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EMORY and PEARLAND—Six days before leaving on their spring break mission trip to Houston, volunteers from Emory Baptist Church found themselves scrambling.
Ronnie Witt had been preparing his youth for a mission project in the fast-growing Houston suburb of Pearland, where they thought they’d be leading backyard Bible clubs in apartment complexes. They had practiced their testimonies, reviewed Bible lessons and prayed for God to go ahead of them.
But a glitch in their plans came when Witt, Emory’s minister of youth and education, got a call from Nathan Law, a Pearland church planter who is partnering with Emory Baptist.
“We’re going to have to scratch our plans,” Law said.
He explained that another church mission team scheduled to work with the Emory group had to cancel their trip due to unforeseen circumstances. That team’s volunteers were supposed to lead a children’s sports camp set for March 9-11, a strategic project designed to pave the way for a sports league Law’s church-planting team plans to start as an outreach.
Law proposed a solution: Would Emory’s team tackle the sports camp?
With just a few days to prepare, Witt agreed to try. It was a “fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants experience,” Witt said, but God led every step of the way.
“Ronnie’s team had never run a sports camp, but they did a fantastic job,” Law said.
“I was impressed by our students’ ability to step up and lead this camp—and their willingness to do whatever was asked of them,” Witt said.
About 50 local children attended the camp in a Pearland ball field, where the 11 youth from Emory taught the basics of football, soccer and baseball. In between the sports lessons, they shared Bible stories and testimonies with the campers.
“We really poured ourselves into those kids,” recalled team member Caleigh Piles, the daughter of Emory Baptist pastor Richard Piles.
The group included children from other cultures, a reflection of Houston’s ethnic diversity.
Caleigh made friends with a 6-year-old Hindu boy from India. Every time she or another teammate talked about Jesus, he boldly spoke his mind.
“I believe there are thousands of gods,” he said.
Caleigh began to pray for him to come to know the one true God. That didn’t happen during the camp, but she continues to pray for his salvation.
“It was an eye-opening experience for our students to get to know kids from other world religions, kids who are very distant from the gospel,” Witt said.
While the Emory youth made gospel connections with the children, Law, his wife Heather and their church-planting team got acquainted with parents who watched the activities. Later, the Laws’ team built even more relationships with families who attended block parties the Emory volunteers helped to host in a park.
Emory’s team provided much of the labor for the parties: preparing and serving food, staffing a face-painting station and a bounce house and helping with setup and takedown.
“We were the boots on the ground, and that allowed Nathan and his team to have multiple, one-on-one conversations with people who attended,” said Emory Baptist deacon John Williams, one of three adult church members who accompanied Witt and the youth on the trip.
The Emory team also spent several afternoons canvassing and prayer walking in Pearland neighborhoods. Volunteers handed out more than 3,000 flyers promoting the sports camp, block parties and other events sponsored by Renovation City Church, a church plant Law’s team is preparing to launch.
Law hopes all these contacts will create more opportunities to share the gospel, minister to families and involve them in small group Bible studies.
“We’re so excited about the connections we made through the Emory Baptist volunteers,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been able to invite and reach the amount of people we did without their selfless service.”
The project also brought an opportunity for evangelism even before the Emory team left for Pearland. Witt said a young woman who wasn’t going on the trip attended an Emory youth group meeting where his students were writing their testimonies. She soon realized she didn’t have a testimony of her own, so Witt and Caleigh shared the gospel with her. She didn’t accept Christ then, but Emory leaders continue to witness to her.
Hearing that story from Witt “was a really cool blessing for us,” Law said.
The Emory-Pearland partnership began after Witt went on a Reach Houston vision tour last year. Ben Hays, strategist for the SBCT Reach Houston initiative, guides these tours to connect pastors and other leaders of established SBCT churches with the needs of church planters in Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city.
Through the tours, “we hope these leaders will hear and then answer a ‘Macedonian call’ to come over and help us,” Hays said. “That’s exactly what happened” with Emory Baptist.
