"We believe you were made for more than just waking up every morning and going through your daily routine. Life can easily lose its value when we don't have a hope in something bigger than ourselves."
Our Lead Pastors
Alex and Eri Soler planted Vertical Encounter in 2015 with just a few people in a living room, to now becoming a multisite church in the Chicagoland area. Their passion is to reach people far from God to help them move from belonging to becoming. Alex and Eri started the Go Multiply Network to develop local leaders to multiply the kingdom of God, specifically in distressed urban and suburban areas of concentrated poverty and low income. They are committed to coaching church planters and multipliers through CMN and various Assemblies of God districts/networks. In 2019, they announced the Church of Today Project, which combines their passion for kids and expertise in education to help launch Hope Homes, which concentrate on educational and mentoring programming with a foundation of biblical discipleship for underprivileged youth.
Life-Giving Community
We find in the Bible that when the early Church was forming after Jesus resurrected, Christ promised to send His Spirit to be with that early Church. When The Spirit of God came, we find that He empowered the early Church to do things it would never dare to do if it wasn't for something supernatural. The truth is that the same Holy Spirit is alive and active today. We hope to help you encounter that Spirit of God so you too can be empowered to do things you could never do on your own.
OUR VALUES
We value healthy relationships here at Vertical Encounter. Our goal is that you feel part of a family. Because of this, we have developed “Small Groups” that help facilitate fellowship and healthy relationships.
With our strong community partners, we focus heavily on serving outside of the four walls of our church. In fact, we don’t believe that the building we meet in is the church. We believe that we (the people) are the church and that we exist to serve our community.
We believe that our students are the Church of today. We continue to invest heavily on our student programs from Pre-K all the way to the end of high school. We want to make sure that we are helping create young people that are confident in what they believe.
One thing we always say at Vertical Encounter is that we don’t have to agree with each other in order to love and accept everyone. We are all on a journey to become more like Christ, and accepting that reality helps us learn to care for people on a whole different level.
We’re all about multiplying the kingdom of God here on earth. We do this by church planting and investing in other kingdom building projects all over the world and locally.