16 | March 2025
Reaching Neighborhoods and Nations in Huber Heights By Stephanie Heading, managing editor
Early in his career, Pastor Will Massaro felt God calling him to either the pastorate or the mission field. Today, as lead pastor of Trails Church, a young church plant in Huber Heights, Massaro gets to do both right in his own neighborhood. He leads his church and works to reach the Meskhetian Turkish community that has settled in the Dayton area. “I just had this desire to be a pastor,” he said. “I knew that God might call me and my family to missions someday. To have the opportunity to kind of do both – be a missionary to this community and to be a pastor of this small flock that God has entrusted to me as a church planter seems like an opportunity to do both.” The seeds for Trails Church were planted at its sending church, Forest Ridge Baptist Church, Dayton, where Mas- saro served as associate pastor. “Forest Ridge is a small Southern Baptist-on-every-cor- ner kind of church building,” he said. “We could fit 100 people, and we had 100 people.” After deciding against building a new building or starting
an additional service, church leaders chose to send out a group of 20 people 20 minutes north of the church in the Huber Heights area. “We had a community group that was already meeting in the Carriage Trails area. We talked to our elders about that and everyone was excited about it,” he recalled. After a year of preparation, Trails Church launched in the spring of 2024 with a core team of 16 at the YMCA in Hu - ber Heights. In the past 10-11 months, Massaro says the church has experienced slow and steady growth. “God has really blessed us. We have brought in a few members here and there. We went from 16 to 23 now with two in the membership process,” he said. The church also witnessed the salvation of its first two new believers in December 2024. A couple from Pennsylvania moved to Huber Heights and although they weren’t believers, they visited the church at the YMCA.
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