Our Vision

This article envisions what we hope a news reporter
would write about Fielder Church in 2026.

Our culture eats churches for breakfast. It devours them by revealing the overt hypocrisy latent in its members. It dismantles them by offering a better show. And it disregards them as irrelevant and superfluous to the American landscape and future. The clearest sign of the culture’s victory over the church comes in the unassuming form of empty buildings. People just don’t show up.”

As inescapable as this trend may appear in America, there are a handful of churches bucking the trend. Fielder Church in Arlington, TX is one of those churches, and it’s doing it in the simplest of ways. In their words, they produce people “who inhale and exhale the gospel and make disciples who do the same.” Apparently, that’s all you need.

This simple mantra has yielded unprecedented results for Fielder Church. In Arlington, a city known for high spending on sports and entertainment, their church is known for high spending on charity, city initiatives, hunger relief, and education. In 2026 alone, their church gave away six million dollars, almost half of their entire operating budget, to support city projects, to meet the needs of local residents, and to bring relief to some of the world’s darkest and neediest places. And money is only half the story.

Four times a year they forgo the weekly gathering at their six campuses around the city and gather for a unified day of service. In addition to that, each of their smaller home gatherings gives one weekend a month to serve a local nonprofit or city project. Together they have adopted and transformed 10 local schools by sending over 500 embers to give an hour a week to tutor and invest in the children. And for many of the families of Fielder Church, one hour a week just wasn’t enough of an investment, so they have opened up their homes through adoption and foster care to over 1,000 children needing a family. Sacrifice appears to be part and parcel to their existence, and the locals have taken notice. In fact, many have decided to join their ranks.

Last year alone, over 2,000 people joined their movement, at least half of whom have not set foot in a church for years, if ever. Javier Gomez, one of the new participants of the church, explained why he joined in. “I’ve always thought of the church as a group of people that expect you to conform to their way or to get out. They seemed mean, judgmental, and nothing like who I thought of when I heard the name Jesus. But this church was so different. You could take most any given member, and their character, their generosity, their passion would remind you of that Galilean carpenter that changed the world 2,000 years ago. They love deeply, they give sacrificially, and they choose to enter into people’s lives…, people just like me. I didn’t just want to be a part of them. I wanted to be just like them. So I jumped in.”

For Fielder Church, relief and assistance only touch the surface of what they do. They have started over 60 churches in the last 10 years, and 10 more are in the works as I write this. They have sent over 1,400 of their own members to start these churches, and they range in distance from 20 minutes away by car to 20 hours away by plane. In fact, 100 of those members have chosen to take their families and lives, uproot them, and replant them in some of the most dangerous and least receptive regions of the world. It is no understatement to say that Fielder Church is changing the world.

Through fasting and prayer, the leadership team re-envisioned what the church would look like if the gospel of Jesus became the bedrock and driver of all their activities. They began to dream of what a church could become if every one of its participants learned to plunge the depth of the in 2026 gospel personally and then to live out the gospel intentionally. They decided to start small with huddles of three to five people in what they call discipleship groups, where they would imbed the DNA of the gospel along with prayer, service, accountability and reproducibility. Core to these groups was multiplication. Each year those three to five would engage another three to five, and in a few years’ time, a movement occurred.

The church began to speak the same language, bear the same heart, and pray the same prayer, and it became unstoppable. They shared with me that some people left in those initial days as the leadership began to take attention away from providing goods and services and instead focused on investing in training the people for work. Yet those who remained have developed into a task force that hell itself fears.

Today they have more than 10,000 people in these small discipleship groups, studying the Bible, challenging each other, and helping each other discover who God designed them to be and what He wants them to contribute. But what makes this church even more unusual is who makes up the 10,000 people in their groups. At any given moment, it is near impossible to tell which culture is the dominant group. The spectrum of colors and cultures at their weekly worship gatherings testifies to the scope of their reach. Their worship music packs eclectic nuances of a dozen cultures or more into a unique sound that only this church could create.

They aren’t hip. They aren’t traditional. They aren’t young. They aren’t old. Truly, they just aren’t definable. But what they are is powerful. I imagine that when Jesus spoke of building a church in which the gates of hell would not prevail against it, he had this church in mind.