Pastor Josh Tancordo
Redeeming Grace Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
After hearing Pastor Jeff Noblit's preaching online, Josh Tancordo decided to move down to Grace Life Church of the Shoals to serve as a summer intern. While there, he met his future wife, Becky. After Josh had been mentored in Muscle Shoals for four years, the congregation commissioned Josh and Becky to plant Redeeming Grace Church in the summer of 2014.
After Josh and Becky built relationships and hosted a Bible study in Pittsburgh for two years, Redeeming Grace Church officially covenanted together as a church in October of 2016. Today, Redeeming Grace Church is a gospel-centered church that values rich biblical preaching and authentic Christian community. More than anything, they are passionate about Jesus. They want to see him worshiped, treasured, and exalted. To learn more about Redeeming Grace, visit https://www.redeeminggracepittsburgh.com/our-story.
(Update from May 2023)
Spring is a wonderful opportunity to remember the way in which God gives us new life in Christ. He takes what is dead and causes it to spring forth with new vitality. "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Praise God for his life-giving grace!
As we think about this past month, we're profoundly grateful for many of the other ways in which God has been gracious to us as well. As you can see pictured above (and in more pictures here on Facebook), we held our third Free Oil Change Event in our church's parking lot. During a period of three and a half hours, we changed the oil of 37 vehicles!
While people were waiting for their oil to be changed, we hosted them in our client reception area and had specific volunteers designated to interact with them. We also gave them gift bags with various goodies as well as Gospel of John booklets and "Two Ways to Live" gospel tracts.
The next day, we had at least 3-4 family units (that we know of) attend the worship service! One lady, named Windy, even signed up for our church's Membership Information Class. Please pray that God would bless our ministry to these families and that we'd see him work in amazing ways in bringing them to saving faith.
In addition, speaking of the Membership Class, please pray that God would use this class to bring tremendous spiritual growth in people's lives and also clarity about their next steps. The class is offered once every six month and lasts for four weeks (meeting 90 minutes each Saturday morning). We currently have 23 people signed up for the class.
One of the most exciting things about this particular class is that, not only do we have Windy in it from our recent oil change event, we also have another lady, Kelly, from a previous oil change event.
Kelly has been attending our church on a regular basis and also attends small groups (which we do on weekday evenings). It seems as though God has been working in her life in marvelous ways, and she's emphasized several times recently that she desires to be baptized. Please pray that God would continue working in Kelly, her husband, and her two girls and would give us clarity about how to proceed with baptism and membership.
In addition, please pray for a lady named Suzanne, who attended our church for the first time this past Sunday. We are usually blessed with a good number of guests each Sunday (usually about three first-time people or families), so I typically don't mention much about them in this update email unless they seem to be sticking around. However, Suzanne's story grabbed my attention.
Suzanne has not been involved in church in the past but prayed a couple of weeks ago that God would reveal himself to her. She also began reading a Christian book (though she doesn't remember the title). This book told her that, if she isn't involved in a church, she needed to start attending a church immediately before reading Chapter 1. So...she did what it said! She looked online, saw that ours was the first church listed for her search term on Google, and figured it was a sign from God that she should come. Please pray that God would give us an open door to minister to Suzanne and that she would come back for subsequent visits.
As always, thank you for your prayers and support! Each one of you is a part of what God is doing in Pittsburgh, and we couldn't be more grateful for you.
Serving Him,
Josh & Becky