys and struggles. To create a space for others to be bold in being honest about what they are going through as well as have a place and community where we can do the same. Gathering together in an intentional community enables us to form authentic relationships with real friends and our neighbors free of judgment. In these spaces, we can learn, stumble, fail, laugh, grow, learn, stumble again, and have grace for each other as we go deeper and deeper in our faith. This is an important part of Gainesville Church!
Loving Those We don't Know
Scripture also tells us what credit is it to love those who are easiest to love, so we take very seriously our responsibility to witness to and love those we don’t know. We don’t do this by beating people over the head with the Bible, or by casting judgment upon them. Rather we believe in sharing our relationship with Jesus first and foremost in the authentic way we live our lives and having the same love for people we don’t know and even don’t particularly like by showing the same love to them that Jesus has shown for us. We call this Good Neighboring. We want to love our neighbors so much that were we ever to move or leave they would not only know we were gone but would deeply miss us.
Loving Sacrificially
Finally, we grow into the practice of loving sacrificially. This means we set ourselves, our agendas, and our personal preference aside in order to fully serve God, our church, and our community. We offer up our talents and skill, our time, and our money in sacrificial generosity not only out of love for God and others but because we want to see God’s kingdom built here in this place. We want to support and see His grace and love overflow into our area and neighborhoods so that others would come to know Jesus. We recognize by no work of our own God has tremendously blessed each and everyone one of us and we want to bless others with those blessings.
