Sunday morning attendance at Caribou Bible Church in Soda Springs, Idaho, jumped from 50 to 100 in two years.
During the same time period, the church added a “jail ministry, recovery ministry, lunch ministry, church ministry,” said Jeff Uskoski, pastor of the church. “You have this huge God and you have us ordinary people.”
‘Can’t wait to share’
“God’s love has poured into our church and people see that,” Uskoski continued. “These ministries have begun from people’s wheelhouse. They’ve said, ‘This is my thing. I can’t wait to share it.’”
Caribou Bible today attracts as many as 135 people to Sunday morning services, plus 10 to 15 more at the new church Caribou helped start last May.
“The story is all about Jesus changing people’s lives,” Uskoski said. “And as He does so, people are inviting their friends and serving the Lord, and that’s really neat to see.”
Uskoski is something of a “trivocational” pastor. He teaches high school math from Algebra I to calculus and also coaches track and baseball.
“I was so apprehensive about the whole situation,” Uskoski said about being asked in 2021 to serve as pastor when the previous pastor left after 15 years. Uskoski and his wife had led worship at Caribou for 10 years, and he had preached a couple of times a year, but he was uneasy about being called the pastor of the church. Even today he says he is “pastoring” the church, using an action word rather than the noun “pastor.”
“I like teaching God’s Word; I like helping people,” Uskoski said. “But I thought pastors were really special people and I still have shortcomings. I still make mistakes.”
Members ministering
He depends on the congregation leading out as they see ministry opportunities. When Uskoski went to the county jail in 2021 to see an inmate after a death in the inmate’s family, the jail commander asked him when he was going to start leading services there. Others in the congregation quickly took over with Bible studies and ministry to the inmates.
In 2022, a woman joined the church who had expertise in recovery ministry and started a group for people dealing with addictions to anger, substance abuse and more, offering an alternative to the “destructive path of life Jesus wants us to set people free from,” the pastor said.
That same year a chef and her husband, a construction worker, moved to Soda Springs and joined the church. “She has tremendous experience and even trained in France,” Uskoski said. “She has a passion to feed people and now leads our monthly food fellowship. Another member with a love for feeding high schoolers restarted a long-dormant ministry we call ‘Friends Feeding Friends,’ which feeds students on Mondays.
Using ‘ordinary people’
“We see how God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things,” Uskoski said. “It’s not that any individual is exceptional. It’s that God is extraordinary. It’s ordinary people pointing to an extraordinary God.
“We preach on God’s Word, all the Southern Baptist things, gospel-centric” the pastor continued. “The gospel changes lives. It’s been really neat to see.”
Soda Springs Baptist Church, which started in 1963, limped along for many years. Despite baptisms of 12 people in 1980 and 10 in 1981, worship attendance was 17 in 1986. It grew to 36 in 1994 and stayed in the 40s and 50s until 2016.
No Annual Church Profile reports appeared between 2017 and 2021, which was Uskoski’s first year as pastor. By 2022, attendance had grown to 80, and the church changed its name to Caribou Bible Church that December. Attendance was at 100 in 2023. These days it can be as many as 135, taxing the space available in the small stucco building the church owns.
“That first summer the church went from being in the red to black,” Uskoski said. “We went from 35 on Sunday mornings to 67 by the end of summer. Now He is really doing a work here.
“We’ve been making changes all along, trying to increase the health of the church,” the pastor continued. “We’re now an elder-led church. We started a ‘second Sunday supper,’ an old-fashioned potluck with the church providing the main course. When you eat together 12 times a year, they become your family.”
Being an example
For the first time in 2022, Uskoski attended the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was held in Anaheim, California, that year.
“I didn’t know much about Southern Baptists until then,” said Uskoski, who came to Caribou from a nondenominational Christian church. “In the exhibit hall I found a marriage course and bought it, and we’ve seen God use it to redeem marriages.”
Being a good example is important to Uskoski.
“We’re located kitty-corner from the high school,” the pastor said. “Every Monday we — volunteers from the church — feed lunch for any kid who wants to come. At least 25% of them do. A majority have never been in another church.
“We love them and feed them and try to let them know love is not conditional. I think that has started to lead us to be like what Mark Clifton (of North American Mission Board) says: ‘When you love people like Jesus wants you to love, in walking out the gospel, God entrusts you with other things.’ We have seen that happening. We’re feeding up to 80 kids, which takes a lot of work, but the kids and the community notice we’re loving kids unconditionally and that opens doors.”
On a personal level, Uskoski and his wife, Hallie, who is an oncology nurse, prioritize their family time. They have “four kids, 10 to 24, two of each,” the pastor said, and they make Fridays their family day.
“When you’re looking at biblical qualifications for elders, they need to take care of their family well and have a good reputation in the community,” Uskoski said. “People tell us, ‘We’ve seen you take care of our parents and teach and coach our children.’ It’s given us a platform to share the hope we have in Jesus.”
With that hope front and center, Caribou Bible Church is growing in eastern Idaho. In cooperation with Salmon Valley Baptist Church in Salmon, Idaho, it started Caribou Bible Church-Grace last May. The mission congregation is in Grace, Idaho, a town of about 900 people approximately 15 miles southwest of Caribou in Soda Springs.
Uskoski preaches in Grace at 2 p.m. on Sundays.
“We have several of our church family who live or have friends in Grace and who want to reach their city for the Jesus who has changed their lives,” the pastor said. “It is the first evangelical church of any kind that has opened in Grace, and we look forward to seeing what God will do there.”
