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GILMER East Mountain Baptist Church in Gilmer has become a regional church—drawing families from 14 school districts—united around a goal of meeting local needs in Jesus’ name and supporting missions globally.
“I used to joke and say, ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere,’ but I’ve got a lady that says, ‘No, we’re in the middle of everywhere.’ She’s really correct,” Timothy Smith, pastor of East Mountain Baptist, told the TEXAN.
The church, northwest of Longview, has been around since 1911, and Smith credits a transitional pastor with laying the groundwork for the current success just before he arrived in 2012. “I had been here about a month, and I realized he had done my first year for me. I didn’t have to walk around on eggshells or whatever. I could just take off,” Smith said.
East Mountain is “still technically a community,” Smith said. “We have a city hall. We have a mayor, those kinds of things.” They don’t have a school anymore. The church building sits next to the old East Mountain School, which has been closed for more than 50 years, he said.
Smith kind of laughed at the town’s name and said, “If there’s a mountain here, it’s a molehill.”
East Mountain Baptist is “pretty much spread out over generations,” Smith said of the people they reach. They draw blue- and white-collar workers, teachers and retired law enforcement officers.
When Smith, a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, arrived at East Mountain Baptist, two of his priorities were to build a strong men’s ministry and to ensure that the church gave sacrificially to missions.
“You show me a church where the men’s ministry is strong, and I’ll show you a strong church,” Smith said. A key to that health is for men’s ministry to be service-oriented rather than event-oriented, he said.
When he spoke with the TEXAN, Smith had returned from one of two weekly men’s prayer breakfasts. “We had 15 men there this morning, praying,” he said, referring to a local coffee shop. The men’s ministry sometimes involves as many as 70 men.
Regarding missions, Smith said East Mountain Baptist’s Cooperative Program giving was never low. “They’ve always given a percentage, and I believe very strongly in that. I tend to disagree with set amounts because when your giving increases, then your missions doesn’t. I want to see percentages.”
In 2012, East Mountain Baptist’s CP giving was around 8 percent, Smith recalled, but each year they’ve increased it either half or a full percent. Their 2020 budget allocates 14.5 percent to the Cooperative Program and 3.5 percent to their local Baptist association.
The church supports a pregnancy help ministry, a cowboy church in Wyoming, a cowboy church in South Texas and mission work in Latvia, among other things.
“So when you throw all of that in together—CP, Reach Texas, Annie Armstrong, Lottie Moon, association—last year our church gave around $240,000 to missions. Eight years ago, that was just about what the total undesignated giving was,” Smith said.
“In 2018—this little out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere church—total receipts were over $1.1 million. It’s been amazing to watch what’s happened. We have generous people, but people that understand missions.”
At the end of 2012, the church averaged 130 in Sunday School. They’ve added about a hundred to that number, and average worship attendance is around 300.
“If you could see a picture of where we are, it would blow your mind,” Smith said of the people who come relative to the surrounding population. The Sunday before he spoke with the TEXAN, the church had baptized two people. One was a young man who travelled to Atlanta for the Passion Conference in January with about 20 other college-aged people from the church.
The other man had just shown up on a Wednesday night, Smith said. He had been dropping his son off for the youth program, and that week he said God “would not let him not go to church.”
“So he came in that night and we started talking after the service, and he shared that he had been incarcerated for a while and some other things,” Smith said. The man prayed to receive Christ that night.
“There are so many needs that flow through here in a week, and yet God provides for every one of those needs,” Smith said.
East Mountain Baptist affiliates with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, Smith said, in part because of the high percentage of Cooperative Program dollars the convention forwards for national and international missions and ministries.
“That’s a big thing because it’s supposed to be about missions, and we’re not giving to the Cooperative Program; we’re giving through the Cooperative Program,” Smith said.
