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LAVON When Brad Patterson became the pastor of First Baptist Church of Lavon three and a half years ago, he inherited a stable, healthy church that had benefitted from the tenure of a pastor who had served faithfully for 30 years.
FBC Lavon has seen tremendous growth under Patterson’s leadership, and as a result their new worship center—only a year old—is already approaching capacity. The church is considering adding a second service to accommodate the growing number of new members and visitors.
But starting last year, many of these new visitors reported that it wasn’t a friend or family member who had recommended the church to them. Rather, they had been drawn by the church’s billboards that lined the major highways in and around Lavon.
“One Saturday morning I got a text message from a church member asking when we had put these billboards up and I had no idea what they were talking about,” Patterson said. “Later that morning I started getting multiple text messages asking questions about how much we spent on these billboards and whether the church approved them.”
He was out of town at the time, so he asked his youth pastor to take a picture and send it to him.
“Within a week or two, multiple billboards started popping up through the city and we started trying to figure out exactly who was putting them up,” he said.
But Patterson said he had an idea of who may have been behind the billboards, so he asked John Smith* to lunch to ask what he thought about them.
“He just started smiling,” Patterson said.
Naturally, Patterson asked what his purpose was in creating the billboards.
“He said he was praying, trying to figure out how he could share the gospel with people and celebrate what the Lord was doing in his life and get people to come to church,” he said. “I told him about the first person who gave their life to Christ as a result of the billboards, and he just started weeping there at breakfast.”
Smith recalled keeping the project secret at first.
“The first several I did, I didn’t even tell Brad,” he said, laughing. “I took a good picture of [the church logo] with my phone after one Sunday service and then sent it to my billboard folks that I use for my business and said hey, can you duplicate this.
“I just thought it would be great for the church,” he said.
Smith, a businessman who describes himself as a new Christian, said the idea started from his desire to do something that would have an eternal impact and his belief in Patterson’s vision for the church. He said that for him, it was a matter of stewardship.
“You know what, this is all God’s anyways. You’re here just for a short time, and it’s really not yours,” he said.
Smith said he started with three or four billboards and didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. Now there are 10 in and around Lavon, an area where the population is projected to continue growing in the next few years. He has already put contracts on other billboards farther away from the church.
“In the very near future, my thought is those billboards are going to be hard to get because of the growth out here,” he said.
“God has definitely gifted him with the gift of generosity,” Patterson said of Smith. “John has that. God has gifted him in business, and he truly wants to see people come to faith in Christ and grow the kingdom.”
“It’s just the possibility of making an eternal difference in someone’s life,” Smith said. “What if it just saves one person?”
According to Patterson, it already has. Shawn Anderson and Natalie Garcia started attending FBC Lavon in the spring of 2019, and for them, the billboards have made all the difference in the world.
“They had moved to town, bought a house together and were living together. She had just moved here from California when they started having relationship struggles, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to turn,” Patterson said. “And they saw a billboard.”
The engaged couple said they wanted to find a church but didn’t know where to start looking around their new home.
“Once we got into the house we were just kind of driving around, getting the lay of the land out here and ran across a billboard,” Anderson said.
And while the billboard is what drew them for the first time, they said it was the people at FBC Lavon that convinced them to come back.
“Once we got to the church, I think the first day that we got there, it’s like they immediately recognized that we were new,” Garcia said. “The vibe we got from the time we walked in was just, we felt so welcomed. Almost like we had been coming there for a long time.
“We didn’t even bother going to any of the other churches in the area,” she added.
From Patterson’s perspective, the story with Anderson and Garcia started when he met them and they asked why the church observed the Lord’s Supper every week.
“So we told them about it, because they’d never seen that before,” he said.
When Patterson asked if they’d taken it, they said they hadn’t because they weren’t ready. Both Anderson and Garcia had been raised around church, but neither had ever committed their life to Christ.
“On Easter, they came down and got the elements and took them back to their seats,” Patterson said, which prompted him to schedule a meeting with Anderson to follow up. “I said, ‘Hey, you took the Lord’s Supper. … Why did you take it?’ And he said, ‘Because we believe this! This is true!’”
Anderson and Garcia followed through with believer’s baptism in December, and Patterson will soon perform their wedding. He referred to it as the “next step in their discipleship process,” which began with a drive around the neighborhood.
“They decided to go because they saw a billboard. They came, ended up coming to faith in Christ, taking the Lord’s Supper and being baptized,” he said. “Because of billboards.”
Patterson said he never would have imagined that something like a billboard yield the type of results they are seeing.
“But it’s absolutely worth it,” he said. “It’s been incredible.”
And though the church has seen a sharp increase in the number of visitors thanks to the free advertising, they have nonetheless donated two of the billboards to the local school district to congratulate them for their recently awarded
A-rating from the Texas Education Agency.
Patterson said he has developed a close relationship with the district superintendent, which has allowed the church unprecedented avenues to serve the teachers and student of Community ISD.
“We are completely involved in our local ISD. We do everything for them. We create a community Christmas project for them, where we give Christmas presents to kids in need,” he said. “All of the other churches in the community have now gotten together and we give 250 kids Christmas presents every year. We personally, as a church, do a hundred of those.”
The church also fills 50 backpacks for students in need of school supplies, and they have set up a program in each of the four local schools to provide for students in need of food.
“If they have extra juice, extra fruit, extra milk that they don’t want but it comes with their meal, instead of throwing it away they can put it on a share cart. And that way if there’s somebody else who’s hungry or thirsty that doesn’t have a lot, they can just come and pick it up off the share cart,” Patterson said.
The share cart idea was a collaboration between FBC Lavon and CISD’s food department. The church had originally approached the district about paying off student debt related to school lunches. While there was little debt, the idea of students sharing unwanted food with each other gave birth to the share carts, which the church purchased and donated.
“The partnership we have with them has been tremendous, and the billboards have helped us to do that.”
When asked about how it made him feel to know that the Lord had used these billboards in so many ways for kingdom advancement, Smith demurred.
“I try to be real humble about that,” he said. “I just want to be along for the ride.”
*Name changed
