What could be better than serving as a North American Mission Board (NAMB) missionary in picturesque Colorado Springs, Colo.? After all, the city of 380,000 backs up to the base of snow-capped, 14,000 feet-tall Pikes Peak on the edge of the Rocky Mountains.
Money and Outside magazines have both deemed it as No. 1 on the list of the best places to live in the United States. It’s perceived as a Christian “mecca” and nicknamed “The Evangelical Vatican” because so many evangelical Christian organizations have their headquarters here — Focus on the Family, The Navigators, the International Bible Society and Young Life, just to mention a few.
Colorado Springs is a military stronghold, the location of the Army’s Fort Carson, Peterson Air Force Base, Schriever Air Force Base, NORAD and the United States Air Force Academy.
The 6,000-foot high city is headquarters to the U.S. Olympic Committee, the U.S. Olympic Training Center and the national sports federations for Olympic bobsledding, fencing, figure skating, basketball, boxing, cycling, judo, hockey, swimming, shooting, triathlon, volleyball and wrestling.
The Colorado Springs area is also a vast wilderness of “lost” souls. Just ask Bill and Carol Lighty.
Bill Lighty, 53, serves as a NAMB national missionary and director of missions for Pikes Peak Baptist Association, which includes about 50 Southern Baptist churches and church plants. In a metro area of more than 600,000, 83 percent (some 500,000) never darken the door of a church — any church.
“God really broke my heart over the lostness of the Pikes Peak region,” said Lighty, who, with his wife of 32 years has worked in his current assignment two and a half years. Prior to that, he spent almost 21 years as pastor of Chapel Hills Baptist Church, Colorado Springs.
Although Lighty said Mormonism and Catholicism are both strongly entrenched in the Colorado Springs area, “there’s half a million people here who don’t know Christ.”
In addition to Pikes Peak, another of Colorado Springs’ famous landmarks is the “Garden of the Gods,” so-called because when it was named in 1859, it was described as a “place fit for the assembling of the gods.” Lighty said this focus on the mythical gods — but not on the one true God — is symptomatic of many of the residents of the Colorado Springs area.
“In a very real sense, Colorado Springs is not godless because the people here have a lot of gods they worship,” he said. “Some worship nature and the mountains. Some worship skiing. Some worship the metaphysical. Spiritualism is a big element of our culture, and we have a strong Wiccan movement. … So our challenge is competing with all these other gods plus the mountains — where there’s something to do 12 months out of the year — in order to help people worship the one true God versus their multiple gods.”
Lighty said he wears different hats in his job — church-planting strategist, a coach to pastors and a consultant to churches.
“I have now come to the realization that one church cannot reach the Pikes Peak region for the kingdom of God,” Lighty said. “If one church could have, it would have been done 100 years ago. I don’t think one denomination can do it, but that it’s going to take hundreds and hundreds of churches to reach these people significantly for God.”
One of Lighty’s “hot buttons” and key church-planting strategies centers on multihousing ministry, especially in nearby Manitou Springs. According to Lighty, 50 percent to 60 percent of families living in America (U.S. citizens and noncitizens) reside in apartment complexes or mobile home communities. But 95 percent of these people do not associate with a local church, and only 4 percent say they actually attend a church.
“So one thing we’re trying to communicate to pastors is that these people may never come to your church building but perhaps we can plant a church in that multihousing community,” whether an apartment complex or mobile home park, Lighty said.
Wynn Greene is Pikes Peak Baptist Association’s multihousing coordinator for the Front Range area of the Rocky Mountains.
“We’re not keeping up with what God is doing,” Greene said. “God has brought the world to America and to multihousing communities. So we missionaries can put our passports back in the drawer and our suitcase back in the closet and start praying for the local community.”
Lighty said the challenge to reach Colorado Springs is intensifying because the percentage of unchurched in the Colorado Springs metro area is going up, not down, and Colorado Springs continues to grow.
“To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a revival west of the Mississippi River and that’s sad,” Lighty said. “I’ve been praying for 25 years that God would bring us a revival and that we would see a fresh movement of God in this region, whether it’s along the I-25 corridor, in Denver, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins or wherever.” (NAMB)
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