Woodland Baptist Association has two Alabama Baptist associational partners, and plans are in place for the two to send missions teams to Michigan this summer.
Teams from Pleasant Grove Baptist Association will work with a new church start in Freemont doing block parties, Bible clubs and other outreach efforts. Teams will also work with Trinity Baptist Church, Grant, Mich., to do construction as well as evangelistic outreach.
Judson Baptist Association is planning to send teams to work with churches in the Grand Rapids area. The association just launched its partnership and final plans are still being put in place, according to Woodland Director of Missions Mike McCoy.
Woodland Association is located in west-central Michigan and covers 10 counties with a total population of 1.6 million people. About a million of those live in a two-county area that includes Grand Rapids, the state’s second largest city.
Currently Woodland Association has 17 churches and church plants and three full-time pastors. But with the help of Alabama Baptists, McCoy is praying for four new church plants each year through 2020.
Churches in the association are beginning to catch the vision of winning people to faith in the Lord, McCoy said. He pointed out that in each of the past two years, associational churches have doubled their number of baptisms.
Rivertown Community Church, Grandville, Mich., currently has three churches meeting in its building. On Saturday nights, a Burmese-language church meets there. The Rivertown congregation meets on Sunday mornings, and a Hispanic church uses the building on Sunday afternoons.
In addition, Rivertown is the sponsoring church for a new work planting a black church meeting in a different site.
McCoy also pointed toward the rapid growth of Iglesia Bautista Hispana, Wyoming, Mich., as evidence of desire to reach lost people. In the past year, the church has grown from 35 in attendance to more than 100. This year, it is planting a new church — Iglesia Bautista Hispana de Allendale. Plans are under way to launch a Hispanic Bible Institute this fall.
“It won’t have all the accreditations, but it will take laymen and give them the basic skills to plant churches,” McCoy said. “We will have a whole bunch of new missionaries.”
Anchor Baptist Church, Walker, Mich., has several members with celiac disease. When the church became aware of the peculiar needs of these members, it responded by establishing a gluten-free environment. Then the church joined community agencies to sponsor a gluten-free food fair, where people could find information about living with the disease.
Anchor Baptist members registered the nearly 1,000 participants and gave them information about the church being gluten-free in its children’s programs and in the Lord’s Supper. Now some of the people who learned about the church through the fair attend Anchor.
Grand Rapids is home to several prominent institutions identified with evangelicals. Among these are Zondervan Publishers, Baker Books and the headquarters of two national denominations. Despite this “religious culture,” there are still “vast pockets of lostness,” McCoy said. He said a conservative estimate of lost people in the community is 800,000.
Three of the association’s 10 counties have no Southern Baptist witness. In other counties, towns with populations as large as 10,000 have no Southern Baptist church.
Not everything is rosy in the association. McCoy said one of the churches may close because of a variety of issues. But he said he and the churches are not focusing on the problems.
“If we focus on the needs and problems of our churches, then we take our eyes off the lost,” McCoy said.
The director of missions said he and other associational leaders are exploring ways to reach the many different types of people who live in the area. “We have wealthy suburbs where the recession does not seem to be making an impact,” he observed. There are also many hourly workers, and much of the area is agricultural.
“We do not want to be limited to reaching only one type of person,” McCoy said. “Christ died for all.”
As new churches are planted, McCoy said the association is looking for new sources of funding these new works as well as help in starting a house-church network for some of the association’s smaller communities.
“In Isaiah 43:19, God says, ‘I am doing a new thing.’ That is what we want Him to do in Woodland Association. That is what we are praying for, and that is what we are working for,” McCoy declared.
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