Tony Hudson

MARRERO, La. – In almost every way possible, Leon and Javon Every of Marrero, La., looked like the heads of a traditional household.

RÍO GRANDE, Puerto Rico – No one would've guessed that "Go big or go home" was an Ortiz family truism. After all, when God called Oscar Ortiz and his wife Wendy to plant a church in Río Grande, they didn't first launch a marketing campaign, send out glossy, full-color mailers, or pay for billboards, radio ads,and social media blasts.

MARRERO, La. – They didn’t know how much longer they had left. But they knew it wasn’t long. “It was bad,” Linda Morrow says. “We had no money, no people. We were just barely getting by with a handful of senior citizens.”

MONTREAL – "The beginning of the story is good. But the ending is even better." That's Andrew Mark Adil's opening line when people ask how such an unlikely man ended up in such an unlikely place doing such an unlikely thing.

TAPPAHANNOCK, Va. – He stood behind a traditional pulpit and looked out over a traditional congregation sitting in traditionally padded pews. He wore a traditional Southern Baptist pastor uniform – gray suit, neatly pressed white button-down shirt, and a red silk tie – and he preached a traditionally structured three-point sermon on Hebrews 1:1-4.

TAPPAHANNOCK, Va. – The house is in a Virginia pine forest at the end of a long, bumpy dirt road. The 30 people living here are 46 miles away from civilization.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – In August, Erin and Ellie were strangers. By October, they were best friends. That's what can happen when two never-met-before college freshmen get assigned one small 250-square-foot dorm room in which to live.

PROVO, Utah – Culturally speaking, David Gaskins is as far removed from the Bible Belt as a North American missionary can be. And yet Gaskins, who planted Mosaic Church in Provo, still knows first-hand this foundational truth of Southern Baptist life: “People,” he said, “always show up for food.”

LANGLEY, British Columbia – “You must be out of your mind.” No one said it. But it had to be what most reasonable people were thinking when they heard what Christian and Laura Rowland had decided to do.  

FLINT, Mich. – Leo and Miosha Robinson know what people think. And it hurts.