In December of 1995, Craig and Tracie Nanna moved to Reading, PA with a call of God to plant a cell-based, multi-cultural church that would touch nations.For a year, Craig and Tracie hosted an evangelistic Thursday night Bible Study called the “Living Word” in a health and fitness club in Temple, a suburb of Reading. Soon the churchplant began to be established as the power of the gospel changed people’s lives.In 1997, the Bible study connected with a churchplanting movement called DOVE Christian Fellowship International (DCFI). DCFI is a family of over 100 churches around the world, committed to plant and nurture cell-based churches, as well as a variety of ministries.

Soon after our Bible study connected with DCFI, we began to meet for Sunday worship and we changed our name to Reading DOVE Christian Fellowship.In a few months, we outgrew the aerobics room of the fitness center and began to lease an “upper room” in a store front across the street.In our early years in Temple, we saw marriages and families healed, lives changed, and the family of God multiplying in small groups called “house churches” all over the Reading region. As we continued in prayer for our new church, though, we began to feel the tug of the Holy Spirit to move our location into center city Reading in order to make ourselves more accessible to the vast amount of people in the city.

In 2003, it became clear that it was time to make the move as we outgrew our “upper room” in Temple. So with much prayer and a leap of faith, during the summer of 2003 the mayor of Reading gave us permission to meet weekly outdoors in Reading’s CityPark. Reading Hopewell Mennonite also graciously opened their doors to us in 2003 for our Celebration gatherings, until we finally secured our own location in December of 2003 in the old “Reading Farmer’s Market”, strategically located directly beside the Sovereign Center on 8th and Penn Streets.2003 truly was a “hallmark” year for us because even though we did not have our own physical church home, we still were the church, a people in love Jesus, meeting from house to house in small groups, not limited by a “building mentality”.

Upon our move into our new site and with a desire to be a center from which every believer is equipped to go out and minister, we changed our name to Reading DOVE Christian Ministry Center.We are now continually expanding the vision as the Holy Spirit leads us, reaching the world from house to house, city to city, nation to nation.