Red Shirt Community Church
Serving On A Team Serving Others
There probably isn’t another church planting organization that would have worked with Katie and me. When we approached Mission Alive back in 2018, Katie told Charles Kiser and Tod Vogt that this church planting thing was my idea, and I told them that I’m not a pastor. Most church planting organizations probably wouldn’t be interested in working with a couple like that, but Mission Alive is different. We will never forget Tod’s response at our first meeting when he said, “I don’t care about whether or not you’re a pastor. Do you have grit?”
Fast forward nearly six years and our family is firmly rooted in western South Dakota. We serve the people who live in our community of Hot Springs and the Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation. We are a part of a team of committed believers that is starting the Red Shirt Community Church on the reservation and we are deeply involved in Hot Springs. Katie currently serves as the vice president of the school board and PTA, and we both serve as parent advisors for the Cultural Diversity Club at Hot Springs High School. Additionally, I run a small tree service that covers the southern Black Hills.
I’m still not a pastor, nor am I trying to be one. I’m not a church planter, but I am helping to plant one. Occasionally, I preach at the Red Shirt Community Church, but I mostly spend my time working with the youth. Katie and I are actively looking for a commercial property in Hot Springs to bring people together to connect with God and experience His transformative power, but it’s not a church in the traditional sense. I can’t put too fine of a point on what it’s supposed to be because God has yet to give us a super clear vision. For now, we just continue to pray and move forward in faith.
You may be wondering whether or not I know who I am and what exactly my role is here in South Dakota. Tod Vogt said that I was a “church planter that’s not a church planter” in our last phone call when he asked me to write this article. I do know who I am and, because of that, I know what I’m doing Figuring this out though, has been quite the journey.
It first began with a long season of working through some unresolved issues that I had in my life. God led me back to my past, helped me come to terms with the trauma that I had experienced, and brought healing and restoration to my heart and mind. Coinciding with this season of healing was a time of drawing close to God and learning to hear His voice and connect with Him in new ways. The Mission Alive discipleship cohorts have been a powerful tool that God has used to guide me in this. Now, I find myself in a new and unexpected season of discovering the identity that God has given me.
In November of 2023, our family traveled back to Texas for a retreat for missionaries. At the retreat, a man named Norris spoke. Norris is probably in his early sixties and he’s a cherry farmer from Washington. He was very unassuming and was not a professionally trained minister. He led the group of missionaries through an exercise called the “identity exchange.” In this exercise, we all wrote down on a sheet of paper the negative things that we believe about ourselves and the things that we do, like our jobs or some skills that we have. Then we closed our eyes and imagined being alone in our favorite place (mine is along a creek in the Black Hills), and we imagined meeting Jesus there. This was the point where things switched from the realm of imagination to reality. You see, I really met Jesus in this moment and so did many others in the room. I handed Jesus the paper that I had written on, he folded his hands around it and then opened up his hands to reveal that the paper had disappeared. I then asked Jesus to tell me who I am and he said, “You’re a captain and a hero maker.”
To me, this is foundational to building a strong, vibrant innovative faith community. You have to start with a core group of people who know Jesus and who know themselves.
Since then, I have craved being with Jesus in the same way that I was last year at the retreat. I have found that he is more than available. In fact, he’s always with me and everyone else all at the same time. I just didn’t know that it was possible to be with him like that until it happened. Now, it happens regularly and it’s my passion that others experience Jesus in this way.
I have also had lots of time to explore what it means to be a captain and a hero maker. As a captain, I am a low-ranking officer in God’s army. I’m not a general, but instead, I work for the generals. This helps me because, in our context, I really can’t be a general. We just don’t need another white guy trying to be in charge out here in Indian country. So, God has shown me who the four generals are in my life. Two are Lakota elders and they understand that they are in charge. These are the leaders at the Red Shirt Community Church. Another seems to have no idea that he matters deeply to God and to others, and so he doesn’t yet know who he is. The last one is my greatest treasure and is growing into a powerful leader, which is something that she has never seen herself as before.
As a hero maker, I’m not the hero of the story. These generals are, along with many others. They get to become heroes of the faith and for their people. It’s my job to help them get there. It’s easy to see how the roles of captain and hero maker correspond, which gives me more energy and a clearer purpose in my work.
This may seem like God has demoted me. That’s how it would be interpreted by the world, but not in the Kingdom. It certainly doesn’t feel like a demotion to me, but rather like things in my life are being brought into greater alignment with the will of God. Furthermore, God continues to reveal more to me about my identity. I have other names that Jesus has given me that I am exploring and learning to live into. Katie is on a similar track.
There are many other things that I mentioned in this article that I would like to write about. Things like the value of having grit, Lakota culture, and just knowing Jesus. Knowing Jesus supersedes everything. But, a critical part of knowing Jesus means knowing yourself and what He specifically created you for. To me, this is foundational to building a strong, vibrant innovative faith community. You have to start with a core group of people who know Jesus and who know themselves.
Blessings upon the ones who desire to know Jesus deeply and have the courage to be deeply known.
Blake Burchfield currently serves as the Director of Peace Initiative in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Blake and his wife, Katie, have given their lives to partner with God in His plan to redeem all indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere.