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BROWNSVILLE—Gifts to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering helped James Martinez plant and grow Ecclesia Community Church in Brownsville, Texas. Now, the congregation is giving back in a big way.
According to church planter James Martinez, Brownsville is a border town like no other. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it’s a world that’s neither Mexico nor the United States. It’s like its own country with its own culture,” he says. “And everybody who leaves Brownsville says, ‘I’m never going to come back.’”
When James left Brownsville to go to college, he was one of those people who never intended to return to his South Texas roots. But during his college years, James heard the gospel, was saved, and watched God rewrite his story. Now, two decades later, James finds himself in Brownsville again—but this time as a church planter.
James describes Brownsville as a “spiritual yet dark place” that’s influenced not only by cultural Catholicism but also by witchcraft. “People have left a pig’s head on our church property. We’ve been in apartment complexes, door knocking, spreading the gospel, and they’ll come out and cut chickens’ heads off and pour blood all over wherever we walked,” James shares.
It should be no surprise, then, that Ecclesia Community Church’s origin story is full of the unexpected and unplanned. When the world shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic just a month before their planned 2020 launch, the Martinezes partnered with a local nonprofit. Together, they started serving their community through gospel-focused food distributions. That’s how, more than a year later, when it was finally time to publicly launch the church, they’d already built a strong network of prospective members.
It turns out that a church that was built largely by showing generosity to its community ended up with generosity in its DNA. Ecclesia Community Church began with many new believers, and when James introduced the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering to them, he was overwhelmed by the church’s response. “We explained that we exist because of the generosity of other churches giving to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering to fuel church planting,” James says. “And when the money started coming in, I thought, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ We’re meeting our goal for the Annie Offering, and people are excited about it.”
All of Ecclesia Community Church were enthusiastic about a chance to give back—from new believers in the congregation who committed to setting up a recurring gift to the elderly single women and the kids in the children’s ministry. Now, the church has committed to giving more to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering each month than they did over the entire previous year.
“I’m a church planter in one of the poorest counties in the nation, and when we surpassed our offering goal, I just thought, ‘Look at what God is doing through this little bitty church,’” James says. “God has been generous to us and now we can be generous and sacrificial back to Him. I love that.”
