Alabama native moves back to replant Guntersville church

Just a year ago, Steven Swords’ life was a haven of stability. He was in his 15th year of service as pastor of a thriving Baptist church in Tennessee. And he wasn’t doing too badly selling real estate on the side.
   
Then everything changed. Swords sold out — literally — for the lost people of Marshall County. 
   
He sold everything he owned, moved his wife and two youngest daughters back to his hometown of Guntersville and bought a long-abandoned Baptist church.
   
Why?
   
“God made me come,” he said.
   
In June 2005, Swords sold the Guntersville-area house that he and his wife had retained should they ever choose to move back home.
   
“We had had a second home down here for more than 10 years so we could move back and retire,” Swords said. “Last spring, we decided we weren’t ever going to move back and we sold the house.”
   
Eleven days later, he drove by the abandoned building of Victory Baptist Church in downtown Guntersville and knew instantly where the money from the sale of the home would go.
   
“I had always known that one day, I was going to start a church plant,” Swords said. “I believe God just put it on my heart to go buy it.”
   
And he did buy the 50-year-old building — run down from lack of use since the former congregation had vacated it — and moved nearby to start The Church at Lake Guntersville. Volunteers from the area helped Swords as he spent months fixing plumbing, repairing the structure and parking lot, repainting the walls, getting new furniture and laying down new carpet.
   
But even though it had a new look, new start and new congregation, Victory Baptist was keeping the old name — Swords said there was no question about that.
   
“I don’t own the church; God owns the church and that’s what He wanted the name to be. It had to be called Victory again; it just had to be,” said Swords, the new Victory Baptist Church’s pastor.
   
For two months, the Swords family went to area restaurants and stores and knocked on doors, going wherever they could find people, he said.
   
Victory held its first service Sept. 11, 2005, and its pews began to fill up with its unchurched neighbors. People who had never darkened the doors of a church before began coming, accepting Christ, being baptized and joining the church.
   
One man who had not been in church in 25 years came to Victory, and then his whole family was baptized. Other families have similar stories, Swords said. And even more continue to come.
   
Randall Stoner, director of missions for Marshall Baptist Association, said the church is doing “a tremendous job pulling together” to reach the inner city of Guntersville.
   
“God is really blessing them,” as they reach people for Christ, he said.
   
Otis Corbitt, an associate in the office of associational missions and church planting of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said, “It’s an inspiring, excellent story of what we would call a church replant. He had 66 charter members, and only a handful came from other churches. The vast majority weren’t going to church anywhere.” 
   
“Steven Swords had a tremendous burden that people in that part of Guntersville were not being ministered to, and he’s on fire for getting people saved.”
   
It’s a God thing, Swords said. “We’re growing. The Lord has been good to us. I give Him all the credit.”