JARRETT BAKER/ Special to The Sun Pastor George Dix has grown the PASSAGE Family Church from a dozen members gathering in a Best Western meeting hall to 1,800 members who have outgrown their 700-seat church on NE 15th Street.

Dix started Saturday, April 19, the day of the festival, at 4 a.m. as he starts most days: in prayer. He spent the rest of the morning preparing for Sunday's sermon, which he delivers in three separate services to the church's 1,800 members.

Then, he headed to Smokey Bear Park in northeast Gainesville, where he spent the afternoon mingling with a crowd of 5,000 people who had come to enjoy $1,000 worth of free fried fish, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream dished out by about 175 church volunteers. A church-sponsored health and fitness booth housed nurses who tested people's blood pressure and other indicators. A church program that provides free clothes, both gently worn and new, to people who need them had a booth open to anyone in the community.

The event, and the 6-year-old church itself, both stem from a night in Gainesville eight years ago, when Dix says God sent him a vision that called for him to think big, to think long-term and to think that what he's doing in northeast Gainesville can change not only Alachua County, but the world.

In six years, the former electrical engineer and Gainesville Regional Utilities executive has grown the church from a dozen members gathering in a Best Western meeting hall to 1,800 members who have outgrown their 700-seat church on NE 15th Street.  PASSAGE, which now has a budget of roughly $1 million a year, has donated $100,000 to the Alachua County School Board for programs at Rawlings and Metcalfe elementary schools.