April 26, 2024
In what has been a busy week for news, a couple of stories especially captured my attention. Perhaps you remember the headlines:
Calvary Baptist Church finds success with spring VBS.
Once a retail giant, Kmart down to 3 stores.
Those stories may, at first glance, appear to be absolutely unrelated, but let me show you how they’re linked.
In Dawson, the folks at Calvary Baptist are thinking outside the box about ways to be relevant to the community where they minister and to find fresh ways to share the gospel.
With that in mind, Pastor Alan Sanders and his congregation scheduled vacation Bible school during spring break, deciding not to wait for the traditional summer start time. Being small in number, they also enlisted the help of a mission team from First Baptist Church in Moultrie to help pull it off.
It was Calvary’s first VBS since the COVID-19 pandemic reached Georgia more than two years ago, and it was fantastic. Here’s why: No one else in Dawson was doing VBS during spring break. Calvary was the only game in town.
“If you have a lot of churches in your community, it’s almost like you’re competing against each other for VBS kids,” he explained. “That wasn’t an issue during spring break.”
Then, there’s Kmart, which, as of Sunday, will be down to its last three stores nationwide.
In its heyday, Kmart was the big name in retail sales. The Associated Press, reporting on the slow, steady decline of the company, pointed out that the chain had cemented a place in American culture with its Blue Light Specials, a flashing blue orb affixed to a pole that would beckon shoppers to a flash sale in progress. Part of its success was due to its early adoption of layaway programs, which allowed customers who lacked credit to reserve items and pay for them in installments, an outside-the-box idea at the time.
Then, the fresh ideas stopped, and, as a result, once-flourishing Kmart stores are no more. Some are vacant. Others have been turned into fitness centers, storage facilities, even churches.
So, how are those two stories linked? It’s about vision.
Pastor Sanders and the folks at Calvary Baptist have a vision for their church to be a lighthouse that’s reflecting the love of Christ into their community. That vision leads them to explore new ways to share the old, old story, to rethink the way they’ve always done things.
Somehow, somewhere, Kmart apparently lost its vision and now is sitting on the very brink of extinction.
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Roger Alford is editor of The Christian Index.
