After starting a church, the last thing on most pastors’ minds would be how that church could immediately have a hand in starting more, especially great distances away.
But when church planter Steve Gentry worked with the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia and the North American Mission Board in 2009 to start Village Church at Midlothian, he led the Richmond-suburb church to form a missions partnership with a Southern Baptist couple serving in East Asia within the church’s first year of existence.
Within that first year, the congregation numbered 12, then grew to 36. Getting involved in international missions when they had yet to establish themselves locally might have seemed out of order, but to Gentry, who grew up in Midlothian, that set the tone for the growth and reach of the congregation which now numbers 300 and includes two overseas missions partnerships, the other with Southern Baptist missionaries in Peru.
“Whatever you want the DNA of your church to be, you have to start from Day 1,” Gentry said. The church finding its place in God’s story meant finding ways to reach the world, not only the community, with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Feeling limited
But how could a small church just starting out do that? Small churches can feel limited by their circumstances as to how much they can do or how far they can reach, Gentry said. But that doesn’t have to be the case, especially with Southern Baptist congregations, he said.
Partner with other churches to do missions, Gentry advises smaller churches. Village Church partners with Parkway Baptist Church, Moseley, Va., to send missions teams to Peru.
“Even as a church plant, we can have missions efforts all over the world,” Gentry said. “Because we get together as Southern Baptist churches to cooperate, we’re able to fund long-term efforts that lead to long-term churches.”
‘Give tangibly’
“It’s exciting for our people (at church) to be a part of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering as well as giving through the Cooperative Program because we’re able to give tangibly toward something that’s going on all over the world, where missionaries are on the ground through what we’re giving. They’re full time, able to start churches, able to form relationships, able to get the gospel to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to have it.”
A staggering difference the missions teams have encountered is the sheer number of people contained within the same land area as their county in Virginia. “Rather than the 400,000 people we have here, there are 6 million people in the same amount of land that we encompass,” Gentry said.
Because of the challenge of reaching so many people with the gospel, the church has decided that “rather than just taking missions trips, we want to be a part of seeing God plant churches,” he said. “So we don’t want to just take one trip to an area and then go somewhere else. Instead we want to commit to a specific area so that over the years we can partner with the same people and see churches planted.
“Without that type of relationship, we would just simply be having to do guess work as to what God is doing there, but we get updates frequently and we’re able to communicate often with them so that we can continue to prepare and focus on what God wants to do next in East Asia.”
(BP)
Share with others: