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Jacksonville College announces presidential search

JACKSONVILLE, Texas—Trustees of Jacksonville College, a faith-based liberal arts institution, have announced a search for the institution’s next president following Mike Smith’s announcement on Feb. 26 of his intention to retire at the end of 2021.

Smith has served as the college’s president since 2011.

Applicants wishing to be considered to lead the faith-based liberal arts junior college located in East Texas must possess an earned doctorate, preferably in education or a related discipline. Pastoral ministry-related experience is a plus. Candidates should be conservative, growing Christians with experience in institutional development, fundraising and administration. Pastoral or ministry-related experience is also preferred.

Applicants are invited to submit the following: a cover letter, a personal resume including family information, work history, personal testimony of faith, and contact information for three references. Resumes should be emailed to Donnie Page at dpage@hillcrestbc.com by April 10 for full consideration. 

Jacksonville College was founded in 1899, and is related with the Baptist Missionary Association of Texas and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The college is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) to award associate degrees, junior college diplomas and continuing education units.

Despite church saturation, gospel witness needed in DeSoto

DESOTO—As in much of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, churches are easy to find in DeSoto. What is harder to find, though, is a consistent gospel witness leading to changed lives. With that need in mind, Ed Johnson III led a group to plant Harvest Fellowship Baptist Church. 

One of the first changed lives was a woman who was “heavily involved in Catholicism and had not really read the Bible,” Johnson told the TEXAN. “She had never really been impacted by the gospel of Jesus.” 

During one of the church’s monthly “Share Jesus” evangelism initiatives, a church member met the woman and told her about Jesus and about Harvest. 

“She had been out of church for years,” Johnson said of the woman. “She came a few times, and God worked on her heart. She was very impacted by our focus on Christ and the expository preaching we’re committed to doing. She joined, and now she is one of our most faithful volunteers.”

Johnson, a graduate of Dallas Baptist University and Baylor’s Truett Seminary, was raised in Austin in a church affiliated with the National Baptist Convention. He served for a decade as an associate pastor at Antioch Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Dallas and during that time had been “basically dreaming, planning and going to church planting conferences.” 

After leaving that position, Johnson applied for various church leadership roles, “and the Lord providentially closed all those doors,” he said. God led him to plant Harvest Fellowship Baptist Church in DeSoto, but he recalls that only seven people attended the first interest meeting in 2016. 

“Three of those individuals were myself, my wife and our daughter,” Johnson said.

With some resources from the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, the core group spent a year laying the groundwork for the church plant by reaching non-Christians and people who were not connected to a church. 

“We went to local apartments and talked with people. We would go to places like the mall, grocery stores, parking lots,” Johnson said of their efforts to start gospel conversations.

On Easter Sunday 2017, Harvest Fellowship Baptist Church launched. 

“Our mission is to lead people to trust and obey Jesus. It comes from Matthew 28:18-20, and that has been our focus since day one,” Johnson said. 

The church realized the value of dovetailing with the city for events such as Easter egg hunts and Juneteenth and Fourth of July celebrations. Instead of trying to create events as a church plant with a tight budget, one of the church’s strategies was to be present at citywide events already happening.

“Whatever events they would put on, we would volunteer at their events. They would allow us to have a booth, and that was an awesome way we were able to rub shoulders and connect with people who didn’t have a church or were not Christians at all,” the pastor said.

Harvest gathers for worship in an events center called Forever Swing Dallas, and before COVID they generally had just under 50 people in attendance, Johnson said. Since then, they’ve shifted to a hybrid model of both in person and online. Their main way of discipling members is through fellowship groups which go deeper into the sermon passages, he said.

Most of the people who attend Harvest have a church background of some sort, Johnson said. The church-saturated area tends to produce nominal or cultural Christians, and people in the community who have no knowledge of Jesus are harder to find.

Johnson expressed gratitude for the way the SBTC came alongside the church plant when they didn’t have the blessing of a sending congregation. 

“We just really are grateful for the SBTC in terms of their focus on the Great Commission, their focus on reaching people who are far from God and don’t have a relationship with God through faith in Christ,” Johnson said. 

“We are so grateful for their focus on church planting and church revitalization and the fact that they get behind church planters and support and encourage.” 

The SBTC helped sustain Harvest in its first three years, Johnson said, and it’s his joy to lead the church to give through the Cooperative Program to help other church plants. 

Johnson is a bivocational church planter, working Monday through Friday as a site coordinator for an afterschool program in the DeSoto Independent School District. He’s married to Tiffany, a native New Yorker, and they have two young daughters. 

“Pray that God will continue to have a gospel impact in our area, that he will continue to allow us to reach people who have yet to trust in Christ, that he will continue to add to our church and that he will continue to sustain us in this unprecedented time of the pandemic,” Johnson said. 

Church Health and Leadership dept. poised to provide “resources and relationships” to SBTC churches

GRAPEVINE—Over the last several months, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention has undergone a significant strategic and operational restructure aimed at streamlining the convention’s efforts to minister to churches.

The process began in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic forced the convention to be more creative in examining the needs of the churches and determining how best to formulate a response. 

“The SBTC was formed by the churches for the purpose of facilitating their Great Commission work. The pandemic has been a unique challenge to that work,” Executive Director Jim Richards said. “Our first effort last spring was to contact all our churches to encourage them and to see what help they might need. We then formed a COVID task force to provide resources fit for the challenges the churches were facing.”

As the convention began responding to the needs arising in Texas churches, it became apparent that more comprehensive revisions would be necessary.

“The pandemic’s impact is going to be long term. The convention needed to pivot in order to be a relevant resource for our churches in the future,” Richards said. “After asking hundreds of our leaders for input, a new task force recommended to our board a structure and a vision for the convention’s future.”

In August, the SBTC Executive Board affirmed a re-engineering of the convention’s work that would reduce the number of departments from seven to five, including the creation of the new Church Health and Leadership department, which combined the former Pastor/Church Relations and Church Ministries areas.

“It is more than just shoving two organizational charts together,” Tony Wolfe, CH&L senior strategist, told the TEXAN of the realignment.

Wolfe said the revisioning is an opportunity to provide local churches with relevant resources to help leaders at every level. 

“It’s more than just an organizational shift. In my mind it’s a strategy shift, to unify the strategy toward church health and church leadership health. We’re hoping we can start getting on the front end of things and, prayerfully, that ultimately might position churches to receive spiritual awakening, if God chooses to send it,” he said. “And it might even reduce our clean-up on the back end when churches and their leaders are unhealthy.”

A survey sent to statewide pastors and associational leaders received almost 400 responses, Wolfe said, and was instrumental in the formation of the new department.

Needed: healthy churches

“One of the things that came to the top very quickly and stayed at the top was this resounding desire from our churches that we would focus on church health,” Wolfe said, explaining that among the items on the survey was the question: What is a healthy convention? 

“Basically when we combined all of those answers what we got was a healthy convention is made up of healthy churches, and healthy churches are led by healthy leaders,” Wolfe said. 

The survey indicated that the convention needed to focus not only on evangelism, church planting and revitalization, but on church health more generally. And while the former structure of the convention tended to place much of the priority on the senior pastor, CH&L has oriented its work so that leaders at every level, both lay and vocational, will receive specific resources aimed at healthy leadership.

According to Wolfe, some of the strategies they are pursuing come from lessons learned when he worked in what was formerly known as Pastor/Church Relations. 

“I finally realized that if we were going to make a dent in this, we were going to have to get on the front end of pastor health and church health instead of just always cleaning up from the back end. And so we kind of carry over that same mindset into the Church Health and Leadership department, where we’re not just focusing on the pastor office but we’re focusing on all church leaders. 

“So CH&L is going to span the full spectrum of church leadership, vocational and volunteer, from the pastor, deacon, children’s minister, youth minister, security team, hospitality team, women’s ministry leader, nursery team—you name it. We’re going to try to pour the same level of effort into the front end of helping church leaders be healthy.”

Tools to help

Wolfe said they are hoping to release a church assessment tool in March which will offer not only a self-evaluation for churches, but will also directly connect them with SBTC resources designed to meet their specific needs.

“There will be 10 touch points for church health, including prayer, evangelism, devotion to God’s Word, reproduction, leadership, worship ministry, prayer ministry and more,” he said. “Whenever their self-assessment pushes them to their three top needs, the tool will immediately redirect them to resources and relationships where they can find help.”

Church Health and Leadership Team Leader Jeff Lynn emphasized the convention’s desire to come alongside churches to assist in whatever ways possible.

“We believe that God is about to bring awakening to the Lone Star State, and we believe that as much as it depends on us, we want to help churches receive it,” he said. “And because healthy churches are led by healthy leaders, we look to encourage, resource and network not only pastors and their wives, but all church leaders in every vein of ministry, whether lay or vocational.”

Both Wolfe and Lynn urged churches to reach out to the SBTC no matter what their needs may be.

“Our team is trained and experienced walking with pastorless churches through seasons of transitions, leading established churches through a proven process of revitalization and serving local congregations in all forms of conflict and crisis management,” Wolfe said.

Ultimately, a convention of churches is only as strong as the churches themselves. Church Health and Leadership is designed to work with and for churches, providing resources to help pastors and laypeople alike develop healthy habits and relationships.

“At the end of Acts 15 as Paul is beginning his second missionary journey, he chose Silas and they traveled throughout the region strengthening the churches,” Wolfe said. “The Church Health and Leadership team has only this in mind—strengthen the churches.” 

You can also listen to the biweekly Church Health and Leadership podcast, hosted by Wolfe and Lynn, available from Apple Podcasts.