About Mark
Mark Sentell is the Founding Pastor of Living Faith Church in Fombell, Pennsylvania, and the director of The Garage at Living Faith, a church ministry that fixes cars for free. By day he runs companies. He knows the fight to live out faith in the real world.
An accidental church
Mark spent his first ten years in ministry as a full-time pastor. Somewhere in the early 2000s he realized he didn't actually know any people far from God. So in 2002 he left, went into business to feed his family, joined a bar band, and spent time in pubs.
He and his wife started hosting dinners. The dinners became Saturday-night bonfires. Eventually someone said, “We should probably start meeting on purpose,” and a small group formed around one idea: even broken people can help other people. They met in bars, clubs, and funeral homes until a church about to close handed them its keys. That group became Living Faith Church.
For twenty-five years Mark has served it as a bi-vocational pastor. In the early years, nearly everything the church received went back out, to single mothers who needed help moving, to utility bills, to broken sinks. The building changed shape. The DNA did not.
The Garage
It started with a man named Michael fixing cars in his driveway because he believed people were worth it. After handing primary pastoral leadership of Living Faith to his successor, Mark came alongside Michael to help it grow: systems, volunteers, partnerships, and eventually a 501(c)(3). Today The Garage at Living Faith has thirty to forty volunteers and serves hundreds of families a year, with partners that include the Center for Rural Ministry at Grove City College. In a year it now serves more people than have attended the church in the last decade.
That story is told in The Garage at Living Faith series: Under the Hood for the people whose cars get fixed, Full Service for the volunteers, Turn the Key for church leaders who want to start something like it, and Second Fiddle for pastors doing ministry alongside a day job.
Invite Mark
Mark speaks to men's gatherings, retreats, church leadership teams, and rural ministry cohorts on accountability, outreach ministry in small churches, serving as worship, and bi-vocational ministry. Email him about your event.
