Point a kaleidoscope to the sun and the colors will glow like tinted honey.
As the dial turns, shapes arching and twisting, expanding and collapsing, new designs will slowly take shape, almost as if they were waiting to be discovered. This is the image Chad Yoder, lead pastor at Pierce Church, has of God.
“I am fully convinced that there is more to the world — there's more to Jesus — than what most of us have been offered,” Yoder said. “I'm constantly in pursuit to know God more and to see the next piece of God that I haven't gotten to see yet.”
Shining like stained glass, even Yoder’s first impression of God was an illuminating experience. Yoder accepted Christ at age 17 after stepping into church for only the second time in his life. But the effect rippled.
By the end of his senior year, Yoder had made the decision to not only trust his new savior with his future in eternity, but also with the next phase of his life, enrolling in the Masters Commission discipleship program to explore the call he felt to ministry.
“I just remember being very firm, like, ‘No, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to say yes,’” Yoder said. “And so from the time I got saved … I kind of had this naive idea of, ‘You can't say no to Jesus. If you're going to follow Him, you have to say yes.’”
The precedent would quickly become an important one. From leading a missions training program in Africa to leaving his eight-month startup church to come to Pierce in 2024, Yoder has learned that saying yes creates holy opportunities.
It’s a gift he hopes to share with his congregation as well.
“If you're going to be able to say yes to God, you have to be able to know what his voice sounds like,” Yoder said. “And I think for a lot of people, when you talk about things like hearing God's voice, there's immediately just kind of a doubt of like, ‘Well, I don't think I can do that. Is that even possible?’”
Yoder’s own experience proves that it is. Yet, like so many things in life, he said one must be willing and open to hearing the voice of the Father–Shepherd whose sheep know his word and follow his direction. To catch a glimpse inside the kaleidoscope is to choose to hold it up to the light.
Yoder admitted that this moment can be uncomfortable at times. Yet the open challenge persists. The pursuit for more stirs in the spirit like the swirl of those twisting shapes. Yoder has found fear often prevents Christ-followers from completing the work God has planned.
“God has a funny way in those moments of getting to the heart of things in our lives,” Yoder said. “He's gonna get to the root of these things in our lives that need tweaked and I think that when we're intentionally hearing his voice, sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming, just because his intention is for us to have that abundant life that Jesus said he came to offer people.”
It’s a process of reorientation — of pursuit. For Chad Yoder, it’s also an adventure, a moment of wild, childlike excitement as he looks to an endless, ‘kaleidoscope God’ and explores just what else he might discover.
