Our Pastor

Senior Pastor Mary Jo Stevenson Fullen is known to many as a nine-time Ironman Triathlon finisher.  Beginning in 1980, she received her pastoral training at the Ministries Institute of Faith Center Foursquare church in Eugene Oregon, under the direction of Dr. Roy Hicks, Jr. In 1990 Pastor Wayne Cordeiro, also from Faith Center, invited her to move to the Big Island in order to serve on staff at New Hope Christian Fellowship. Having received a heart for the people of Hawaii a decade earlier while visiting the Hawaiian islands, Mary Jo gladly responded to that invitation, and still serves as an assisting minister at New Hope in Hilo under Senior Pastor Alex Pacheco.

From the time when Pastor Mary Jo attended the Ministries Institute in 1980 until now, the call to pioneer a church has been on her heart. Now on Easter in Papa’aloa, that dream is being fulfilled as Mary Jo and her husband, Bob, launch Island Faith Center.

In her words: “Because God loves the people on the Hamakua coast, He wants to build this church, Island Faith Center, and has called us to teach His word without compromise so that He can reveal Himself in His love, grace, and power. He wants to fill His people with His power and enable them to become all that He originally intended for them to be. When people see Him for who He really is, there springs up a natural response of worship. As He makes Himself known, even those who have not yet come to know Him will, as it says in I Corinthians, fall on their faces before Him and declare that God is in our midst.”
 
 Island Faith Center is part of the Foursquare denomination, which was started by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923 in Los Angeles, California. The name "Foursquare" represents the four-fold ministry of Jesus Christ as Savior, Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, Healer and Coming King.

The mission of Island Faith Center is to be a place where everyone - both adults and children -  canfind an intimate relationship with God through the teaching of His word, through genuine worship, and prayer. Island Faith Center is committed to being a place of love, acceptance, encouragement and freedom for the broken, discouraged and bound through the experiencing of genuine, caring relationships and serving one another.
 

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