SPECIAL REPORT: Urban church shares time, talents with rural East Texas church

FORT WORTH?The members at New Life Complete in Christ Baptist Church in Fort Worth are only passing on the gifts they’ve been given.

The mostly African-American congregation, led by Pastor Rainey Matthews, began in 1998 with help from the mostly white First Baptist Church of Malakoff, a church 100 miles away in distance and half-a-world away in culture.

Last summer, New Life, which has grown from 14 members to 600, sent a team of men to rural LaRue Baptist Church in LaRue?an Anglo congregation in East Texas that had dwindled to about 15 attendees?to do some much-needed electrical, plumbing and carpentry work.

Matthews and three of his members spent a week in nearby Athens, laboring on the physical structure of the LaRue church, which at the time was without a pastor.

Matthews said his friend and fellow Southern Baptists of Texas Convention Minister-Church Relations consultant, Casey Perry, suggested the New Life team travel to LaRue to help the congregation. In the process, LaRue sold a van it was struggling to pay for to New Life, which needed a van, Matthews said.

“During the process, we met a 21-year-old student from Criswell College, Josh McDonald,” Matthews said. “He was taken there to preach and they fell in love with him and called him as their pastor. And New Life Complete in Christ has become a sister church to LaRue Baptist.”

Matthews and Perry have been friends since the mid-1990s, and the friendship has paid dividends for black city folk and white country folk alike.

Perry is a son of rural East Texas and a Southern Baptist from the soles of his cowboy boots to the top of his head. Formerly the pastor at First Baptist Church of Malakoff, Perry, still a member there, helped spur the church to start New Life.

Matthews, meanwhile, is a product of Detroit, a 6-foot-4 former heavyweight boxer with a warm, enveloping handshake and a gentle, pastoral demeanor. He considers Robert Webb, FBC Malakoff’s current pastor, his own pastor.

Meanwhile, both Perry and Matthews consider the young McDonald, LaRue’s pastor, a spiritual son. Under McDonald, LaRue Baptist is averaging about 60 people in Sunday morning worship services.

“Casey Perry has adopted him as his spiritual son, but so has Rainey Matthews,” Matthews said. “Josh has two spiritual dads now.”