Contin. . . . Interview with a Chicagoland City Reacher

Bio: Phil Miglioratti

Ever since his early childhood on Chicago’s North Side, Phil Miglioratti has been involved in the ministries of Chicagoland churches. He accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior at the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle, a church born out of Paul Rader’s tent revivals of the 1930’s. Miglioratti attended this church until his family brought him to the North Side Gospel Center, where he participated in and lead the early forms of Awana Club and other youth programs that developed at under the direction of Pastor Lance Lathum. After graduating from Northeastern Illinois University (BA) and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (M.Div), he worked as a youth director at the First Evangelical Covenant Church of Rockford, IL before pioneering Promised Land, the innovative children’s church program that continues to this day at Willow Creek Community Church.

With this eclectic array of experiences, Miglioratti left Willow Creek in 1980 to co-pastor a new church called the Woodfield Church—a non-traditional group of Southern Baptists who hoped to reach out the people who lived near the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL. Though this church never attracted more than two-hundred members, it did experience a definite revival in the winter of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down.

With this revival stirring in his heart, Miglioratti became especially burdened to pray with other pastors, and he facilitated a gathering of several area pastors who met and agreed to pray regularly with each other—a meeting they came to call the “pastors prayer group.” Within several years Miglioratti had helped facilitate the formation of nearly thirty pastor’s prayer groups in the Chicagoland area. Sensing the Spirit’s leading, Miglioratti began coordinating and convening this larger group for the purposes of strategic corporate prayer.

This newfound role of prayer coordinator led Miglioratti to many exciting opportunities on both the city and national level. Over the next fifteen years, he became involved with the work of Mission America (a national initiative of church collaboration for the sake of the gospel), with the Southern Baptist’s Strategic Focus Cities Chicago, with PRAY! magazine, and with Good City—initially taking the role of prayer coordinator in all of this work. In and through all this, Miglioratti saw his list of Pastor’s Prayer Groups flourish. At present, he sends a news letter to 830 different groups around the nation.

It wasn’t long until his role as prayer coordinator and convener led him into a coordinating and convening role among a newly forming group of people who called themselves “city-reachers.” As Mission America developed its strategy, it began to focus its attention on the strategy of reaching entire cities with the transforming power of the gospel. One of the models which they developed to help facilitate this process they called City Impact Roundtable (or CIR). A CIR would be a meeting that brings together various pastors, ministry and business leaders together to discuss how to collaborate for the sake of common city-reaching objectives. Miglioratti became quite interested in this process, and quickly joined the leadership team that helped promote and shape CIR’s in different cities around the United States.

As Miglioratti became ever more invested in prayer-networking and city-reaching, he gained permission from his elders to pursue these endeavors full time, and in 1999 he stepped down from his role as head pastor of Woodfield. Shortly thereafter, he became the national facilitator of CIR’s—traveling from city to city to facilitate meetings. He also became the city-coordinator for Strategic Focus Cities (later, the executive director for SFC’s focus point organization, the Chicago Metro Baptist Association).

Today, Phil continues to coordinate and help convene prayer and city-reaching meetings on many different levels. He serves as the prayer coordinator for roughly 1,100 churches in Illinois which are associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, he facilitates the Church Prayer-Leaders Network, he also collaborates a number of individuals and organizations in Chicago for the sake of coordinating the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole city of Chicago.

Currently, he lives with his wife, Carol in Palatine, IL. They have two grown children have recently become proud grandparents to their first grandchild.

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