Today’s From the States features items from:
Western Recorder (Kentucky)
Baptist & Reflector (Tennessee)
Portraits (Arizona)
KY church gives God glory
for 70 coming to Christ
By Myriah Snyder
MADISONVILLE, Ky. (Western Recorder) — Sunday, Feb. 8, is a date that the members of Grape Vine Baptist Church of Madisonville will talk about for years to come. Seventy people were baptized that day.
“This event happened because 500 or 600 people just fervently plead with God for His presence,” Pastor Bob Morrison said.
“There was not a special speaker or a special sermon or anything special about the day other than we spent a lot of time pleading and praying with God,” he added.
Morrison challenged the southwestern Kentucky congregation with an average attendance of 500 people to “pray for the entire week, pleading with God for His presence and asking God to show up in power on the following Sunday,” he said.
The following Sunday (Jan. 18), he preached on the “wheat and tares.” There were 48 professions of faith that morning.
That night, there was no sermon, simply a time for testimonies, and the congregation responded to God’s call with 23 more professions of faith.
On Sunday, Feb. 1, 15 people joined the church, with eight by profession of faith.
So far, the church has baptized 70 and still have more to be baptized, Morrison said.
“I think the problem that we typically have is that when people hear of something like this, they ask who preached, or what did he preach, or what was the sermon or what’s your visitation program?” Morrison said.
“People want to give credit to the program, or to the process or to people,” he continued. “What we try to do, maybe intentionally or not, is we try to take God’s glory away from Him and say, ‘Well, God couldn’t have done that. It must have been a good preacher. It must have been a good sermon.’ And none of that is true.
“We’ve taken a great deal of time and effort and energy to teach our people ‘it is not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit says the Lord,'” Morrison concluded.
Throughout the week, the church received calls from people who were praying and calling the office to “let us know what was going on in their lives and how they were taking our services before the Lord,” Grape Vine’s youth pastor Michael Jicka said.
“We’ve seen Him do things that I have not seen in 25 years of youth ministry that I’ve never seen even at camps and overseas. I’ve never seen anything in this setting work like that,” Jicka added.
“When we prayed for the presence of God, He showed up.”
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This article appeared in the Western Recorder (westernrecorder.org), newsjournal of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. Myriah Snyder is a news writer for the Western Recorder.
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Small TN church helps
children, teens
By Connie Bushey
SEVIERVILLE, Tenn. (Baptist & Reflector) — On a Sunday morning Sims Chapel Baptist Church here will draw about 50 people to its regular worship service and about 30 children and younger teens to its children’s church.
On Wednesday nights, the church draws about 40 children and teens.
The church may seem like many other Tennessee Baptist churches with quite a few students in comparison to adults. Yet the situation is unique in that nearly all of the students who attend Sims Chapel Baptist come without their parents and are picked up by the church bus.
The ministry to children and teens in the community by Sims Chapel Baptist also is unusual in other ways.
In 2013, 10 of the children or teens were saved and eight were baptized. In 2014, four were saved and baptized and an adult was saved and baptized.
Another way it is unusual stems from the high ratio of adults to students at the church. In response, a small group of members teach and lead the students while they are there, but they do much more than that, involving the whole congregation, said Dave Pyatte, pastor.
All of this began after a fall festival for the community about four years ago. John and Robin Patrick of the church got to know some kids who attended so well that they invited them back and then the next Wednesday night picked them up using the church bus which the church wasn’t using much anyway.
That first Wednesday night 12 kids came.
What the Patricks and others in the church soon discovered was kids living in great poverty with families who had many problems. They also found kids who were interested in Jesus.
Pyatte said he will never forget learning of two girls who came to church on the bus on a Sunday following Thanksgiving holidays. The girls kept asking people when they would eat. The church only was providing food before Wednesday night activities at that time. Eventually Robin Patrick learned that they had not eaten in two days.
In response, Sims Chapel started a food ministry for the kids. They receive a breakfast snack on Sunday mornings and a hot meal on Wednesday evening. They also receive food to take home in backpacks provided by the church after Sunday and Wednesday activities.
The Patricks, soon assisted by fellow church members Pat Compton, Penny Gibson, Maggie Miller, Aaron and Jessica Ewell, and Mike Baker, kept offering the regular programs on Sunday mornings and evenings and an “on-going” Vacation Bible School on Wednesday nights. They dubbed it Christ In Action or CIA “which is truly what happened,” explained Robin.
Then the ministry leaders started taking the community kids monthly to minister to nursing home residents. They taught them how to interpret Christian music with coordinated movements in black light. They began holding movie nights for them at the church. Finally, they started taking them on fun trips like visiting a park.
But the highlight of the ministry is CIA which will regularly conclude outside the church with the kids and leaders sitting around a fire pit and sharing prayer requests. Robin said amazingly 4-year-olds will ask for prayer for a family member.
“It’s just amazing to see how excited they are about the Lord and coming to church,” said Patrick.
The congregation has been supportive as ministry leaders identified needs of students for things besides food such as shoes or school supplies and the outings. This year they were put in contact with Appalachian Regional Ministry of Southern Baptists who provided 50 backpacks filled with items for the kids.
Of course, at times, working with the kids is a challenge and more workers are needed, said Pyatte. Yet, members of the church have seen kids change for the good and the members have changed for the good because of it, said Robin and the pastor.
“God had the Patricks lead Sims Chapel to reach out to the lost in the community,” said Pyatte.
“I haven’t seen anyone have a passion for kids like those two,” said Pyatte of the Patricks, who have one son, Harley, 14. Pyatte has ministered for 35 years and served Sims Chapel for two years. He formerly served a church in North Carolina.
He explained that Sims Chapel Baptist is located in a farming community which has “a lot of poverty. And Sims is right in the middle of that,” he added.
He has visited the homes of many of the kids who have single parents and live in “sad situations.” He has met parents who “don’t care about anything. If it weren’t for the grandparents, they (the children and teens) would be in trouble,” reported Pyatte.
“All the gospel they hear is at church.” He works to “bring it down to their level” at worship services, he added. He even gets them personally involved, calling them to the platform to help him illustrate something. He only has had to stop preaching a couple of times because a teen has interrupted him, he said.
“It takes a lot of prayer and patience to work with these kids,” said Pyatte.
To help provide the meals for the kids, members give beef from cattle they raise and produce. Members also give funds for the kids ministry to an offering that is taken up regularly.
“This is just a small church,” said Pyatte.
“Some people think we do too much for the kids of the community. When it comes to their souls, you can’t do too much as far as I’m concerned.”
Robin added, “It takes a lot of people working together to care for a lot of kids to make it work….
“I think God has arranged for everything to have happened in my life. We never know how we’re blessed.” B&R
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This article appeared in the Baptist & Reflector (http://tnbaptist.org/BRNews.asp), newsjournal of the Tennessee Baptist Convention. Connie Bushey is news editor of the Baptist & Reflector.
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Clear vision, team effort
and prayer propel AZ church
By Deborah Leuthold
GOODYEAR, Ariz. (Portraits) — In the midst of a vibrant church ministry in a city that was voted the No. 1 place to live in America, Chris Stull felt a hunger to be where unchurched people lived.
“Arizona ranks among the top places where residents don’t connect to a church family and many have yet to hear the gospel,” says Stull, pastor of Wellspring Church in Goodyear.
“Those and other factors led us to move to Arizona and plant Wellspring in February 2014.”
Living in McKinney, Texas, gave us some of the best years of our lives, he says, “but, it was the burden God placed in my heart [to move].”
Brenna Stull wasn’t as positive at first, but God was also at work in her.
“There were so many divine moments God revealed His plan that we both became convinced,” she says.
“I’ve found that outside of strong leadership on the part of any church planter/pastor/team, a new church work needs three things,” Stull says. “Number one is prayer. The power and necessity of prayer cannot be overstated.”
The second is people who come alongside early and often to promote, attend, take leadership roles and more.
The Stulls were not the only family who moved to Arizona to be part of this new work. Three other couples from First Baptist Church, McKinney, felt God leading them to sell homes, uproot, leave family and join God in His work. Others have given six months for a local mission experience and then returned to their home churches.
The third is financial resources and someone to account for them.
Wellspring partners include First McKinney; North Phoenix Baptist Church, where Stull was executive pastor before moving to McKinney; Lake Pointe Church in Rockwell, Texas; First Baptist Church, Mustang, Okla., and others.
The church began by reaching out to the community.
“God has opened doors in local schools, Luke Air Force Base, city governments, with retail owners and others,” Stull says.
Wellspring assists the community by serving meals at holidays, distributing Christmas gifts to special-needs families, hosting date nights and retreats for military families, praying at city council meetings, hosting prayer events and more.
“We also attempt to engage everyone we reach in small groups for community and discipleship,” Stull says. “We host classes for children to build a spiritual framework for salvation and discipleship. We host weekly men’s and women’s ministries, teaching the Word and encouraging members to pursue spiritual disciplines, worship and acts of service.”
The women’s ministry has grown to 45-50 women attending weekly meetings, with Bible teaching led by the well-known Bible teacher Jill Rhodes. Members invite guests and find unique ways to minister. They held a night of worship where women stilled their hearts to celebrate Jesus’ birth before the stresses of the holidays.
“I believe this women’s ministry is called to minister to a larger group than solely the women of Wellspring,” Brenna Stull says. “We see God stirring women in the West Valley. We want to expand ways to teach those hungry for God’s Word.”
Stull believes God will use Wellspring in three distinct ways in the next decade: to be a unifying catalyst and partner for revival, to lead a movement that connects people to a life-giving relationship with Christ and to equip them to grow and reproduce as believers.
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This article appeared in Portraits, newsmagazine of the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention. Deborah Leuthold is a freelance writer in Litchfield Park, Ariz.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: From the States, published each Tuesday by Baptist Press, relays news and feature stories from state Baptist papers and other publications on initiatives by Baptist churches, associations and state conventions in evangelism, church planting and Great Commission outreach, including partnership missions. Reports about churches, associations and state conventions responding to the International Mission Board’s call to embrace the world’s 3,800 unengaged, unreached people groups also are included in From the States, along with reports about church, associational and state convention initiatives in conjunction with the North American Mission Board’s call to Southern Baptist churches to broaden their efforts in starting new churches and satellite campuses. The items appear in Baptist Press as originally published.
