Story of God at Work in Reno
A skyline painted with casinos, a place that permits prostitution, promotes promiscuity, and encourages substance abuse, may sound like the opposite of a place God would send His people. Just as Jesus entered the hostile Samaria to reach a weary woman at a well in John 4, our God sent a team of people from Moscow, Idaho, to Reno, Nevada, to make His name known in the summer of 2021.
Steven and Nicole Trantham led the team planting in Reno after being asked to consider by Keith Wieser and a scouting trip where they met with local ministries, feeling encouraged about the new thing God could do there and a lingering feeling of desolation in that city. After announcing planting at the University of Nevada Reno at Resonate Conference and several scout trips, a team was committed to being sent. As the team began to settle in, they quickly noticed the depths of the brokenness not only on the campus of the University of Nevada but the city of Reno at large. The campus had 20,000 students and less than 100 of them identified with any faith, starkly contrasting the area many of the team members had moved from. Going from a rural Idaho town to a place of bright lights and showmanship in Nevada opened the eyes of the team to the severe need for Jesus. The need for the Light of the World is evident in Reno, and the enemy of our souls longs to steal opportunities, kill our joy, and destroy our identity, and our God has come to give us life in abundance (John 10:10).
“Understandably, when engaging with strangers, the students of UNR often proceeded with caution, establishing a barrier for uncertain and standoffish students. The enemy was at work, but so was our God. ”
Immediately, there were a multitude of hoops to jump through as the city was at the tail end of its COVID regulations, masks were required on campus, which made connecting with others difficult, the core team didn’t have club status yet, and as a result, weren’t allowed to hold a Sunday Gathering on campus either. Not only were people closed off because they were coming out of the distancing guidelines of the pandemic, but the city of Reno is generally unsafe. Understandably, when engaging with strangers, the students of UNR often proceeded with caution, establishing a barrier for uncertain and standoffish students. The enemy was at work, but so was our God. Working to fight against that barrier, the core team and staff were able to help move students into their dorms at the beginning of the school year, and they ended up being the only volunteers there. Slowly but surely, God began to chip away at the barriers present, connecting them with more and more students. Since they still weren’t a club on campus and were not permitted to table at the club fair, Steven and the team printed 500 fliers with information about Resonate on them, attached them to airhead candies, and passed them out on the perimeter of the quad.
Faithfully showing up and being a presence on campus began to establish familiarity among the student body slowly. Trial and error occurred often and led the team to figure out innovative ways to reach students who passed by, allowing them to engage if they felt comfortable.
Making their faces known on campus, Steven and the team would consistently show up in highly populated areas on campus, which ended up being few and far between due to the fairly high academic focus most students have. Something as simple as lawn games on the quad established familiarity and led to 50 people attending the first small group gathering that the Reno team held. Not expecting many to show up, the team was completely shocked and began to realize just how much the UNR students desired a place to belong. The dark side of this desire to belong and be a part of a community is put on display in the rampant party culture that seeps from the casinos and clubs of downtown Reno to campus and beyond. During their first year in Reno, the team hosted a Halloween party for students at a few of the core team member’s homes, where 700 people showed up, and just about 500 walked through the front door. Although this party got out of control because a campus “party plug unintentionally spread it,” many got connected, and two gave their lives to Jesus the next semester. What the enemy meant for evil, the Lord used for His good, reconciling His people to Himself amidst darkness and hostility (Genesis 50:20).
Ashton Shaul, a staff member in Reno, shared that many refer to Reno as “satan’s throneroom,” and despite it being made “clear the enemy didn’t want us here,” God was still faithful to shine His light in the suffocating darkness of the city. Ashton and their team noticed that people began to stick around despite their apathetic response to the gospel shared with them frequently. Ashton said there was a distinct presence of “people of peace with a lot of relational capital,” connecting them to the campus, which felt like it was sometimes working against them. If their goal is to share the good news of Jesus with as many as possible, they just need to find the right people with the right connections, just as Jesus revealed Himself to the woman at the well who quickly shared His goodness with anyone who would listen in her town.
One of the people Steven, Ashton, and their core team met several years ago during the first Week of Welcome. They were on campus, and he introduced himself as a “militant atheist” but still stuck around. Despite his self-declared disbelief, He would attend every event, including church on the weekend. God was working on his heart despite the faithfulness of the team to show up and consistently share truth with him, leading to his eventual declaration of Jesus as his Lord years later. Not only did this young man come from death to life, but he also is living into the call to mission, pursuing his classmates, campus, and city as a small group leader. As his graduation date is approaching, he’s decided to stay in Reno to be a part of their church, continuing to forsake the things of this world to advance the Kingdom of God. Steven notes that the death-to-life stories written in Reno are atypical of his experience in ministry in Moscow but just as impactful. Showing up to Samaria to save the outcasted woman at the well was worth it to Jesus, and sharing Jesus with the darkness of Reno is equally as worth it, for His everlasting light brings forth eternal life.
Ecclesiastes 3:2 tells us that there is “a time to plant and a time to harvest”; in the same way, there is a time to plant seeds of the gospel in the lives of others and a time to reap a harvest of the fruit that is born in them by the Spirit. For the past three years, Reno has been a place of fervently tilling rocky soil and planting countless seeds with hopeful expectations of what will come. Steven shares they are in a harvest season, with four small groups reaching the campus, more Grow Groups than he can count, three baptism services, and several people getting baptized. Their church has grown from a group of 15 to 55, clearly displaying that “He has brought these people out of complete and utter darkness and that it is always worth it no matter the cost,” according to Ashton. The enemy uses barriers to stop us in our tracks to carry out his evil schemes, but our God has given us the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome evil in His mighty name.
Less than half of the original team remains three years into planting in Reno, but God has proven faithful despite this. Steven and Nicolle are confident of this as they said, “we have never thought that we made the wrong choice in moving here,” for God alone is their security and safety. Remembering the character of Christ and His evident faithfulness postures our heart in worship, seeing that “he has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Not being allowed to gather on campus for longer than expected, hosting a party that got out of hand, and the countless rejection faced was all worth it, and even counted as a joy in reflection of God at work in Reno. Just as the woman clothed in shame and treated as an outcast was met by Jesus on a random day at a well while hiding from the other women, so are the people of Reno as the team continues to sow seeds of the gospel in their midst faithfully. Maybe the woman at the well didn’t ask to be interrupted and shared words that would save her, but upon remembrance, I’d bet she’s beyond glad to have come face to face with her deliver. Finding temporary satisfaction in the attempts to fill a void with the things of this Earth may have charade as the “best life” to those in Reno, but encountering people who wanted to build a family and a God who called them into eternity would be the answer to the “eternity set in their human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The people of Reno can know Jesus as deliverer, savior, friend, and satisfyer as they walk in the light of His radiant glory, forsaking the emptiness of substance, promiscuity, loneliness, and addiction. There is more than we could ask, think, or imagine in Christ Jesus.
