 God has placed you in this season for such a time as this. I truly believe that God wants to use you. God has anointed you and he wants to make you a vessel that brings him glory. I'm talking today with my friend Pastor Marcel Muniz from Praise Chapel Pasadena. He went and answered the call of God to pastor a church at the age of 29. And I want you to hear this testimony. I want you to hear the word that the Lord has placed in his heart. And I want you to be encouraged to pursue all that God has for you. I want to emphasize God wants to use you. And we're talking about the call of God. Pastor Marcel Muniz, welcome to Encounter TV. Now I need to full disclosure here off the top. Pastor Marcel is my brother-in-law. I married my sister Raquel and is the father of Danny J. And Jammers is what we call him. He's the great family. That's not why he's on the program. He's on the program because he's anointed and he's gifted of God. And I have some family members that are not coming on. But you're here because you're anointed. There's a call of God on you. So that's why you're here. And you have a story to share. You have just a passion to do things for God. So that's what we're talking about, the call of God. And I want my viewers to be encouraged to pursue that. So take us back there. Tell us a little bit about your family, yourself and where you are right now. Absolutely. I married to a beautiful wife. Her name is Rocky. She's awesome. She's my partner in crime for all the ministry that we do through thick and thin. She's not here because she's like, you know, I'll take care of the house and you just go and do what you got to do. So I honestly wouldn't be able to do the call that God has called me to if it wasn't for her. She's just there backing me up on my side throughout the whole thing. And she's great. She's awesome. She's church easy. Right. So if you're out, if you're there trying to like find a wife or like find a good wife that's going to make church and call doing the call of God super easy. So we've been married for a good time. And she, she, she was, she's out there with me in Pasadena. We, we moved out there last May and we started the church. We started the church plant in our home. It was probably about like five people. Now what was that like you actually, you didn't start in a church building as some people would think to do. Right. Yeah. You worked with what you had. Absolutely. In your home. We started our home and we, we, we got a great send off from our, our sending church was awesome. And they helped us get there. They helped move us out there. So we had support from their beginning. But once we got there where we're on our own, I had to do worship. We had to get the slide. So we had to do all these other things that like maybe some people up front wouldn't think a pastor should do, but you just got to, you just got to make it happen. Right. Did doing all the outreaches. And I remember being in the home, like you said, and most people don't feel like a church, a home church is really a church, but I, it really is, you know, I remember we, we did an outreach. We went out there and we started passing out flyers and there's one woman she actually showed up and she knocked on the door and she knocked on the door and I opened the door and I'm like just as surprised as her like, whoa, like there's someone here. Somebody came. Yeah. Somebody came. And she was just like, uh, is this a church? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it's totally a church. Trust me. But she was really weird because like in the early beginning, I could just tell she was a little apprehensive. She didn't want to come inside at first, but I like forced her inside, you know, and I strapped the, no, I'm just kidding. I didn't do that. But she came in, she, she loved it. But there's, it's, there, there's a little awkwardness in the beginning, I guess for this type of model, which is praise chapel. Not everybody is familiar with praise chapel, but praise chapel is the fellowship that we're part of. And really what we do is we, we believe in people. We win them, we build them and we send them. And, and a lot of times we send with as much support as possible, but they go out there sometimes by themselves, not alone, but we, with their family to get integrated into the, the culture, into whatever city that they're going out to. And, and, and they just go for it. And that's exactly where we're at right now. We were there in our home for about like four months from May, not four months, from May to October. I'm bad at math, so I don't know how long that was. But we were there from May to, to, to October. And I just felt God putting in our heart like, man, we're, we're going to outgrow this place. Like, and I remember like praying and, and just getting a sense of what God was doing there. And I remember telling my pastor, if we get like five more people, it's just five more people showed up. We hung out with them on a Friday. That was a Friday. Remember it was a Friday night. And I told them five more people show up. We're going to have to move. And then the next Sunday, five more people showed up, five people straight up showed up. And I was like, wow, like this is totally God. Like in, in, and it's just been a series of God moving, God speaking to us and, and, and just revealing himself in different ways like that, which caused us to take the next step. But we went and we got another bill. We got a building for the off of Colorado Boulevard. It's a great location. It's awesome. And it's, it's, it's been really cool to have people come to that, which is a little, I guess a step up from having home church. It's not so weird. You don't have to people feel awkward with that. Kind of. Yeah. And I'm just so thankful and blessed for the people that did go to the home church and, and, and believed in it from the very beginning. Cause that's just, to me, it just brings to mind a bless or those who believe who don't see it, like who don't see it and still believe like they're believing in what God was doing, even without the, all the extras that come with just having like a church building, right? It's funny how the culture kind of switched on that because in the early church, they met in people's homes quite regularly. Yeah. But where we come from, and I don't talk about it, I don't feel like I talk about it often enough. We're both from Praise, Chapel, Christian Fellowship. Now this is a fellowship of churches. It's basically a church multiplication movement. And so it started with one church in Maywood, California in 1976. And that church planted several churches and those churches plant churches and those. And so we're multiplying church churches, which the church is the number one tool of evangelism. Absolutely. So you are from, so my pastor is Pastor Omar Lopez. Take it all the way back, yeah. So let's take it all the way back. I go to a church in Paramount. My pastor is Pastor Omar Lopez who sent Pastor Mike Perez to Bel Gardens. Mike Perez to City of Bel Gardens. Who discipled you. Yep. Who then sent you to Pasadena. So it just kind of all connects. Yeah, it just keeps going and just keeps going. And so talk to me about that though because I think one of the dying messages nowadays that you don't really hear anything about is this message of the call of God costing you something. This message of, I know you kind of joked about, you know, the wife making it easier and you know. But you've talked to me and we've had several conversations at my dad's house and even just me and you one-on-one about the call of God, discipleship and the price to pay. You know, Jesus paid the price for salvation but we got to pay the price for the call. Talk to me about discipleship, where you came from, how God started to form that in you. Talk to me about that. Honestly, I can for sure say that we wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be as equipped that I am to be here in our church right now. If it wasn't for the cost of discipleship that I paid, I don't want to make myself seem like, oh yeah, like look at the stripes in my back. I'm like this all-star. But like the cost that we paid in being at bell gardens from the very beginning. It's kind of like a very similar story except that it wasn't a house that we started in bell gardens. It was a crummy warehouse. So it was a house, it was a crummy warehouse. And I remember people coming and people saying like, coming and leaving saying, man, this is a ghetto church. You know, and looking at it and kind of just despising the day of small beginnings and saying like, man, what's going to come out of this? Like there's no way anything come out of this, you know. And I think the cost comes when you look at something like that and you dig roots anyways. And you pay the cost of not chasing after the big, the extravagant, and you're faithful to a small vision with purpose. And that, man, putting effort and investing financially. Man, sometimes that can be, to me, I think that's a bigger cost when you're just taking care of something that hasn't even sprouted yet and you're just tending to something like that versus, oh, when you're just connected to a super big ministry. Which is great, you know, like if people find homes there, awesome, let them flourish where they're planted, where God brings them. But like in a place like that, I feel like God allowed me to be able to connect to the ministry, connect to the heartbeat of not only my pastor, but what God is doing in that city. And to me, I feel like it's more difficult when you don't see all the fruit up front, right? And you don't have a thousand followers just clamoring at how awesome your ministry is, how awesome, you know, like how you are and how great your preaching is. And just dealing with the people that not too many people want to deal with. I think to me that's one of the costs that we pay all the time. And again, it can kind of sound like, man, we're the martyrs and I'm not trying to make it seem like that. Like we're trying to elevate ourselves based on the cost that we pay. But I feel like when it comes down to discipleship, when it comes down to seeing God doing something huge, you've got to value the small for sure and treat it like if it was the biggest thing on earth. And to me, when we were there in bell gardens, I remember being there with like maybe five youth right now in that ministry. And I'm talking about kids that just, there are great kids now. Like if you look at those kids now in our church, they're leading the worship team. One of the guys is the assistant pastors. You have them, the leading young adult group that's just thriving. They have like a hundred plus people. It's just amazing. It's fantastic. It's just awesome. I look at it and it's like, man, I'm so pumped for these guys. But what I look back at, a lot of people don't see the new people that are coming to that. They don't see the cost that was involved when all these kids didn't have cars. And I was the guy driving from, I lived in La Habra, driving to La Marada to pick them up to bell gardens to take them to church, pick up some people in bell gardens to take them to the church. And mind you, I had like an Acura Integra. I remember that. And I was in college at this time. So I was the typical broke college student. I remember someone giving me five bucks for gas. I was like, thank you. God bless you, brother. I went to Jack in a Box because I had like no money. And I put half to the gas and the half I bought like two orders of tacos. Anyways, so I was there in doing this work when no one was patting my back. And there wasn't this incentive where like, man, my ministry is awesome. My ministry is like flourishing, right? And I had all this buy-in that people want to be on my team. People, you know, like buying, even from the top, like, man, your pastor saying, you're doing a great job, son. You know, like all that. And I remember being there and just investing in these kids and helping them out and speaking to them. And even when they went to their teen, they got out of their teen years and went to their adult, their like young adult stage when they didn't care about anything about church. All they wanted to do was just find their babe. You know what I mean? And I remember like investing and just hanging on to them, pulling. I remember some of them like saying, I want to go to the military. I'm like, bro, like you can't do that. You know, like you got to, not that you can't and that's bad. But I'm like, in their case, it wasn't God. Yeah. And just helping them to see that. But there was no accolades, right? I'm not getting any like stars right now. Like even right now, again, as I said, the ministry is just flourishing. But nobody knows my name there as it should be. Like, I'm not like, you know, it's great that nobody knows my name. It's great that there's new guys taking over. But I find it, it's the cost to pay for something when it's that young. Why do you think so many people struggle with it? I mean, you're describing here, and I love what you're describing, that you're just kind of in it to do the work. Not all of these things that surround it. Why is it that so many people have trouble with the price that comes along with it or working with the small or valuing the small? Why in our culture today, why do people struggle to value the small? I don't know. I think it's... I don't know if it's part of the millennial generation has to do something to that, that we, with everything that we have so instant, instantaneously, like, are not only just the microwaves, which, God bless, you know, I'm so thankful for the engineers who didn't pursue a ministry or a career ministry, but actually were engineers to create those things. I think, God bless those guys. But even just the accessibility of 4G networks and just stuff that we get just like that. And you kind of don't even have to pay for that stuff. It's just part of life. You have stuff that fast. And for the millennial generation, maybe plus or minus five years from 30, like 35 to like 25, maybe even younger, it kind of translates to church. You want to be a part of something that has value, that has impact, that you yourself are half-satisfaction in your ministry, but it doesn't come quickly, you know? And I think another thing, too, is that what comes... I hate this term that I'm about to say, but paying your dues. I really hate that term. I do. I personally, like in my job work for LA County, I've lost promotions to other people because I haven't paid my dues, right? And it's just like, bro, I have so much experience that you guys don't even know about. You don't even know how to double-click on a mouse and you're giving these promotions to all these people. And so I get it. And I vibe with millennials who have a problem with that saying. But I feel like on the flip side, there's some truth to that. Because you can't really expect to change the system. You can't expect to change or influence your church, your small church, right? Your pastor maybe doesn't see the value in the lights, doesn't see the value in doing amazing stuff like this, doesn't see the value in having a young adult ministry or a youth ministry. No lie, there's a lot of pushback. There's gonna be a lot of pushback in church. And I understand that a lot of times people will be turned off by that. And they'll be turned off by pushback and criticism in the church. I totally get that. And there's a case for that. But I will say that there has to be some vetting and you have to just get through that, man. I believe all change comes from the top. So unless you're willing to have an influence and have, I guess just as Paul said about Timothy, man, like this guy is just vetted. This guy has proven himself over and over. And he's standing for Timothy with these church people because he's like, man, you guys can't say anything about Timothy. He's proven himself. And Tide is all these young men because they've proven themselves. And I feel like there's value in proving yourself in ministry, paying the price, partnering with your pastor when it's small, you know, when things aren't just awesome and amazing, when they don't serve your needs, right? And I feel like some, that could be missed with our generation. And they don't, we don't pay that price, you know? And it's just like, I want to make impact. I want my ministry to be as awesome as someone else's ministry that I see on Instagram. And just because you get a little pushback from your church, it's like, you know, whatever. They don't see the value that I have. They didn't look at my resume, you know? And they just, man, they have no idea what they're missing out on. And I totally understand that. But at the same time, I feel like throughout the scripture, you know, we see people valuing the ministry and getting vetted and improving themselves. So value is small. Yes. Pay your dues. That was a two great point. Give me one more just as far as things that you're learning on your journey of pioneering this church. Because you didn't, here's one of the things I wanted to point out. You said earlier, you didn't just go. You were sent. Yeah. You served under a pastor for how many years? I was there for like 10, 11 years. 10, 11 years before you were finally released to pastor church. Yeah. That's missing nowadays. People don't want, they say, I don't want to be under a system. God's not controlling. Oh, yeah. That's an ugly spirit. Absolutely. That's an ugly spirit. And so that's one of the things I've always respected about you is that you're willing to serve. And so tell me now, where is your church? It's in Pasadena, California. It's right off of Colorado Boulevard. And we're actually looking to go to the next level. I mean, to me, I think it's just phenomenal God's doing from what I've heard. We work with a lot of other church plants out of Praise Chapel. And I'm hearing stuff that like, man, where we're at, it's like a miracle. Like some people don't get out of their homes for like four years. I'm just like, wow. And not only did we get out of our house and we got into this building that we're at, but we're God's leading us. He's leading us to go even bigger than that. And to me, every step of the way, I'm just blown away at what God's doing, not only in like, I guess, the momentum of the church, but the people in the church. They're just blowing me away that they're connecting to the vision about what God is doing in the city, that they're understanding that they've been blessed for a purpose, that what God brings them financially, what God brings them in their special skills and abilities in their own characteristics, that they're not just using it for their own good, their own benefit. They're saying, I want to invest that into the church. We're in a series where I call Be the Church. And what it's talking about is, is not just using God's blessing and going to the church just so I can hear a good word. And you know, like, man, put that on Instagram. You know, like tweet a memorable statement that the pastor said, but saying like, God's giving me this, not only should I go to church, but also be the church and use the things that God has given me for a purpose. And it's just wonderful to see that people are connecting to that vision. We just had a meeting with these guys that are just social media managers. Another guy, he's onboard. He's like a, he's trying to intern for that stuff. And I'm like, man, I'm so thankful that these guys are just willingly just connecting to this and just understanding the vision from the very beginning. It's just wonderful. And it would be, I guess, even more wonderful. If anybody, you know anybody in Pasadena that would love to be a part of a church plan and really just learn to know what it means to pay the price of discipleship, of investing into something that small. Man, let me tell you, God's doing something wonderful. And I would love to have you a part of the church and whatever giftings that God has blessed you with. Let me tell you, I do worship. I'm not good at it. I play acoustic. I drop my pick inside the guitar all the time, you guys. And I drop it all the time. And I'm telling you, there's so much opportunity that God has for people, believers. Maybe you know somebody that wants to get connected in Pasadena. We would love to have them come out. And I believe- What are the cities around there? There's Altadena. There's Arcadia. There's San Gabriel. San Marino. South Pasadena. Any of the area, by the foothills, we would love to have you guys come by. The 210, we're extremely close to the 210. Me, like a minute away from the 210. We have service on Sundays at 10 a.m. And we're looking to kick off a connect group, a house group during the week. So we're looking for anybody that would be interested in partnering with us and just believing God. I believe I'm a pastor that believes in persuasion, not in coercion. I'm not going to try to coerce you and make you feel bad and guilt-trip you into doing something. I'm a pastor that believes in just preaching the word and just believing that the Holy Ghost will encourage you, convict you to get into action. You're looking for a church where you want to grow. And I don't always do this. You guys know me. I don't always do this with other ministries. I had Ben Limon a couple of weeks ago, and I'm starting to have other ministries on as I promised you I would. But I only bring people on here who I have no reservations about. Without reservation or hesitation, I can recommend this church not only for you to get down there and be a part of your looking for a church and you're in the area, get to that church. You know someone, get them to that church. This is a place where you can fulfill the call of God on your life. This is a place where God can use you. And like you said, you're in small stages. Don't despise the small, but you're also thinking big. Yeah, absolutely. You got big plans and connect with that church. Marcel, why don't we real quickly, just about a few seconds here. Look right at that camera. Encourage them real quick and pray with them that God would stir their heart for the call. Amen. Lord, we just thank you right now in Jesus' name for the opportunity to be on this platform and just minister your word and just invite people to answer the call. If there's anybody hearing this right now and they're in the area, I pray Father God that you would just minister to them and just if that's you for them to come over, Lord God and be a part of what you're doing, Jesus. Man, I fully welcome it and I just confirm it right now that you've been thinking about going to church. You've been looking to go to a church and not just to clear over your life that this would be it. Jesus' name. Jesus' name. Amen. Well, this is an introduction. I know we didn't get... I went by quick. Yeah, it did. This is just a quick introduction. Pastor Marcel will be back on and we'll get into teaching and scripture. Yeah. You have a ton of it. Absolutely. But I feel this was just a good introduction for you to get to know his ministry and get to the church if you can. God bless you. Thank you Pastor Marcel. Thanks man. I appreciate it. Join me. Well, that is it for this edition of EncounterTV interviews. Until next time, remember nothing is impossible with God.