By Marilee Griffin, October 2008
Photo By Zachary Bennett
In 1990, Mike Patz was just another University of Florida freshman cruising around Gainesville on a Friday night. Except, on that night, Patz urgently felt a need to connect with God. Although he had been raised in church, this was a new feeling. So he pulled over, knelt under a tree and prayed. The next evening, some students stopped by his dorm and invited him to church. When they told him where it was located, he was shocked. Their church —First Assembly of God — was located on the property he had stopped to pray the night before.
Eighteen years and five kids later, Patz preaches five Sunday sermons at the same place his spiritual journey began — the First Assembly of God. In the past four years, the church’s remarkably multicultural congregation has almost tripled to about 1,400 people — half of whom are college age.
Being a UF graduate has helped prepare Patz to meet the unique spiritual needs of students, he said. He believes they place too much faith in getting rich and achieving what the world considers important. Patz wants them to follow Jesus instead of the American Dream and knows the lingo to tell them so.
“We don’t want to stand before God one day and find out we were making straight A’s in classes that never mattered.”