Family and Ministry Updates

Dear Praying Friends,

Thank you for all the prayer and encouragement over the last few months as we have sought the Lord about the opportunity to get into this building.

Here is an update on our ministry from the last few months and on the building.

We are under contract to purchase the new building, pending the issuance of a conditional use permit by the city!

We are grateful for the invitation from Pastor Marshall Stevens and Calvary Baptist Church to attend their Church Planting Conference the first week in December. There, Pastor Stevens graciously introduced the needs of our home remodel and the building purchase, and the money was raised to replace the roof on our home! The preaching and fellowship was a tremendous encouragement, and our boys were very grateful for the children’s Christmas offering that was given to all the ministry kids who were present.

In December and January, we had the opportunity to present the Gospel to several who came to meet with us at the park, even in thirty and forty-degree, very wet weather. Pray for one man, clearly a demoniac, who showed up one Sunday to protest every Scripture I preached for awhile. I invited him to sit and hear what the Bible said, but he declined. The next week, he was back, seemingly without the demons, and was willing to listen to me tell him about the Lord. While he did not receive the Lord that day, he has been there waiting nearly every Sunday when we start services, and walks circles around us, listening to the preaching. Please pray with us that he will soon receive Christ!

Pray also for a man named Jack, who received Christ on Sunday night, January 4th. A lifelong Jehovah Witness, he had many questions, and was hesitant to turn his back on his family and religion, but came to understand that his eternity was more important. It was a precious thing when “it all clicked” and he called upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ alone to save him, renouncing his old religion.

Now, for an update on the building. We have been praying about turning an old bar near the park that we have been meeting in – into a Baptist church building. It is in a great location with lots of traffic. Around the first of December, we learned who the owner was, and that he was willing to sell it to us for $110,000 and carry a contract if we could come up with $60,000 down.

The owner had other interested buyers, and I told the owner that we had no money, and that he should sell it if the Lord would give him a buyer. He contacted me two weeks later, and gave me the keys to the building, and told me that he’d give me time to find the down payment. While we couldn’t meet in the building, we could hold prayer meetings there, which we do every Sunday, and our church people sacrificially gave as much money as we could toward the building (and continue to do so).  

We attended the Church Planters’ Conference at Heartland Baptist Bible College in hopes of being able to present the need for the down payment. As there were many needs to present, we were unable to present ours, yet God put us in contact with others there, and we were able to raise $50,000 toward the down payment. In going back to the owner, he lowered the down payment, and we signed a contract, pending being able to get fire insurance (a hassle in California) and a conditional use permit.

For the last two weeks we have begun cleaning up the corner – mowing the lawn that has not been mowed for a few years - and doing a lot of trimming. The neighbors are noticing and several have stopped and are grateful that “another bar is not going in there.” The “for sale” sign is down, and the alcohol signs are out of the windows. Hopefully soon, a sign inviting people to Grace and Truth Baptist Church will replace them.

Please pray with us as we attend the city council meeting next Tuesday, February 10th, that God will give us grace with those present. This is our final hurdle before closing sometime in February.

Then the real fun will begin, as we will have a short amount of time to do some repairs to the building before we have some inspections. Please pray that the Lord will provide the necessary resources to get those repairs completed, and on time.

Thank you for your prayer and encouragement.

In Christ’s Care,
Jared & Krysta Watkins
Enoch, Ezra, Ezekiel, & EdWord

 Some have asked how they can give towards our ministry. The easiest way to do that is online through the giving page on our church website. It can be found at giving.gatbc.org. You can specify through the drop-down on that page whether you want to give towards the building or towards our family needs. Thank you for your generosity!

We have an opportunity to purchase this building for a very low cost, and turn an old bar into a Baptist Church building!

This is a building that we have been praying about since we have been meeting directly across the river from here for over 2 years, and I finally found who the owner was yesterday. The building is for sale. It is around 1800 square feet inside, sitting on about 1/4 of an acre with plenty of parking, on the 1/3 busiest street in the area (including major highways). It needs a lot of work, which I am able to do myself. It was last sold for around $350,000, and has not been open for about 6 years. The last person who tried to open it died of a heart attack, and it reverted back to the person who is selling it now. Due to the work that is needed and the fact that it cannot be mortgaged, he is asking $110,000, and is willing to carry a contract on $50,000 of that (so we need to come up with a down payment of $60,000).

One bonus that it offers is that one end of the building has been wired, plumbed, and permitted as a laundromat. If we were to keep that end separate from the church meeting space and actually open it as a laundromat, it could pay off the rest of the mortgage, and help facilitate other church planting expenses.

For those of you who do not know about me and our church plant, my name is Jared Watkins. Grace Baptist Church (Pastor Steven Harper) in Cle Elum, Washington, sent us out in January of 2023 to plant a church in Los Molinos, California, a rural town of about 2000 people in Northern California. We established Grace and Truth Baptist Church in September of 2023. When our initial plan for a building fell through, we began meeting in Mill Creek Park, which is directly across the river from this building. We meet year round in the park, which has benches to meet on, and is surrounded by three mobile home parks, giving us plenty of ministry opportunities. We have seen souls saved and baptized and added to the church.

Depending upon what we have going on, we may have up to 35 attend, and I'm sure that we would have that regularly with a building. Last Sunday, it was around 40 degrees when we met for services in the park, and we had a few visitors who stayed for a few minutes before finding somewhere to get warm. I'm content to meet in the park as long as the Lord wants us to, but it sure would be a blessing if we could pray our way into this building.

There are three things that you can do to help:

1. Pray. That's most important.
2. Hire me. I support our ministry through my graphics, website, and small business consulting business. Call me if I can be a help to you, your business, or your church. (360) 300-7635 is my cell.
3. Give if the Lord wants you to. Here is a link to our giving page on our church website: https://giving.gatbc.org. There is a drop-down for the building purchase.

Thank you for your prayerful consideration!

In Christ's Care,

Jared & Krysta Watkins
Enoch, Ezra, Ezekiel & EdWord

Dear Praying Friends,

Thank you for praying with us for our ministry here in Northern California! Allow us to update you on what God’s been doing, and brag on some of God’s blessings. We’ll share some prayer requests, too.

Fair and Summer Ministry

In our last ministry update, we were preparing for a fair ministry opportunity, which took place in May. We had a creation / dinosaur-themed booth at our county fair. That allowed us to get the Gospel into the hands of a lot of people very quickly. Thanks to Lighthouse Baptist Press, my friend, Dr. Bryan Gentry, our sending church in Cle Elum, and many others who helped, we were able to get out approximately 10,000 gospel presentations or invitations into people’s hands between a combination of John and Romans, Gospel Tracts, Water Bottle Tracts, Revival Invitations, and more – all in 4 days. All 8 of our church members did an outstanding job to pull this off!

We were able to talk to several people, give a complete Gospel presentation to all who would listen, and collect the contact info to follow up with about 160 others. We immediately went into a revival with Dr. SM Davis the next day, where we had several visitors. During the revival, we launched “Character Club,” a Wednesday-night character-based discipleship club to teach families to be conformed to the character of Christ by following the examples of Bible characters. These events led to three being saved, and two being baptized later in the summer, for which we are praising the Lord!

A young man who was the very first visitor that we had on the first Sunday that we met as a church in September of 2023 finally decided to receive Christ as His personal Saviour instead of depending upon his grandmother’s faith to get him to heaven. He also followed the Lord in baptism in August.

Another young man began attending Character Club this summer. He first came during the revival following the fair ministry. In July, he received Christ as his Saviour, and then was baptized in August as well.

A 6-year-old young lady is our most faithful member of Character Club. She comes with her dad, who is a member of the church. In September, her dad led her to the Lord after services on a Sunday morning.

Please pray for a lady. We have had some visits with her in her home and she has attended services several times. She has a testimony of salvation and has expressed interest in baptism. She speaks Spanish and has many contacts in the Hispanic community, which we have a burden to reach, as much of our county is Hispanic. Pray also for a related man who is a deaf mute who we have been praying about reaching for some time. Recently he has attended some services, and we have learned that he learned written English in order to obtain US citizenship and legally avoid deportation. This gives us something to work with in getting him the Gospel. We strongly believe that God has brought these two into our paths to be an inroad to reaching a lot of people with the Gospel to whom we would otherwise not have access. Please pray that God would soften their hearts and give us liberty and the tools to reach, teach, and disciple.

Current Urgent Project and Needs

Please allow me to tell you about our current urgent project, and to brag on God a bit in showing how God has answered so many prayers in getting us to this point in the project.

When we first moved down to California, one of our biggest needs was an affordable place to live. God met that need by allowing me to be the caretaker for a farm that previously had been destroyed by a drug dealer. Since moving on, we have run off the druggies, and rebuilt the house, which is a mobile home that was severely abused by the previous occupants.

The house was full of holes and rot. We redid the plumbing and electrical, the floors, corrected the framing, poured concrete pads under it to level it properly, and now we are working on closing things back in. We had hoped to have this done before the cold weather, because camping out is easier when it is warm. However, now we are facing very short periods of sun in between heavy periods of rain going into winter.

So, let me tell you what God has done. Last year, we were trying to put together the money for consistent power. God has provided that miraculously! Now we have enough solar for most of the time, and then about a month ago, God gave us an almost brand-new whole-house generator for $100 dollars! Power is no longer an issue!

God provided all the sheetrock that we needed for the house – absolutely free, because a big box store accidently counted the two sheets that were stuck together as one and delivered twice as many to a customer and then refused to acknowledge the mistake and take them back. So, that customer told me that if I’d haul off the extra sheets, I could have them – which of course was a direct answer to prayer and saved me a couple thousand dollars.

God provided most of the insulation we need for the house – probably about 80% of it – because someone had borrowed a trailer from one of our church members and when they returned it, it was full of insulation, and they just told them to keep it. They didn’t need it, and knew I needed it, so God provided the insulation.

On our recent trip up to Washington for the Yakima Home Missions Conference, God lead our sending church to pay for our siding for the house, and we have picked that up, and we are getting ready to install it.

We were planning to reuse the windows that were on the house, but when we went to remove them to start doing the siding, they were so damaged that they could not be reused. So, we went to the Lord. God gave me a project that I could finish same day and get paid, and then provided all matching windows and sliding glass doors that we needed – and exactly what we wanted - at the Habitat for Humanity Restore for exactly how much money I made on that project – and at a fraction of the cost of buying them new.

So, here’s the thing – God has gotten us all the way through this project to where we are now, but we have a little ways to go to finish it up.

We fund our ministry and provide for our family through graphic design, websites and small business consulting. We need a couple of good projects right away to fund the rest of this remodel. We have about a week to work on this before our next big storm. It is getting pretty cold at night, and these are the things that I need to finish funding to get the house closed in with windows, doors and siding:

• Some house wrap and flashing
• A little more wiring that goes behind the walls that have to be closed up
• Some miscellaneous plumbing and propane pieces
• A few more 2x4s for framing
• A little more insulation
• A chimney stove pipe so we can run our wood stove
• Our cook stove went out on us as well, so we are currently cooking cowboy style over a campfire

I know that God provides every time we go to Him in prayer, and we are just thrilled to see how he has answered prayer left and right for us, so prayer is the most important thing that you could do for us. Since we fund our ministry through our business, you could also be a big help to us by hiring us if you need graphics or website help or by recommending us to someone who might. Give me a call or text at 360-300-7635 and we can talk more about that.

I’m often asked to include a giving link for those who are led to help us. You can do so through our church website by going to giving.gatbc.org. Please choose “Watkins Family Support” from the ‘fund’ dropdown menu to designate it to help us with this project.

Thank you so much for praying for us! It means the world to us!

In Christ’s care,

Jared & Krysta Watkins

Enoch, Ezra, Ezekiel, and EdWord

Dear Praying Friends,

I’m excited to tell you about an exciting opportunity that the Lord has put together for us. Through a series of miracles, we have secured the last available vendor booth at the Tehama County Fair, and intend to use it to get the gospel to as many people at one time as possible. Approximately 1/3 of our county attends this fair, which means that we should have the opportunity to witness to about 20,000 people at one time. The fair runs Thursday, May 1st through Sunday, May 4th, 2025. We have put together a Creation and dinosaur theme for the booth with the intention of telling them that the God who personally created the universe, personally cares about every individual and offers them the free gift of salvation.

Immediately after the fair, we have scheduled an open-air, “Great Commission Revival.” Dr. SM Davis has made himself available to come and preach for it. The idea is to try to get as many people from the fair into the revival, where we can help them understand where they belong in God’s plan. Monday, May 5th, will be all about salvation, when Dr. Davis will preach “How To Tell if You’ve Been Saved.” Tuesday’s message concerns why a person needs to be baptized and join a Biblical church, and Dr. Davis will be preaching “The Unique Purposes of the Local Church.” On Wednesday, we plan to launch our ongoing mid-week kids and family program, “Character Club,” and Dr. Davis will help us understand why every Christian needs to grow in the Lord with his message, “What It Means to Walk in the Spirit.”

Please pray with us that God will move in a mighty way. Our small church of eight members if fully invested in seeing God work through this fair and revival.

We are humbled that many have given already to help us make this possible. Our sending church in Cle Elum, WA, sent us an offering to help cover the cost of the booth and some of the advertising. Lighthouse Baptist Press shipped us a pallet of John and Romans. Dr. Bryan Gentry in Florida, with the help of Mercy and Truth Printing Ministry in Kansas, is making sure that we have 2000 tracts and 1000 “dinosaur cards” for the fair. While there are many other pieces that need to come together, and expenses that need to be met in the next 7-10 days, I am confident that God will provide since He has already opened so many doors.

We have been asked to setup a registry on Amazon.com to list the things that we still need to purchase. That registry can be found here:

 Amazon Registry

You can also find it by searching for “Jared Watkins” on “find a registry” on Amazon. If the Lord impresses you to help with some of the needs, we are very grateful. You can also help by donating through our church’s giving page, which is found at giving.gatbc.org.

If the Lord leads you to take a spur-of-the-moment soul-winning missions trip to Northern California to help us, we would be thrilled to have you! Please call or text me at (360) 300-7635 to work out the details.

Most importantly, please help us bathe this in prayer. We have a HUGE opportunity here to reach a lot of people with the Gospel.

In Christ’s Care,

Jared & Krysta Watkins

Enoch, Ezra, Ezekiel, and EdWord

Dear Praying Friends,

In this update, I’d like to share some of what has been going on in our ministry, some blessings since our last update, and some prayer requests and needs. I am very passionate about reaching Northern California with the Gospel, and doing it God’s way. I hope that you will join us in prayer.

Blessings of God’s Provision

In October of last year, the Lord provided for us to attend the Home Missions Conference at Yakima Bible Baptist Church in Yakima, WA. There, I was graciously encouraged to give an update and present a couple of needs that we had. Through the generous giving of others, including church planters and pastors, the Lord provided a vehicle that was an exact answer to our prayer, and about one-third of the need for electrical power. I’ll share more about this need in a moment. We are very grateful that God used his people to meet these needs. Outreach In November, we had a Thanksgiving-themed outreach – An Old-Fashioned Day of Thankfulness. We had several visitors, and were able to present the Gospel to some new faces. One family that came had received some of our invitations on their door, and the dad told me that he had been watching us meet in the park for over a year, but wanted to see if we would stick around before he visited. We continue to make contact with most of these visitors.

Our theme in December was giving, in this spirit of the great Gift (Jesus Christ) that we celebrate at Christmas. In conjunction with each service, we had a special outreach focused on giving. One Sunday, the Lord lead us to a homeless encampment, where we gave some baskets of food that we had prepared, along with a gospel presentation in each basket. Several were eager for prayer and we were able to visit with several of these forgotten people. One elderly man told us that he worked all his life, but his retirement barely covered food now, and he lost his house due to taxes. Now he lives in the homeless park in a tent. Some were there because of poor choices or drugs. Many were there because the fires have wiped out everything they had. Without a home, they were fired from their jobs for instability. Without a job, they lost their place on a waiting list for a home. Regardless of the reason that they got there, Jesus is the solution. Without hope that is only found in a personal walk with God, drugs and alcohol often take over, perpetuating the problem.

Around the end of the year, we as a family, and also some of the men in the church, helped an elderly couple with some much-needed repairs on their home to get them through the winter. We did this in obedience to Matthew 5:16 (“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”). The wife has a salvation testimony, and tells all she meets about the Lord. The husband, however, was raised in paganism, and was not open even to a conversation in the beginning. The last day that we were there in January, I was able to overcome some of his barriers, and pray with him. Hopefully soon, he will receive the Lord as his Saviour.

Please pray for those we visited with through these outreaches: Les, Pam, Allen, James, Philip, Pancho, Liz, Derrek, Harleen, Sarah, Aiden, Ezekiel, Clarence, Carla, Dani, Jason, Jason Jr, Shawna, Lupe, Alex, Luna, Raynna, Rose, Mindy, Treasure, Harmony, and Shane.

We have had some bad storms and flooding that has wiped out one of the mobile home parks that adjoins the park where we meet for services. Dozens had to be rescued from drowning with the flash flooding. Several moved their trailers to an area of the park to wait out the flooding. The flooding has given us the opportunity to reach out to more people, especially some we had met through previous outreaches. We also took the time to knock the doors of the trailers on Sunday, trying to encourage those affected by the flooding and look for an opportunity to share the Lord with them.

Our Needs

I am constantly amazed to see how God answers prayer in every aspect of life. I am absolutely convinced of the need in California, and am passionate about doing whatever it takes to establish well-rooted, Biblical churches here. The fact is that it is an expensive endeavor, and here are some of the most important needs that we would like to ask you pray for us about:

Electrical power – one of the great blessings that God has provided is a farm on which we live and for which we are caretakers. This presents many opportunities that cut our costs of living down tremendously, as well as give us the ability to reach out to others. And, it is the direct answer to prayer in many, many respects.

The farm is in a very rural area, and completely off-grid. This alone saves us thousands every year in power and water bills in the most expensive state in the country. However, it requires a combination of solar power and a generator. Part of the agreement of us living on the farm is that we rebuild what was destroyed by the drug dealers who lived here before us. Part of what they destroyed was the electrical setup. I have some experience in solar power, and so I am able to rebuild at a much lower cost since I can do the installation and configuration myself. We raised about one-third of this expense at the Yakima Home Missions Conference, which has allowed us to have most of the power that we need during sunny days.

At night, however, and during the long storms of winter, we require a generator. We have had some trouble with our generator, mostly due to sabotage from the aforementioned druggies who keep coming back to cause trouble. I’ve rebuilt it a number of times, but this last week it has broken down beyond repair. I have put what “band-aids” I can on it, but it desperately needs to be replaced.

Having reliable power would go a long way to accomplishing what God has called us to do here. It is also essential to my business. To complete the power projects (solar and generator), I need to raise about $8000.

Consistent income – we did not go on deputation and do not receive any regular monthly support. God has put on the heart of several individuals and churches over the last couple of years to help us from time to time; most of the time these gifts have come in when we did not know how to move forward. God is faithful.

When I moved down here, I had a ministry-related job offer which fell through when I had to take a Biblical and ethical stand (with the prayer and counsel of my sending pastor and others). I also had some long-time clients in my website, graphics, and printing business. The economy has tightened spending everywhere, and I no longer have sufficient client income.

While God has never ceased to care for us, and has made it abundantly clear that we are ministering where we need to be, I am praying that God will provide consistent income to keep going.

If you need graphics, website, or printing work, I would love to help you out. For local church ministries and bi-vocational pastors, I offer my services at steep discounts.

Safety – When we first moved onto the farm 1 ½ years ago, we helped to evict a drug trafficker. We have since done extensive cleanup (we have removed over 25 tons of garbage and destruction). The drug dealers and their clients have not gone away peacefully, and we still face regular threats and sabotage. We have lost two guard dogs, four pigs, about forty chickens, and four rabbits due to poisoning and strangulation from these guys. We have had to rebuild our solar and generator countless times and repair destroyed water lines. I have been in the hospital due to poisoning. We have had our well tampered and gas lines cut. Our brakes have been tampered with, and our vehicle has had multiple instances of cut tires and other sabotage. In the last couple of months, we have come home on three occasions to our door kicked in and every bit of food we had emptied into the middle of the living room. On two occasions, those who destroyed our water and power then called in the police and child services, telling them that we had children out here without adequate power and water (thankfully, I had just finished the repairs when they showed up to investigate and nothing came of it – Praise the Lord!)

Drugs have a strong hold in our county. The state police told me that it is the poorest county in California, and the one with the least police presence. The particular area where we live in the county is known for its manufacturing and distribution of drugs.

It is understandable why many ministries have packed up and left. Here is the reality – there is a huge, ripe mission field. Never have I been a place that is so receptive to hearing the Gospel. With prayer and God’s provision, we can make a difference in this difficult place.

Attached are some pictures of our events and outreach over the last few months.

If the Lord lays on your heart to help with some of the expenses, or if you have a graphics or website need, please contact me. You can give directly to our family, or through our church website. Please contact me for a giving link. Either way, you will receive an appropriate receipt. Most who have helped us prefer to give through an electronic link that accepts debit / credit / ach. I can provide you a link or send you to the online giving page of our church website. You can mail a check to us or our sending church if you would like, but the mail here has proven very unreliable. Thank you for praying for us!

In Christ,
Jared & Krysta Watkins
Enoch, Ezra, Ezekiel, and EdWord

EDIT:

I was asked to make it clearer how to give. If you want to give directly to our family, here is a link:

Donate to the Watkins Directly

If you want to give to us through our church for tax purposes, use this link and choose "Watkins Family Support" from the fund drop-down at the top:

Donate through Grace and Truth Baptist Church

Old-Fashioned Day of Thankfulness

A church work day helping an elderly couple.

Flooding