Building church from the outside in: Jacob and Maria Valtierra

Building church from the outside in

Church plant ministers to Native Americans in Milwaukee By Jenny Collins, M.A.

In September of 2020, when many churches still had closed doors, The Gathering Place opened theirs for the first time. “We decided that, pandemic or not, we need to set a date and go for it. That’s why we came here,” explained Jacob Valtierra ’11, ’17 M.A., founding co-pastor of The Gathering Place, currently the only church focused on reaching the Native American community in the Milwaukee metro area. The other reason they knew it was time to launch? Momentum. “We baptized 10 people before we ever even had a church service.”

Jacob, who is Ojibwe, Mexican, and White, and his wife Maria Valtierra ’12, who is also Mexican, moved their family from Minneapolis to Milwaukee in 2018—10 days before their third child was born.

Native Americans are one of the most marginalized ethnic groups. Jacob explained they can be hard to reach because of what happened between the Church and the Native people over the centuries. “There is a lot of historical trauma that Native people carry to this day,” he said. “It’s a bad taste in their mouth when they hear the name Jesus, the word “church” or anything about Christianity. In a lot of ways, they can’t accept it because of what happened in the past. We know what happened was not what we know as Christianity, so I feel like we’re here to repair the relationship. We’re a bridge between the truth of who Jesus is and the Native community. And we introduce the true Jesus.” Jacob said since Native people believe in a Creator, prayer, and spiritual gifts, there’s one thing he always tells traditional Native people: “The Creator has a name, and his name is Yahweh. And Creator has a son, and we know him as Jesus, but his tribal name was Yeshua. He was very much a tribal person—he comes from the tribe of Judah. He’s very much like an Indian.” Right away, he sees a shift in them after they hear this. “They’ve never heard that. They associated Jesus with the white man’s God, a white man’s religion. [They believed] this isn’t for us. And nothing could be further from the truth.”

Building on prayer, relationships outside the four walls

Moving and starting a church, however, wasn’t even on their radar four years ago. In 2017, Jacob simply felt God’s call to visit all 12 of the Native American reservations in Wisconsin, to pray specific scriptures (including Exodus 15, Psalm 24) over the land and the communities. He and another pastor took a threeday weekend to visit each place. “We prayed that God would heal the land, that through the healing of the land the people would begin to be healed.” During that weekend, Lonnie Johnson, a pastor in the Oneida community, mentioned that the Milwaukee area had a large Native population and asked Jacob if he would consider starting a church there. “I had never been to Milwaukee,” Jacob said. But when he mentioned the opportunity to Maria, she said she immediately felt peace about the idea.

One year later, they left their church, teaching, and traveling ministry roles in Minneapolis, and moved their family to Milwaukee. Their first goal was to build life-giving relationships within the Native community. For them, that meant “getting outside the four walls of the church and actually going into the education system, the healthcare system, nonprofits, and community

organizations already doing Kingdom work without the Kingdom label. They’re very compassion-oriented. And through the relationships, conversations happen.” A prodigal story

Jacob also openly shared his own story with them. “I’m a prodigal,” he said. “Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be like my dad. But I got kind of lost.” Jacob’s father, Thomas Valtierra of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota, was the first Native American ordained by the Assemblies of God. An evangelist, church planter, and pastor, Thomas traveled to reservations and tribal communities all over the U.S.

“I was struggling with my identity through my teen and young adult years and didn’t really know who I was, even though I was raised in the Church,” shared Jacob. Addicted to drugs and alcohol by his mid-20s, Jacob said he “felt really lost and broken, very hopeless and depressed. I knew Jesus was the way out, but I just didn’t know what that would look like.”

In 2006 he visited North Central University and experienced chapel—“like heaven come down to earth,” he described, having never seen so many young people worshipping God together. One year later, he enrolled as a non-traditional student— older than most first-year students by eight years. “That presented challenges because I didn’t really feel like I fit in, but I was there to pursue God’s call on my life.” Though Maria and Jacob knew each other from playing basketball and connecting over their shared Mexican heritage, it was in a Global Perspectives class their second year at NCU that the spark between them first started. They married during the final semester of their senior year. “We feel like we’re like an anomaly,” said Jacob, describing the diversity in their own family. “We have a diverse ethnic background. We’re from different generations—I’m older and borderline Generation X, but Maria is a Millennial.” He’s a self-proclaimed visionary while she keeps them grounded. “And we have a blended family,” added Jacob, who has a 21-year-old daughter. (Together, he and Maria have four children, age six and under.) “There’s a lot of messiness. I even hold up the Bible sometimes when I’m preaching and say, ‘you know, there are no perfect families in this book; this is full of messy families.’” Gathering with many tribes

When COVID-19 arrived, the Valtierras moved the prayer meetings they’d started onto Zoom, with around 30 people participating. Once they set September 12, 2020, as their official church launch day, they and their handful of volunteers hosted three outdoor pre-launch events during the summer.

Today, their Saturday night gatherings have grown to around 70 people live, with more tuning in from hundreds of miles away on their livestream. Jacob also hosts a weekly Facebook Live prayer time, greeting viewers with Boozhoo! (welcome in Ojibwe) or Yahswatayaht! (welcome in Oneida) and inviting participants to say hello in their own indigenous language or language of origin. “Every time I preach, I wear my moccasins,” said Jacob, who is also doing a two-year native language program through the University of Wisconsin, to better learn his language and connect with his heritage. Because The Gathering Place is an intertribal church, they welcome indigenous expressions and tribal dress, hosting a “Regalia Day” one Saturday a month, inviting people to wear their ribbon shirts, vests, skirts, jewelry, or moccasins. “We also have people attending the church who don’t have a Native American background, but we always tell them, you don’t have to be Native to come, but we want you to develop a heart for the Native people.” About one-third of the church is children, many of whom have never been to church, said Maria, who runs their growing children’s program. Show them love

“These kids are just little evangelists. They’re bringing their friends from the neighborhood around the block. They’re begging their cousins if they can come. They want their friends to know about Jesus. It’s really encouraging.”

Maria said the most significant thing non-Native people can do is to embrace them. “You don’t have to demonize their culture. You don’t have to let them know that some of their practices don’t line up with the Word of God—that’s the job of the Holy Spirit,” she explained. “If you show them love and if you show them that you value them, it speaks so much more. Because we ultimately, as Christians, know our identity isn’t solely in our culture. We know that we are citizens of heaven.”

These kids are just little evangelists. They’re bringing their friends from the neighborhood. They want their friends to know about Jesus. “

Learn more: facebook.com/TheGatheringPlaceMKE or thegatheringplacemke.org.