Tarrant First Baptist looks to future, gifts building to church plant

Tarrant First Baptist Church on Sept. 18 passed the torch of ministry — and its campus — to Victory City Church, a church plant in the Jefferson County suburb north of Birmingham.

Chris Crain, executive director of the Birmingham Metro Baptist Association, and Josh Cook, BMBA church revitalization specialist, helped Derek Gentle, interim pastor of Tarrant FBC, and Brandon Knight, pastor of Victory City Church, navigate the process of church planting, one of the four pathways to church revitalization.

Cook said members of Tarrant FBC are investing the church’s legacy and resources in a completely new work with the hope that Victory City will take up the mantle and continue the mission FBC began 100 years ago with new effectiveness and energy.

Still, combining two churches takes a lot of planning and prayer, Cook said.

“Our role in this process was to identify a partner church for FBC Tarrant and connect them, and we found Victory City,” Cook recalled. “In a replant, the declining church has reached a point where their best path forward is to invest their resources — building, people, funds — in a new church plant. We guide the churches through the process to make sure things are done smoothly and the transfer is done properly.”

BMBA uses a strategy that involves two churches coming together, each with unique joys and challenges. A replant is one church passing the torch of ministry to a new church rather than a merger or partnership, Cook explained.

Challenges, joys of replanting 

The greatest challenge in replanting is the declining church letting go of what they know and embracing what God wants to do with the new church, he acknowledged. In this case, Tarrant FBC had three conditions before agreeing to the replant:

• They believed it was God’s will that a Baptist church be on their corner.
• That the church could no longer sustain effective ministry in the community.
• They would rather see fruitful ministry by investing in a church that could reach the community than leaving an empty building when they could no longer maintain ministry.

Cook hopes sharing how Victory City and Tarrant FBC made a future-focused plan will inspire other churches to reach out for help and find a new path forward.