North American Mission Board (NAMB) missionary Vivian McCaughan enters Hidden Valley Estates in Wentzville, Mo., and thanks God for the changes she sees.
She points out the new community center, the tidy landscaping and the covered pavilion built on the dusty spot where outdoor baptisms once took place in a rented cattle tank.
But mostly McCaughan thanks God for transformed lives. She remembers back almost 20 years ago when she first saw the 200-unit apartment community as a suffering mass of humanity. In those days, the complex was infested with drugs and crime.
She got behind the work begun in 1990 by Pastor Dan Hite and 45 members of Christian Family Fellowship, which began its ministry by serving a Thanksgiving meal to 230 residents. Twin Rivers Baptist Association had targeted the complex as a strategic focus area. In those early days, McCaughan taught children and women and helped to make connections with churches and resources, according to Hite. “She became our greatest cheerleader.”
By the next year at Thanksgiving, the new church served 350. It also ran a weeklong Life Fair ministry, holding various life skills workshops for adults, Vacation Bible School for the children and ended the week with a Christian concert. Hite said management noticed a significant drop in the number of complaint calls to the police and the complex’s office that week — down from 40 calls to just two.
The complex manager later called Hite and said, “I don’t know what you did, but all I know is I want you here all the time.” That week, the church saw 123 professions of faith and would later rent a cattle tank for outdoor baptisms in the middle of the community.
After meeting for those first years at a nearby dance school, the church now meets in a community center built on 11 acres bought in 1996. The center serves the community’s 600 residents — consisting of a majority of single mothers and children — and offers day care for infants up to 5 year olds, an after-school reading and sports program, GED and pre-college tutoring, mentoring, cooking classes and fragile family counseling.
Serving as the Missouri Baptist Convention’s missions/evangelism team leader, McCaughan also serves as NAMB’s multihousing church-planting missionary to Missouri. Like most of the 5,300 NAMB missionaries in the United States, Canada and their territories, McCaughan receives a percentage of her support from the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions. She is among the NAMB missionaries featured as part of the annual week of prayer, March 7–14.
In Missouri, where 37 percent of the population of 5.9 million lives in multihousing, her job is not a small one. She said every county in Missouri has some type of multihousing facility, whether an apartment or condominium complex, an inner-city housing project, a mobile home park, cluster homes, duplexes or blocks of homes that are subdivided. And 97 percent of the residents who live in multihousing are unchurched, according to a national NAMB study.
McCaughan said among these unchurched multihousing residents, studies show that generally 40 percent will go to a Bible study or worship experience on the property but that only 3 percent or 4 percent of residents will attend a church off the grounds.
After ministries are launched on the multihousing properties, she said, “The ultimate goal is to hold Bible studies and worship experiences on the property and to have a long-term presence.
“The biggest fallacy in multihousing/church planting is that people think it can happen overnight, and they are willing to jump in and go into a community for a week, two weeks, maybe even for a year,” she said. “In some instances, it may take five or 10 years for a church plant to take hold so that the residents see it as their church and their mission field. It’s a longtime process.” (NAMB)
Share with others: