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You’ve probably never heard of First Baptist Church of Woodsboro. In fact, you’ve probably never heard of Woodsboro.
Woodsboro is a little pocket of a town hanging off the southeast side of State Highway 77, about 40 miles north of Corpus Christi. There’s no Walmart there, but they do have a 2A high school equipped with a hurricane shelter (standard issue for that part of the state), a Dairy Queen (standard issue in many a small Texas town), and a dollar store.
The town is home to about 1,300 residents, 80 of whom can be found on any given Sunday inside FBC Woodsboro.
“We are just a very normal-sized church,” their pastor, Jordan Newberry, recently told me. “We’re not a megachurch at all. Nothing like that. We’re just your normal, everyday Southern Baptist church—full of good people, though.”
Within this issue, you’ll find a story about FBC Woodsboro that we hope inspires you. To be honest, it’s not so much a story about FBC Woodsboro as it is a story about what God can do when kingdom-minded people say yes to the Lord and then wait to see where He will lead.
FBC Woodsboro recently returned from a mission trip to Nevada, where members worked alongside Pathfinder Church in Reno to connect with the community through a series of public outreach events. As the week wrapped up, Pathfinder’s pastor said having FBC Woodsboro’s assistance paved the way for him to have more meaningful conversations with Reno residents over the course of a week than he’d had in any other week since he planted the church about a year ago.
So how in the world did a rural church in Texas get connected with a church in a hustle-bustle town like Reno?
"When we work together to multiply our resources behind a common gospel goal, there is no small work."
A couple years ago, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention partnered with the Nevada Baptist Convention to do kingdom work together. Through the partnership, the SBTC began offering its resources to help NBC churches become stronger and multiply. Part of that commitment included the SBTC making its churches aware of the opportunity to work side by side with Southern Baptist churches in Nevada.
These aren’t connections churches like FBC Woodsboro would normally expect to have. But by leveraging the SBTC’s network, the church was able to send a group to a western state for a week to help a young church hungry to reach the lost better connect with its community.
“We’re not a huge church,” Newberry said, “but we’re still able to go and have an impact.”
To be clear, there are megachurches among the SBTC’s 2,700-plus churches doing amazing kingdom work. But there are also much smaller SBTC churches like FBC Woodsboro having a massive eternal impact not just in their communities, but around the world.
Having pastored, I know how overwhelming it can feel to just address the needs in your own congregation and community. It can often feel like paddling as hard as you can just to keep your head above water, so reaching outside your local context might feel difficult.
That’s one of the reasons God calls us to something greater. He calls us to be members of a body, one that works together to achieve His purposes. When we work together to multiply our resources behind a common gospel goal, there is no small work. It’s a great work performed by thousands and thousands of faithful hands working together.
