HOUSTON Pastors and others are invited to see firsthand what God is doing through Reach Houston, a church planting initiative that combines church planting and revitalization in America’s fourth-largest and most ethnically diverse city. 

A Reach Houston vision tour will be April 16-18 to help churches learn how they can partner to reach Houston’s 350 ethno-linguistic people groups—speaking more than 220 languages—with the gospel. 

Cost for the vision tour is $75 per person, which includes lodging and transportation during the vision tour. Breakfast is included at the hotel. Lunch and dinner will be at the expense of each attendee. 

The vision tour kicks off at noon Monday with lunch and a Reach Houston overview followed by a visit with a Baytown-area church planter. Dinner that night will be with Pearland-area church planters.

On Tuesday, attendees will visit with Inner Loop-area planters and then have lunch with an Alief-area planter. Later, they will meet with church planters from Tomball/Cypress and New Caney. Dinner that night will be in Pearland.

The tour will conclude after a debriefing Wednesday morning.

To sign up, contact Ben Hays at 832-489-3908 or bhays@sbtexas.com, or Gayla Harris at gharris@sbtexas.com. 

More than a dozen new church plants are spread across Houston, many of them needing volunteers to help them recover from Hurricane Harvey. 

Barry Calhoun, SBTC director of missions mobilization, noted that Texas has the longest border with Mexico of any state, and the Reach Houston initiative, among others, helps carry the gospel into Mexico as people are reached and carry their newfound faith back home to friends and family.

Pastors also have opportunities for Reach Houston vision tours before and after the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. Vision tours are set for June 8-9 and June 14-15. 

CLEBURNE If you were to take a long look at Cleburne, Texas, you’d likely come away with all sorts of observations. At 30,000 people, it’s not a big city—nor a small town. It’s a community full of young families with a large contingency of older citizens who have called it home for decades. It’s just on the fringes of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

But when church planter John Turner looks at Cleburne, he sees a city desperate for more gospel-preaching local churches.

“We’re a year old,” Turner said of his new Cleburne church plant, The Hill Church. “They were either traveling out of town to find a church that meets the needs of the family or people who were in town but hadn’t found a church that was for them.”

In its first 12 months of life, the new church has doubled in attendance from 30 to 60. Turner believes the church is on the cusp of even greater growth in 2018.

But it’s only possible because of partner churches like Graceview Baptist Church in Burleson. Turner says Graceview’s partnership, and in particular his relationship with the church’s pastor, Aaron Scarbrough, has helped him have a sense of community and support during an intense first year of the church’s history.

“Having community with other men doing ministry who are open to dialogue, open to share their experiences, open to sharing their resources, that’s a big deal when you’re starting a church,” Turner said.  

Graceview is one of 25 churches that the Southern Baptists Convention of Texas honored in 2017 with its Antioch award, as a partnering church to a new church plant. David Alexander, the SBTC church planting director, says the award brings to the forefront the sacrifices partners make. Partners like Graceview play a key role in the convention’s efforts to start churches throughout the state.

“Partnering with a new church plant is a significant investment of time and resources,” Alexander said. “We wanted to acknowledge that. It’s very important. Church planters couldn’t do it without the investment from primary sponsoring churches.”

Alexander noted that when people talk about supporting church plants they tend to think first about finances. Although the financial support from sponsoring churches is critical to a planter’s ability to get a new work started, he says it may be the least important kind of support partnering churches provide for new church starts. He noted both the critical part prayer support and mentoring play in the development of new churches. The mentoring relationship doesn’t just develop between the partnering pastor and the church planter but also extends to the lay leadership efforts of the two churches, such as the deacons and the finance teams. 

“This [new church plant] is their child,” Alexander said. “The convention is not planting this church. We are facilitating this SBTC church that has decided to become the primary sponsor. We are helping them give birth to this new church. We want partnering churches to take primary ownership of this church plant.”

Graceview got involved in church planting partnerships after Scarbrough led the church through a replanting process in 2011. Scarbrough says he wanted to help other church planters learn the lessons he and his team learned the hard way. Graceview became an SBTC church planting center, where prospective church planters could come and learn from the church and then be sent out. Graceview worked with two different SBTC church plants in 2017 and is beginning the process of partnering with a Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary student moving to Boston to plant a new church. 

As Graceview prepares to send outnew church planters, Scarbrough meets weekly with them as a group and one or two times a month. The church planters also participate in elder meetings, lead one of the church’s small groups and attend the church’s yearly planning meetings.

“It’s more of an immersion into the church than it is a program,” Scarbrough said. “That’s really the only way guys can learn the things we know. You can sit in a classroom and you can tell them all of those things, but until you have to interact with someone in a small group who might not like their teaching or get up in the pulpit and preach through a passage they had to struggle through because they are not used to that genre yet, you haven’t properly prepared them. Those are the kind of things I try to walk through with them.”

Scarbrough says the benefits of supporting a new church plant aren’t just felt by the planter or the planting church. The sending church is blessed, too. 

“That’s something church planting does that no other thing really can do. When you have a foreign mission focus, you say, ‘The gospel is good over there.’ When you have a local missions focus, you say, ‘The gospel is good down the street.’ But very rarely do we think of the towns surrounding us, because we tend to think that other churches are taking care of that. Church planting says, ‘no,’ we have to be intentional everywhere.”

Aaron Scarbrough, Pastor of Graceview Baptist Church in Burleson

“It’s definitely good for Graceview because [our congregation] recognizes that the gospel isn’t just important for our church but for other churches, too,” Scarbrough added. “That’s something church planting does that no other thing really can do. When you have a foreign mission focus, you say, ‘The gospel is good over there.’ When you have a local missions focus, you say, ‘The gospel is good down the street.’ But very rarely do we think of the towns surrounding us, because we tend to think that other churches are taking care of that. Church planting says, ‘no,’ we have to be intentional everywhere.”

Scarbrough notes that his own personal ministry has been stretched through his relationship with church planters. 

“It keeps me out of a rut,” Scarbrough said. “When I work with these guys, I am constantly having to examine my life. I have to examine my convictions and ask myself if I have fallen into a pattern of the ‘same old, same old.’”

To learn more about the church planting ministry of the SBTC, visit sbtexas.com/churchplanting.  

In the early 1990s I attended the quadrennial meeting of the Disciples of Christ in the city we lived in at the time. I was particularly interested to hear the reports of two committees. One was reporting on what, if any, role Scripture played in the salvation of people. The other recommended a more welcoming and affirming response to homosexuals. Both reports and related actions were decided by a delegate vote. I wrote a column about the oddity of a Christian religious body deciding these issues as if God has not spoken objectively in Scripture. It’s hard to imagine a Christian denomination starting without this foundation. What happened? 

A little later I wrote a column about the beginning of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a denomination-like body of Baptist churches that disagreed with Southern Baptists about biblical authority. I didn’t make any connection with the two groups at the time; the CBF was generally a little left of me but mostly just indignant to have lost 12 years of SBC elections. My point then was that they were a separate denomination even though they preferred to keep a foot in the SBC. 

Twenty-six years later I see similarity between the now solidly liberal Disciples of Christ and the CBF. On Feb. 9 the CBF coordinating council acted on behalf of the fellowship by altering a 20-year ban on hiring those who engage in homosexual behavior. CBF partisans have responded from both sides; the more conservative wing disagrees with the decision and the liberal wing wants a clearer affirmation of homosexual behavior. I was intrigued by their decision-making process. 

After 18 months of deliberation, interviews and listening sessions, the committee chairman said that the resulting statement was “informed” by Scripture but that being Baptist means that we “don’t dictate the beliefs of individuals and churches in a top-down fashion.” Instead, they listened to churches and individuals “in all their diversity,” before deciding that some roles (excepting top-level management and missionary field personnel) will be open to those who practice homosexuality. 

So, it’s a little top down in the sense that the council is opening some positions and closing others. The decision is clearly informed by listening to diverse churches and individuals. By opening the door just a little to leaders and employees formerly considered immoral, they can tell the more conservative members that it’s not as bad as it might be and the less conservative ones that it’s better than it was. 

“Informed by Scripture?” Not so much. I do understand the hermeneutic of those who pit what the apostles wrote under inspiration of the Holy Spirit against what they imagine Jesus might have said if he had explicitly taught on this type of sexual behavior. I think that’s what the fellowship’s moderator means when he claims that this decision will show the world that “Christ is our center and can hold us together for the sake of the gospel.” 

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s path and destination were not as clear when they left us more than 25 years ago. At the time, the leaders were those who had formerly led Southern Baptists. But it was clear that they were on a different path. If you go down a path, you get to where it leads. What was clear then was that CBF leaders were willing to compromise biblical authority for unity. An early leader of the fellowship said that he believed in the virgin birth of Christ, that the Bible taught it, but he did not believe it essential that his pastor or seminary professor believe it. That was the path. The fellowship was a diverse group of people who were unified around little except not being Southern Baptist. In the following years they resisted nearly any effort to describe more or less acceptable doctrine and practice. So the fellowship included seminaries funded by a Baptist convention in Texas with professors who taught that God is not all-knowing, a lesbian married couple who co-pastor a church in Washington, D.C., and a generation of young people who’ve come out of the movement unable to explain or believe the gospel. This recent decision is nothing I imagined when they started; it’s nothing Keith Parks, Dan Vestal or Cecil Sherman imagined. But they should have. It was just over the horizon on the path they chose.

Brothers and sisters, Christian bodies do not get more orthodox because people are nice and well-intentioned. It is serious work to lay a foundation of biblical doctrine and build a church or institution on that foundation. It can be heartbreaking work to keep those commitments when it means that we must lose friends over it. But we are not merely “informed” by Scripture. We are bound to it as God’s revelation of himself and the Savior of the world. If it is not true, we are of all men most foolish. 

Perhaps you have seen in your life hundreds of others go astray in the same way as the CBF. You and I can both name churches and schools that took a path that later took them. It is a warning to us all. The path we take determines our destination.