One day when Cedric Brown was just a little kid growing up near Tarrant, his mom stopped going to church.
“When my grandmother passed away, my mother had a faith crisis. She couldn’t believe God would take her mother away,” said Brown, pastor of Destiny Covenant Church, Tarrant.
So the family started skipping Sundays, until one day the young boy realized he was missing something.
“I got up, put on my little suit and walked myself to the nearest church,” he said.
His mom was stunned when he came back and she learned where he had been. But eventually she started sending his siblings with him, then sent some offering money. Eventually she came back to church and to God.
“Children can lead their parents to church,” Brown said.
‘God wants to do something’
And that’s exactly what his hopes are for Destiny Covenant, the church that through “a movement of God” moved into the north Birmingham community near where he grew up.
“We wanted to be a church in a community where people could walk to church,” Brown said.
That’s been their goal ever since the church started in Hotel Highland in Birmingham’s Five Points South neighborhood in 2009. They moved from there into another rented space in a commercial building downtown, then out to a skating rink on a major highway in Tarrant.
The church was growing, but it was never quite in the position to be a presence in a neighborhood like Brown and others prayed it would be.
That’s when Central Baptist Church, Tarrant, came on the scene.
“I was talking about our vision with a friend and he told me I should get in touch with this pastor in town,” Brown said, referring to James Parnell, Central Baptist’s pastor.
Parnell and his congregation — whose youngest member was “about 70” — had been praying about how to best transition their church to reach the community around them.
So when Brown contacted Parnell, the two began to meet up on Thursdays to talk and pray, Parnell said. They had “no agenda,” he said.
But, Brown said, it became quickly apparent that God had one.
“I remember Bro. James saying, ‘I don’t know what God wants to do, but I know He wants to do something,’” he said.
It wasn’t too long before that “something” got started by Destiny Covenant moving into Central Baptist’s chapel.
And on the very first Sunday there, Brown saw his prayers answered.
“I was preaching on the passage where Jesus said, ‘Put your nets on the other side of the boat, and you’ll catch some fish.’ We felt like that’s what God said to us when He moved us to the other side of the highway in Tarrant. And in the middle of the sermon, two men from the neighborhood walked in,” Brown said. “It was amazing.”
And it only grew from there.
After a big Easter event, 20 visitors from the community came to the church, and Destiny Covenant and Central Baptist together began to dream even bigger.
‘Everything we needed’
“We made our theme ‘All in for outreach 2015,’ but we didn’t have enough people in our congregation to do the kind of outreach we wanted to do,” Brown said.
So they began praying for God to send some people to help them do it.
Enter Smoke Rise Baptist Church, Warrior, and Carolina Baptist Church, Andalusia. Parnell connected Destiny Covenant with the two congregations, as well as with the greater Baptist family — the church joined Birmingham Baptist Association in July. And as a joint effort, everyone began to work toward an evangelistic effort with a clothes giveaway and MEGA Sports Camp.
“God sent everything we needed,” Brown said.
Volunteers from Smoke Rise Baptist prayer-walked the neighborhood, handing out flyers and telling people about the event. And Carolina Baptist brought a team full of coaches and teachers to run the sports camp, which offered cheerleading, basketball and martial arts classes for about 45 neighborhood children. Their parents came too. And everyone heard the gospel.
Keith Tankersley, pastor of Carolina Baptist, said it was a good way for his church to use “our God-given talents to reach out.”
Jonathan Jones, also with Carolina Baptist, agreed. “Destiny Covenant is a great church trying to introduce itself to the community,” he said. “We were glad to be able to help them do that.”
Brown said the evangelistic efforts are gaining momentum and boosting his faith, and Parnell said the whole thing has been a blessing to him and his church.
“Our mindset at Central Baptist is that we want to be in the community, and we don’t know how much longer we will be around, age-wise,” Parnell said. “My role is to lead us in the direction that God wants our church to go.”
And that direction, he said, is to support, equip and encourage Destiny Covenant for ministry inside and outside the walls of Central Baptist’s building.
Brown said his church is thrilled about that. “We’re just trying to find what God is doing and join Him, and He continues to open doors.”
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