Frank & Dawn Wilder

To join Frank & Dawn Wilder's support team, click HERE. You can find their names listed under "Missionaries & Projects" in the list of giving options. Thanks!

Bio/Description: Dawn and I have been all over the world in pursuit of Jesus and his call on our lives. We have lived in numerous cities and housing situations, slept on floors, trains, and sofas. We were the team leaders for five years in an effort to start a missional community in Paris, France, which is doing well.  Our heart is in Europe and we hope to one day return and be more effective in reaching Europeans for Jesus.

Frank is an eloquent communicator as evidenced by his recent appearance on a panel at a large homiletics class. When asked how important transparency is, Frank answered that when he speaks before people, he has to be completely real and feels like he must expose himself to the audience for there to be a connection. He never recovered.

We have five awesome children: Caroline 13, Peyton 10, Chloe 8, Charles 5 and Roman 2. They are a wonderful blessing, a constant encouragement and challenge simultaneously.  Each is uniquely shaped and gifted and are growing way too fast. While we never used them as objects for ministry, they have provided relationships with seekers that we never could have conjured up on our own.

Currently, Frank is the director of a new project, the planting of a missional community in St. Petersburg, FL. Dawn serves in a part-time role as administrative assistant to Frank and to all mission churches. We have been sent out by the Underground Network in Tampa, FL and Christian Associates to initiate a work over the bridge, south of Tampa, in St. Pete. The Underground is a network of autonomous house churches and mission churches (what we call micro-churches) which are committed to the poor and the lost, and the transformation of our cities and our world.  The Underground in Tampa is about 3 years old and has been able to plant about 37 micro-churches. In the last year, St. Pete UG has grown quite a bit to where we now have 11 micro-churches. The ecclesial minimum for a micro-church is worship, community, and mission.

The micro-churches are autonomous, but have chosen a group of 7 governing elders chosen from our body of elders  to oversee them, coach them, and hold them accountable to character and moral standards. What the micro-churches do and how they do it is completely up to them. Basically, we give people permission to pursue their heart and their calling. Dawn and I  work for the Network, which is the non-profit side of the Underground. Our role is to help initiate new micro-churches and resource the leaders and ministries in place. We coach, train, encourage, counsel, teach, shepherd, serve in any way possible to make our people as successful as they can be.  Our goal is to be the best that we can be at small church for the poor and the lost.

With only two full-time staff people (who raise their own support), lay people have started micro-churches reaching women in the sex industry, middle school African-American girls, men recovering from addiction issues, Haitian men's and women's groups, multiple homeless feedings (feeding 1000's a month), a day shelter for homeless (our friends on the street),  a program to provide companions for cancer patients, a community garden, a ministry to the dying, a jewelry making business that provides jobs for women in developing countries and women in the US who have difficulty finding employment, a ministry to a deaf school in Honduras, multiple college campus ministries, a ministry to foster kids who have aged out of the foster system, to name a few. Many of these micro-churches have become ministries that raise their own funding and employ their own staff. Also, we will be sending a team to plant in Hamburg, Germany this year as well as initiating projects in the Philippines and Haiti in the next year.

It is an exciting and challenging place to be and work. Our desire is to create a training hub for Christian Associates pre-field missionaries to come and live with us, experience a vibrant missional community before they are sent out to Europe AND to provide a place for current European missionaries and European lay leaders to come to learn, grow, and be resourced.

To learn more about the work in St. Petersburg click here