Twenty years ago, while we were still living in England, God gave us (Peter and Debbie Pollock) a dream to create a camp for under-resourced young people and a place of rest for people in Christian Ministry.
We didn’t realize it was from God at the time and didn’t seriously pursue it, but it has been running around in our heads and hearts ever since and God finally told us it was time to bring the dream to fruition.
The journey to get from having a dream to moving our family into full time ministry has been a long one and other articles on this site tell parts of the story, but this is how we landed on the name 559 Ministries.
In the exciting days of first believing we were soon going to be starting a new ministry, we realized it needed a name. Wanting our kids to be fully involved in the process, we asked them to join us for a brainstorming session. We got nowhere, but our youngest daughter brought up the idea of using 559.
559 is our phone number area code here in California and the kids wanted something in the ministry name which connected them to their youth. A 559 area code was all they had ever known and they thought it would be a good call-back to their upbringing.
We told them that we could use it if we could find a bible verse with those numbers that fit. For some reason I cannot explain, I thought that I needed to find a chapter 5 verse 59. Anything else didn’t occur to me. There weren’t any anywhere in the bible. so we nixed that idea. We couldn’t come up with a name that night so we left that decision for another night.
A couple of weeks later, we reached the stage where we were pretty sure that God was pointing us at a certain property for the ministry. We were getting ready to take a trip to Georgia to see the property and potentially look for ways to buy it….. but we needed around $3 million to do so.
We were feeling lost. We had looked at SO many properties in so many places and this was the only one we felt a sense of peace from God about…. but how could we possibly afford it? It seemed so perfect, but there was just no way that we could see to make it happen.
We decided we had to just stick with the basics. Pray, listen to God and do the things we knew how to do… so we decided to register a nonprofit, which we would need if someone was going to donate $3 million dollars to us.
Registering a nonprofit meant we needed a name, so we called the kids back together again and laid it out for them. We told them we were sure God was calling us to this place but we couldn’t see any way that it could possibly happen, but we needed a name.
Nothing we suggested sounded good to them and eventually 559 came up again. This time though, it suddenly clicked with me that I could look for books of the bible with a chapter 55 and verse 9.
Psalm 55:9 meant nothing in our context but we flipped to Isaiah 55:9 and suddenly there was an answer to our prayers:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:9 (NIV)
God orchestrated things so that at the very moment we needed to hear how he was in control and was able to do the things we thought there was no way for him to do, he led us right to a verse that reminded us that he is not human, he is higher than us and not constrained by anything we see as constraints.
And so 559 Ministries was born. Isaiah 55:9 Ministries if you want to say it the long way, but we prefer just plain 559.