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[Back to index of November articles] Finding both the faith and the funds to grow By Bishop John Bryson Chane When I lived in San Diego and served as dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, a friend and colleague in ecumenical work was the Rev. Timothy Winters, an African American pastor who was in charge of Bayview Baptist Church, one of the largest congregations in the city. Timothy was a wonderful host, opening up his large gymnasium for the annual Martin Luther King Tribute Breakfast and working actively on public education and city policing issues with me and the Ecumenical Council of San Diego. One day we were talking about the massive size of Timothy's church. I was curious about its size and what it saw as its central mission. Part of the answer was clear. Timothy had recruited a core of faithful folks who believed that they could become a dynamic Christ-centered congregation that would support the needs and concerns of the African American community in San Diego. They developed a very fine neighborhood school - kindergarten through eighth grade; worked hard on family counseling and support issues; were engaged in creative substance abuse programs and worked with the courts on work-release programs. But what was amazing to me was that they had started several new congregations in the county that were as large and as socially engaged as Bayview Baptist. Timothy Winters saw church growth and new church starts to be one of the major objectives of his church's mission imperative. The overall mission of these new plants and starts was to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to areas in the county where broad-based ministries of support for the community would be welcomed and supported. Bayview Baptist had a mission strategy that wasn't all that complicated. It was based on some clear principles that are as follows: 1. Our ministry is clearly centered on the teaching and preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and our objective is to bring people to Christ. 2. We see ourselves as missionaries in everything that we do. 3. When we look to locate a new church, we do intense demographic studies of the region in which we are interested. 4. We work with parishioners who are either in the real estate business or county government to find out where land is available for purchase and development. When we find land we buy it with resources provided by our parishioners from Bayiew, or we partner with developers who want us to be part of their commercial project. 5. We select a team of about 10 or 12 persons from Bayview, who we then train as a "church start team." They are commissioned at Bayview for the missionary task at hand, that of building up the new church, and they leave Bayview for a period of two years while they build up the new church through recruitment and example. 6. Responsibility for financing the building of the new church and its facilities initially rests with the new start team. They may begin by holding services in people's homes and then expand into rented facilities before they can build a new church with the financial support of the new congregation. What was amazing to me wasn't the process they followed for a new church start but that they saw it as a significant part of their mission as a church. What also was remarkable was that they recruited from within their own congregation a team of 10 or 12 people who were willing to leave their own congregation for a period of two years and move to a new area to start a church. They saw themselves as working out of a place of abundance rather than scarcity, which in their thinking made it possible to raise the money needed to build new churches. This always fascinates me in our own Diocese of Washington. I see so many new nondenominational churches and mega-churches being built and I wonder where in the world they got their money. We Episcopalians have very little, if any, money to initiate new church starts or even to rebuild congregations that could expand their ministries if they had better facilities. This is an area in which we've got to make improvements if we are to do our part in spreading the Gospel. [Back to index of November articles]
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