John Brock, pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Florence, still has a screenshot of the text Allen Tate sent him in 2015. They bring it up every now and then just for a laugh.
The text says, “Think about this — The Well Church Florence, a campus of Highland Baptist Church.”
Tate, then college pastor at Highland Baptist, had been sensing God moving in his heart to take the church’s weekly college worship service — called The Well — and turn it into a church plant with a missional focus on reaching college students.
Brock said his answer was short — “Uhhh … no.”
But Brock and Tate both knew the conversation wasn’t over — it was just beginning.
Multiple campuses
In the six years since, Highland has planted The Well Church Florence but also The Well Church Huntsville. The Well Church Florence also has multiplied, planting Church at the Oaks in Tuscaloosa. The Well Church Florence now has a church-planter-in-residence who is preparing to plant Banner Church in Jacksonville in early 2023.
And they’re planning to continue to train planters and start new churches near university campuses. They hope The Well Network will have 16 locations by 2026.
It all started when Brock and Tate began observing the students who were graduating from the University of North Alabama and leaving Highland’s college ministry.
“What we realized was pretty gut-wrenching,” Tate remembered. “We had taught them to love the ministry, but we had not taught them to love the Church.”
Many students saw the college worship service as their congregation and weren’t engaging in the life of the church body, he admitted.
“And when they left us, they were not engaging in a body wherever they moved. It was almost as if we had not prepared them effectively for the next stage of life.”
So Tate began wrestling with what to do with the ministry. It had run well since the early 2000s, but now he and Brock were both questioning whether it was really achieving its purpose. Should they revamp it? Should they tear it down and start over?
As they prayed through those questions, Tate began building relationships with leaders in other parts of the country who were planting churches focused on reaching college students. Church planting wasn’t a new concept for the Highland congregation — in the past they had taken in a declining church and replanted it as a campus of Highland.
They just hadn’t planted one focused on reaching college students, and slowly Tate was gaining a heart to do just that.
Then he sent Brock that text, the one to which Brock replied “no.”
‘God wanted more’
“That was just sort of a first conversation,” Brock recalled. “But over the course of some months of conversation and praying, we became convinced that God wanted more for this ministry than just a worship service that drew college students in to worship once a week and that was it.”
So in 2016, The Well Church Florence was born, not as a campus of Highland Baptist but as a full-fledged church plant. It had a missional focus on reaching students from the University of North Alabama, though it also drew young adults from the community.
The process went well — students were discipled, baptized and sent out on mission.
Working in partnership with Mike Nuss, director of the office of collegiate and student ministries for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, Highland members began to pray about expanding the vision to other college towns. They began to look around the state to determine which needed the most help in reaching students with the gospel.
“Of course we’ve got Baptist Campus Ministries on the majority of our campuses, but in some places it’s them and maybe one other church actively engaging the campus,” Tate said. “That might mean that it’s basically two full-time people engaging a campus of 15,000. We wanted to come alongside them and help.”
In 2017 — much faster than they’d planned — they planted The Well Church Huntsville near the campus of the UAH. They had originally considered a runway of several years for that plant, but the timeline was accelerated when the city’s University Baptist Church partnered with them in the effort.
Then in January 2021, The Well Church Florence planted Church at the Oaks in Tuscaloosa. In 2022, it will plant Banner Church in Jacksonville. By then, Malachi Cole will have spent 18 months as a planter-in-residence at The Well Church Florence, learning from Tate and his team.
In January, another planter-in-residence will join the staff of The Well Church Florence in anticipation of a fifth location, still to be determined. The Well Church Huntsville will have a planter-in-residence soon too, which will be another step in Highland’s long-term vision of church multiplication.
‘It’s all the Lord’
The Well Network is expanding, and Tate now serves as executive director in addition to being lead pastor of The Well Church Florence.
“What we have seen — it’s not us, it’s all the Lord,” he said, noting they have been “building the plane while it was in the air” as they planted one church and then started the network.”
And baptisms have increased significantly, Tate shared. The church plants are nearing 150 baptisms since the networks’s 2016 beginning, much more than the single college ministry effort saw in 15 years.
Those numbers — and the number of students in a discipleship relationship across the three church plants — are what leaders look at more these days than attendance, Tate said.
“These are the numbers that at the end of the day are ultimately going to make a Kingdom impact. We just want to see that continue to multiply.”
Brock added that it’s been amazing for Highland members to get to celebrate God working, and students being baptized and discipled, in rooms they’ll probably never set foot in.
“It’s been fun for our church family at Highland to watch this unfold, and have buy-in … and see this as a ministry God has given us,” Brock said.
