Freedom Village is an answer to God’s call on my life. I started in ministry over 31 years ago. God called me to preach and specifically to reach out to the youth.

I started Gates Community Chapel in Rochester in the late seventies. Our youth program expanded and we soon had a bus ministry running for our Friday night youth program. One night I saw a young boy who was known to be a street prostitute. I had seen him before and he always would watch our bus go by. I approached him and asked him to come to our youth program. He was very vocal in telling me that we really didn’t want him at our church. He continued to speak of our hypocrisy and that we had nothing to offer him. Until we could give him three meals a day, shelter and safety, we had nothing to offer a boy like him. I ran into a policeman friend later that month and he told me how that boy had been killed in an alley. My heart broke. I felt totally inadequate and lost. I locked myself away in my room and began to fast and pray.

I knew God had a plan in this and I wasn’t going to go anywhere until he told me what I was supposed to do. God answered me very clearly. I have only had a couple of specific times when God’s presence was so thick around me and that His message was so unmistakably clear. God showed me three things. He showed me this pond, this cesspool. And in the middle of it was this kid, this teenager bobbing up and down. And on the side of the cesspool was a younger, little kid, and he thinks the teenager is having fun. He doesn't realize the teenager is flailing because he is drowning. The little one is getting ready to jump in. And God showed me the vision for Freedom Village that night.

1. Get the kids out of the cesspool.
2. Work to keep the next generation from jumping into the cesspool.
3. Work to clean up the cesspool."

The focus of Freedom Village is specific to that vision and the calling on my life. My purpose is to be faithful to that calling and to be diligent and faithful to God’s vision
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- Pastor Brothers