Stained glass & Starbucks

When Milton Wood was growing up in Burning Bush near Dalton, something happened which shaped his life and molded his yet-to-be ministry.

"When I was just a little boy, someone presented the Gospel to me in a manner that I could understand. In my context, in my 'little boy world,' they took the time to understand my values so they could make the Gospel relevant to me.

That event, now decades in the past, has been the foundation of his ministry.

"Today I feel that I should do the same thing for others, using any means possible, to share the Gospel in a way they can understand and grasp. Isn't that what the Apostle Paul taught we should do? It may mean that I need to change the way I worship or dress, but I believe that is the only way to win America to Christ."

Now, at 67 years of age, Wood is implementing that approach at a church that is reinventing itself with a missional vision of reaching others in a context they can understand.

 

A former powerhouse

In the 1960s First Baptist Church of Forest Park was a powerhouse among Georgia Baptist churches. It averaged nearly a thousand in Sunday School and worship as its 1,700-seat sanctuary reverberated with the hymns of Christendom. But the community changed, the church had difficulty shedding its traditions, and the congregation began to dwindle. Two years ago when Wood was called out of retirement as interim pastor - a position now upgraded to fulltime pastor - attendance was barely 200.

What happened to Forest Park is a stark warning to many Georgia Baptist churches. Society moved on and the church lagged behind until it was left in the dust. Old evangelism approaches were clung to and new models were shunned.

In some ways it became the Southern Baptist version of the Amish faith; pure in its orthodoxy but culturally irrelevant. It never compromised the Gospel message but failed to tell the story in new and exciting ways.

 

Breathing new life into a church

But that's not the end of the story. Today, new life is being breathed into Forest Park as the church reinvents itself to make it relevant to the community. The Gospel presentation is as strong as ever but the method of delivery is more relevant. Today the story is being shared in ways its hearers can more easily grasp.

"The church had only baptized 12 people in the past five years before we tried some new approaches, and I think we've turned the corner on our decline. We baptized 50 this year and we're just in late September," Wood said while walking around the cavernous sanctuary.

But that's not the end of the growth; weekly attendance has jumped by 60 in just 18 months.

How did Forest Park reverse the decline? It wasn't as much through growth of the mother church but through starting new ministries that reach the unchurched, then offering them worship alternatives.

"Most of our new members have no desire to worship in a large sanctuary like ours. There's nothing wrong with it, its just not who they are. And if we insisted on them changing to embrace our worship style, they would not come. The church tried that for 40 years and it wasn't working," he explains.

Long ago Wood came to be at peace with what many Georgia Baptists still struggle; the flexibility to bend when it comes to worship and evangelism approaches.

"I prefer a traditional service with choir robes and the singing of hymns, but church is not about me or about what I want. It's about Him and making the gospel relevant to the culture. I've noticed that most people, as adults, enjoy the style of music they grew up with as a child.

 

Many today don't know Southern Baptist tradition

"We need to admit that many today don't know the traditional style of Southern Baptists of 40 years ago because they were never in that culture. It's wrong for us to expect them to embrace a tradition they are not familiar with. They have their own traditions that are just as valid.

"It would be a real shame for those folks to go to hell just because they didn't want to sing the hymns which we insist they learn."

They don't sing hymns at Logos, a new church that meets on Sunday evenings in a coffeehouse in inner city Atlanta. In fact, they don't sing at all. But they do gather to study and search Scripture in a way that is just as valid as what happens in any brick-and-mortar Baptist church.

Both Forest Park and Logos are examples of a missional approach to evangelism and church planting. Forest Park looked at the needs of its community and developed ministries to meet the needs. Then as people came to Christ, a church was begun that was tailored to their style of worship. In addition to a clothing and food pantry ministry, a 6:30 p.m. Wednesday community worship service now attracts 150, as many as attend in the traditional Sunday morning service. And an 11 a.m. Wednesday morning community service is also gaining popularity.

To be missional is to think about spreading the Gospel in ways modeled by the early Christians. Some of those cutting edge approaches pioneered by First Century Christians were lost as the Church became institutionalized. Now they are being rediscovered.

Forest Park is learning what it means to be missional. Logos has been such since its founding earlier this year.

In a Starbucks coffee shop tucked into a strip mall in colorful Little Five Points, the gospel is being planted and watered in the lives of about 20 individuals. Danny Preston is committed to seeing that those in the neighborhood have an opportunity to respond to that gospel.

"The non-Christians I was encountering down here were far less interested in going to a traditional church building than I ever imagined. There was no way I was ever going to get them to a church, so with the backing of the Atlanta Association of Southern Baptists and First Baptist Church where I had served as a staff member, I made the decision to take the gospel to them.

"Ninety percent of this area is completely unchurched. What a great place to share Christ," he said as he sipped a latte and waited for individuals to show up for a Sunday evening Bible study.

Some may question why a church would need to be based out of Starbucks. For Heather Cahill, it's a no-brainer.

"It's a lot harder to interact with non-believers in a traditional church setting. What better place for a church to be started than in the middle of lost people?

"It's not uncommon for someone to be listening in on our Bible study and begin to ask questions about Christ. That's why we are here, to help transform society."

 

Undergoing a missional makeover in Jonesboro

Further south of Atlanta in Jonesboro, First Baptist Church has undergone a missional makeover that changed the look of the congregation - and has brought an ever growing number of unbelievers into the Kingdom.

The congregation is 180 years old but does not have a 180-year-old mindset, says pastor Dean Haun. Much of its change has occurred in the past four years.

"Our community began to transition and we had to decide if we were going to stay and adapt or move away from the field God had given to us. As a result of our decision to stay, we eventually grew from one to13 different congregations - 13 different expressions of what it means to be a Christian - as well as have one contemporary and two traditional worship services.

"Two of those congregations reflect specific subcultures - hip hop and bikers. Our staff speaks 20 languages and a fourth of our deacons are not Anglos.

"We now have our own medical clinic and have seen 328 professions of faith in the past year. We built a Recreation Outreach Center that has two fullsize gyms and walking tracks and has been the scene of 400 professions of faith."

Haun is a stickler for doctrinal purity while urging his congregation on to new heights of freedom of evangelical expression.

Some of our members would say that what we had been doing for 25 years was working fine and there was no need to change even as our membership began to plateau. We could have sat here and died but we decided to be proactive and change with the times. We never compromised the message but sought new ways of how we communicated it.

 

Reaching 27,000 bikers

"We added 11 of our 13 congregations, most of them language congregations, in just the past six years. When we discovered there were 27,000 people in south Atlanta in the biker lifestyle who needed to hear the gospel, we started a church for them. We did the same for the hip hop sub-culture. All we did was respond to the vision that God gave us for our community," Haun explains.

"We have a ton of folks here in Clayton County and they may not all look like us or talk like us but we have an obligation in Acts 1:8 to reach every last one of them. They may not come to our sanctuary, but that just means we have to take the church to them."

In Cobb County, Johnson Ferry Baptist Church has adopted a similar approach to offering a variety of worship, discipleship, and evangelism formats to reach a highly segmented society. While East Cobb, as the area is known, is highly affluent, the missional approach is just as valid - discover the needs of the community and tailor an outreach to meet those needs. The harvest follows.

Since 1989 the church has been on an aggressive church starting track, launching seven new congregations, partnering with other churches to start four others, and expanding its worship service by live video feed to a second campus in Acworth. Additionally it hosts four language congregations on it main campus, started a church in the Ukraine, built a new sanctuary for a Chinese congregation, and supports seminaries and Bible training institutes in four nations to train pastors in church planting.

Though Johnson Ferry has five morning worship services at its primary location, it has been flexible in how the Gospel is presented in those services, says pastor Bryant Wright. Founded on a traditional format of worship, today it offers worship opportunities through three contemporary and two blended services.

"In all five of our services the people hear the same uncompromised message but we vary the style in which it is delivered. We believe that when you are sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit you'll constantly change your methodology to keep the message relevant. The option is to resist change and die.

"We never dictated the worship or evangelism style of our new church starts, but they have all adopted contemporary formats. We gave them the freedom to set their own course and to be as free as we are to experiment with their metholodgy," Wright explains.

"If we were not open to offering an alternative form of worship we would be guilty of denying the gospel to hundreds who are attracted to those services."

In Loganville east of Atlanta, The Summit has followed a similar plan. It's a missional church that seeks to incarnate Christ through all of its outreach approaches.

"Missionaries to other countries learned a long time ago that it was wrong to 'Westernize' the Gospel, and we want to be sure we don't 'traditionalize' the Gospel. We are using the same approach William Carey used when he carried the Gospel to India two centuries ago," says pastor 'Butch' Butcher.

 

"The gospel is not 1950s American culture"

"I'm afraid that Southern Baptists have lost their cultural sensitivity and don't know how to reach the lost world. Everyone doesn't have to look like me or worship like me to go to heaven. The Gospel is not Western culture or1950s American culture. It's not even 'Sunday-best-dress' choir-and-hymn Baptist culture. It's as contemporary as today in any spoken language; it must not be tied to yesterday.

"Contextualizing the Gospel is nothing new in Christian history, but it's very new and very threatening to evangelical American churches that are now having to come to grips with being flexible.

"That's what the Apostle Paul talked about when he struggled with how to carry the Gospel to the Greeks and Romans. He did not insist on wrapping it in the Jewish tradition in which it was founded and in which he was comfortable. He struggled with learning to change his delivery without changing the message. He never watered down the Gospel story but he told it in different styles. And he got results because the church spread like wildfire."

Today, that church which started in 1994 with a dozen people as a church plant of First Baptist of Social Circle - under Milton Wood's leadership - has 950 members and a full service Saturday evening Sunday School and worship, in addition to its Sunday schedule.

"New churches reach people faster than existing churches. That's a fact, and that's why we are starting other churches in our county. We see this as a way of seeding the Gospel ... planting seeds throughout our culture in order that some might be saved."

What works in rural Walton County also works in downtown Atlanta.

Tim Wolfe began a congregation in the city center three years ago through sponsorship of Rehoboth Baptist Church, the Atlanta Association of Southern Baptists, and the Georgia Baptist Convention. At first he and the new church met in a former bar at 1027 Peachtree Street but had to move when the congregation lost the lease ... to another bar. Today the congregation is working to remodel an old warehouse and convert it into a second incarnation of the 1027 Church, as it was called.

 

A history of retreating to the suburbs

The new congregation is one of Georgia Baptist's newest experiments with planting churches in downtown Atlanta. Historically Southern Baptists have retreated from urban settings, choosing the suburbs over the skyscrapers. In the past 30 years churches inside the Perimeter shut their doors or retreated to the suburbs to be closer to their congregations, as the logic went.

It seemed that churches were more concerned with making the commute easier on their members than reaching out to the newcomers moving into the neighborhoods in the shadow of the church. As the exodus continued in Atlanta and other cities nationwide, downtown was reviled as a place of the lost and downtrodden - a classic description of a mission field.

But today's missional approach embraces the mission field rather than retreating from it. Whether it's reaching the down-and-out or the up-and-out affluent population, the Gospel is strong enough to survive in any culture, pastors such as Wolfe believe.

"The issue is not whether you are contemporary or traditional but are you being effective. Christianity has a revolutionary message to proclaim and it can't be confined to just one format."

Georgia, both rural and urban, is waiting to hear the Gospel. Missional churches, traditional and contemporary, will be needed to stand in the gap that is growing between the churched and the unchurched.