Who We Are. The Lead Pastor and Family

Ryan and Leslie Rice will serve as the founding church family to plant Imago Dei Community Church in Phoenix, Arizona beginning in May of 2010. Ryan will serve as the Lead Pastor/Elder of the church.

Ryan has worked in youth ministry for over 10 years serving on staff at churches such as Fellowship Bible Church, Lake Pointe Baptist Church and Resurrection Anglican Church. In addition, he has a long background in outdoor ministry working as a guide at Noah’s Ark Adventure Co. His interdenominational experience will help add to his ability to adapt to the new church partners and church planting networks.

Ryan and Leslie have been married for 7 years and have five-year-old twins, a boy, Sam and a girl, Riley. They recently moved to Little Rock from Dallas, after Ryan graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary. While studying various church plants of Ryan’s home church, (Fellowship Bible Church) he discovered the need for international missions/church planting and pursued planting in Madrid, Spain. For nearly two years he took courses/independent studies to educate himself about the mission field and even spent a summer with his family exploring this potential call. Later, through a series of events and circumstances the Rice’s sensed God’s clear call within the counsel of many to remain in the United States and plant a sending church that would equip others to plant churches in major cities of the world.

Ryan  attended Fellowship Associates Leadership Residency for church planters. Fellowship has been equipping and empowering church planters for the last 10 years and has more then a 95% success rate in planting churches. The Rice’s will graduate from the leadership residency in May of 2010 and move to Phoenix Arizona to plant Imago Dei Community Church.

With more then 10 years of ministry experience in the church and fresh passion for international ministry Ryan and Leslie chose the name Imago Dei Community Church to share with the people of Phoenix a greater story about God’s love for all people. “Imago Dei” is Latin for “In the Image of God” this message is the heartbeat of the church- a love for Jesus and all people.

Our Missional Approach

Side Door Assimilation
If we as a church will own our vision statement: Love One. Love All. We won’t try to open the door of the church wider; rather we will open more doors in various communities around the city.

reaching a diverse people of various culture and various needs. This approach fosters flexibility, creativity and contextualization of the gospel, making the message more relevant within each cultural community. This idea is not new rather it is ancient. It is a basic missionary principle that our church holds to at the core of its philosophy. We believe that more and more people today want to experience or witness Christian community without having to join the public worship celebration first.

In light of our cultural experience, and a biblical mandate to make disciples, we as a people of God see value in extending the gospel in multiple avenues, empowering Christians to extend gospel within both small and medium sized communities throughout our city. We recognize that the traditional worship celebration may as well be the first step for the unchurched; therefore we will in time establish a weekly worship service on Sunday mornings for the purpose of Exaltation of Christ, through the preaching of his word, communion for believers, worship and baptism.

This organic approach allows our church body to engage their neighbors, at multiple levels. This model pushes our church leadership to focus on Leadership Development, Equipping Christians to Establish Communities.

This model is a missional model for churches. It’s not the model but a model. There are many other forms but we are choosing this way to keep or structures a little more decentralized than your typical church and more flexible to increase our member participation and upping the Ante on how to do church. We are empowering ordinary people to be pastors to their neighborhoods and spheres of influence. We are talking the church to our culture.

The advantages are many. To name one, this model increases access and opportunity for un-churched/un-believers to see and experience the gospel in the context of community. The un-churched are able to more quickly and organically assimilate into a community of believers, which in reality increases their likelihood of sticking around and growing in their faith.