Davenport Couple Welcomes Community to New Eternal Freedom Church
Gene Bass and his wife Barbara have the faith, and want to help others find, live and spread the good news as well.
Gene, a 68-year-old ordained minister in Davenport, with his 66-year-old wife, recently started the new Eternal Freedom Church, in a commercial building at 3817 W. Locust St. (Suite 3), Davenport, near Fairmount Street.
The loving, passionate pair have five children (one passed away in 2017), 18 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. They had been members of a local Full Gospel church for 30 years, and left in January 2025.
“We felt the call to go and start a church,” Gene said Monday, July 20. “What we had decided to do was to have prayer meetings and Bible study among ourselves, the family. And we started doing that in our living room, and till people got wind of it and they started coming, and our living room just got too small.”
From September 2025 through March 2026, they first had services at rented space at 2244 W. Locust St., and quickly outgrew that, with about 30 people per Sunday. Since March, the Basses are in the process of buying the current building they rent, which does not have a sign out front. They are on the right end of the building.
“I believe that’s a miracle. And that’s some of the things that we are teaching people, a miracle. One of the reasons why I believe that the Lord wanted us to start a church, because that was the last thing on our mind,” Gene said Monday. “I wanted to stay at home and teach Bible study, pray and things like that, but God had other plans for us. And we are a church that believe that if you know certain things, you could be free from bondage. Nobody can lie to you, nobody can manipulate you. And we believe, and this is what we are teaching, we’re teaching people that they should know the truth for themselves. They should know the word of God for themselves.”
“One of the things that Jesus said, he said, ‘I am the truth, the way, and the life.’ And he said that you should know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” he said. “So I’m teaching people, instead of looking at the truth as being just a word that people use, look at the truth as being a person, the person of Jesus Christ. So once you get Jesus Christ in your life, you can be free from all bondage. And we know that a whole lot of churches, and we’re not putting anybody down. But a lot of churches have taken on authoritarian spirit. They want to control everything and everyone in every aspect of everybody’s lives.
“We’re teaching people that if you want to know the truth, if you want to know how saints should behave, then know— study the word for yourself,” Gene said. “One thing that we have to realize, that we are responsible for our own salvation. We are responsible for knowing the truth, because one day we’re going to have to go before Christ. We’re going to go before the judgment seat, and we’re going to have to give an account of the things that we did here in the body that we’re living in. And that’s what we are teaching people.
“Don’t be in a position that you have to make excuses when you go and have to go before the judgment because there are gonna be no excuses,” he said. Most churches believe their pastor has all the power over the congregation and their moral lives, he noted.
“The pastor is the one that’s supposed to feed the flock of God, not to make slaves out of the flock of God, but to feed them,” Gene said. “And not only feed them, but he’s supposed to be an example to them. So what we are teaching people, we’re supposed to be doing it ourselves. And I’m not telling anybody to do anything that I’m not doing. I have to be an example. It goes to me first.”
Gene Bass and his wife, Barbara, at their new Eternal Freedom Church, 3817 W. Locust St., Davenport, July 20, 2026. (photo by Jonathan Turner)
A native of Arkansas, who moved to Davenport in 1989 (partly since his brother lived here), Gene said the Pentecostal church he was raised in taught “that the Lord don’t speak to you, he speak to the leader. And that’s not what the scripture teaches,” he said. “Today, in the last days, he is speaking to his people through his son, Jesus Christ. So Jesus is speaking to us today. We don’t have to depend on priests today to go before God for us, because after Jesus Christ came and did the work that he did, it made it possible for us to go before the throne of grace, go to God ourselves on our own behalf.”
“So God speaks to us himself,” he said. “And the word also teaches us that Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and us. So we don’t have to depend on a priest anymore. That was an Old Testament. This is New Testament. Jesus fulfilled all of that.”
“The word of God goes for everyone, even the leader,” Gene said. “More for the leader than anybody. You know, ’cause the leader is gonna be held more accountable than the ones that’s following him.”
People don’t need to prove their worth through good works, but more by faith, he noted.
“We have to live by faith. If the Bible tells us that we could do it, we can do it through faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, according to the Bible,” Gene said. “We can’t see hope, but we believe it. You know, we believe in it. We believe it’s coming. Like an example was, if I walk into this door and I see all of these chairs and I just pick one and go sit in it, faith is telling me that that chair will hold me, and I believe that the chair will hold me.”
The interior of Eternal Freedom Church, which meets for worship at 11 a.m. Sundays, and Bible study 7 p.m. Wednesdays. (photo by Jonathan Turner).
“We live a life believing that whatever God say is going to come to pass. See, the word of God— the Bible teaches us that God watches over his word to perform it,” he said. “But works is not what’s going to save us. It’s not what it’s going to get us into the place that Jesus Christ went to prepare for us. But if you get saved, it automatically comes. You’re gonna want to work. You’re gonna want to tell people about, about Christ. See, when Jesus Christ left, one of his last commandments was the— he told his disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”
Becoming free
They named their church “Eternal Freedom” because of the need to earn freedom.
“Most of people are being bound because they just don’t know the truth. They’re being bound because a lot of people in a lot of churches, the only time they open their Bibles is when they go to church on Sunday morning and the preacher said open your Bible to a certain passage, and they open their Bible to that passage, and they get their whole interpretation and of scripture from the pastor,” Gene said.
“We’re supposed to believe that the pastor’s going to tell us the truth, but we can’t count on that when it comes to our salvation,” he said. “If we know the truth, if we know that the pastor is not supposed to control every area of our life, we won’t be bound to slavery.”
“Most pastors, most of what they preach on is obedience, submission,” he said. “Most people don’t know it for themselves, and they just won’t even try to learn.”
Eternal Freedom Church has been meeting since March 2026 in the west end of Davenport, just west of Davenport West High School. (photo by Jonathan Turner)
“We also tell them, go home and search this out for yourself,” Gene said. “And it’s working. The people are going and they’re studying. People are studying now. They get deep into the word because they were tired of being bound and tired of being lied to.”
Their church (which has about 20+ regular members) meets for worship Sundays at 11 a.m., with prayer groups at 6 p.m. Sundays, and Bible study Wednesdays at 7 p.m.
Gene is a self-employed painter, for 40 years, and mainly works on farm buildings across Iowa, and some residential.
Barbara said the church is the latest challenge in a life filled with obstacles, since they had problems even moving from Arkansas to the Quad Cities, when they had car trouble.
“We had breakdowns and everything, but every time the enemy would stop us, God was there to get us back to going,” she said Monday. She has also recovered from being hospitalized with COVID, pneumonia, blood clots in her lungs, and strokes in recent years.
“My husband kept hearing the call, and what he decided to do was, stay a little longer,” Barbara said. “You got to know that God is calling you. And he was being resisted on his calling for years. And then this last time when God called us out, it was so plain. It was different.”
“Until we knew that God wanted us to obey him and do what he wanted us to do, not what man wanted us to do, what he wanted us to do,” she said. “We began to realize why we had so much trouble getting here. It’s because the enemy was trying to stop us from doing the will of God. We are more— we are so focused on the Lord, not man. God has so many things for us to do for the people that’s out there suffering. God don’t want us inside these four walls, gathering up all this money and doing things that we need to be out there taking care of the people. You ever wonder why is it so many, so many churches in the Quad Cities, but yet it’s still we got people sleeping on the streets, including babies, including babies sleeping on the street.”
The commercial building that houses Eternal Freedom Church (on the right end) at 3817 W. Locust St., Davenport, Suite 3. (photo by Jonathan Turner)
“And God saw fit to keep me here. Why did he keep me here? For a reason,” Barbara said. “He had a purpose for me. All my life I wanted to help people. I would see people and I wanted to help them.”
The fact that she has recovered from health issues also strengthened her faith.
“We go through some things and we got to keep the focus, keep the focus on God and praise him in spite of what we going through,” she said. “And thank him each day you open your eyes. Lord, I thank you. We are on a mission here. We are trying to help the people out here.”
Gene said they plan to grow into other spaces in the building, including for offices, Sunday school, a gym and other programs.
“We have different ministries that we’re going to teach. We’re gonna try to incorporate a marriage ministry into the church because a whole lot of marriages are failing because they don’t know the truth,” he said. “The truth is the is the key behind everything. And that’s what we want people to know the truth. And when they know truth, when they let the word of God have the last say, they go into the word of God and find the answers in there and leave it there. Let the word of God lead them and guide them.
“That’s what we have been doing for years, and we’ve been together for over 40 years now. So it works,” Gene said. “It works. So I just thank God for what what’s going on here. It’s not just us, it’s the people.”
“We all working together because one thing that we teach, that God has put something in all of us,” he said. “All of us have some type of gift that we can contribute to the ministry, to help the vision come to pass. Nobody is left out. You know, that anybody that wants to do something, they’re free to do it.”
Special event Aug. 8
Eternal Freedom Church (a registered nonprofit organization) will have a special community outreach event on Saturday, Aug. 8 (free admission) from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., including kids’ activities, to introduce the church to the community and bring together local organizations, businesses, service providers and volunteers. They want to offer support, resources and encouragement to all those in need.
Attendees will have access to free clothes, hygiene care packages and support resources. The church encourages donations of clothes and non-perishable foods, and plans to open a regular food pantry.
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