Pop-up church sets up in Tonopah

A pop-up church is continuing its multi-day Tonopah run, featuring “revival” services starting at 7 nightly, “most likely” through June 12, the organizer said.

Last week, “Faith Revivals Tent Ministry” put up its large tent in the dirt parking lot west of the Banc Club along U.S. Highway 95.

“We put it up here, right next to road, to try and get the best visibility that we can,” Derrick Thomas, evangelist and minister, said as he planned for a June 3 Tonopah opening. “With all the traffic coming back and forth, this is about the prime location for people to see.”

“Services are going really well,” Thomas said on June 6. “We’re not getting a huge crowd. The first night we had somewhere around 15 people.”

“Considering we’ve never been in this town before, and we don’t know anybody here, that’s to be expected,” added Thomas, who said “Faith Revivals Tent Ministry” is based out of Golden Valley, Arizona.

“It takes a little while for people to kind of warm up to you, especially when they don’t know anything about you or who you are,” he said. “The Lord’s been showing up. We’re just enjoying our time being here and looking forward to finishing out the rest of this revival. Hopefully more people will start showing up.”

The church, he said, is “just getting people interested in what God’s doing here.”

“Hopefully, they’ll want to know what He’s doing and come out and want to be part of it.”

What to expect

Services each evening are to last until about 8:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., Thomas said June 2.

“We’ll start out with praise and worship music, and some prayer and then get into the word,” Thomas said. “Then, we’ll have an altar call for prayer for people afterward.”

“We receive an offering for those who want to give, but we don’t pass the plate,” he said. “We don’t charge anything to come. We just want to come and share the gospel. We just want to bless the community.”

He said that in other places, crowd sizes vary.

“We’ve been in some places where we’ve had 10 to 12 people, and other places we’ll fill the tent up,” Thomas said.

The tent holds 100, he said.

As of earlier this week, most of those attending services were from in town, Thomas said.

“We’ve had a few people who were just passing through, stopping over for the evening and just happened to be driving through town, see the tent and wanted to know what was going on,” he said.

The next stop for “Faith Revivals Tent Ministry” is Battle Mountain, Thomas said.

Contact reporter David Jacobs at djacobs@tonopahtimes.com