News

By Tobin Perry 

INDIANAPOLIS – More than 100,000 visitors will likely flood into the area around Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on Feb. 5 for America’s most popular sporting event—The Super Bowl. When those visitors come to Indianapolis, local Southern Baptists say they’ll find a growing, diverse population and a thriving commercial area in downtown Indianapolis.

But they won’t find nearly enough Southern Baptist churches.

Currently, Southern Baptists have only two places to worship in the city center, an area of downtown Indianapolis with 19,000 people living in a one-mile radius. One is a new church plant reaching students at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI). The other, Metro Baptist Center, reaches mostly the homeless population.

By Joe Conway

NORTHBOROUGH, Mass. – In a record-setting year of disasters, the overwhelming urge to meet practical needs while sharing the Gospel spurred New England Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers and leaders to reach out and serve in new avenues. Through it all Baptist Convention of New England assistant DR director Tim Buehner is encouraged by the impact made on lives for Christ.

“All the disaster relief efforts, all the work of the volunteers, gave the people of New England a picture of what Southern Baptists are about and what we care capable of providing in response to needs. In New England that is enormous,” said Buehner. 

By Mickey Noah 

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers from a half-dozen local associations in central Alabama are responding to three tornadoes that struck the state early on Monday, Jan. 23, including one that raked the northeast Birmingham area, killing two.

The National Weather Service said the tornado that hit the Oak Grove community southwest of Birmingham and ripped northeastward through Center Point, Trussville and Clay was in the EF-3 category, with winds of 150 mph. The two victims were an 81-year-old man in Oak Grove and a 16-year-old girl in Clay.

ST. LOUIS ­– St. Louis Southern Baptists hope a revitalized city may soon be on the horizon. Yet they’re not banking on economics or politics to make it happen.

Instead, they’re banking on the gospel.

“I’m thinking that there can be a faithful gospel presence literally in every community in St. Louis,” said Kenny Petty, a Southern Baptist church planter in St. Louis. “What would that look like? … You’d see crime go down. You’d see the dropout rates lessen. You’d see teen pregnancy go down. … These things are heart issues. And there’s only one thing that can deal with the heart of man and that’s the gospel of Jesus.”

By Tobin Perry 

ST. LOUIS – You can tell a lot about a community from the inside of a barbershop. Just about everyone, at some time or another, needs a haircut. The barber sees it all.

Yet of all the patrons of Sean and Taquella Boone’s beauty and barbershop in North County, St. Louis, one group stood out to the couple—young African-Americans who wanted no part in the traditional church. The Boones saw them every day. Most wouldn’t have felt comfortable in the aging churches nearby.

But they needed to hear about Jesus.

By Tobin Perry 

CLEVELAND, Ohio – A church planting renaissance is on the horizon in an unlikely locale. Southern Baptists in Cleveland believe they’re on the edge of something big—a church planting movement that could change the city. 

But they’ll need Southern Baptist partners from elsewhere to see that movement come to fruition.

“Cleveland needs people who love Jesus,” said Dan Ghramm, a North American Mission Board church planter in West Cleveland. “In the area of 65,000 people in far West Cleveland where I’m at, there has to be less than 300 to 400 people in a gospel-preaching church on Sunday morning.”

By Tobin Perry 

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio – Cleveland Heights might not be the kind of place that attracts some church planters—at least church planters that want an easier road.  

“Cleveland Heights has really become a church planting graveyard,” said Zach Weihrauch, who came to the city in 2011 to start a church as a North American Mission Board missionary. “It’s tough, but I really felt God was telling us that if there was a gospel-centered church here, then things would happen in Cleveland.”

Weihrauch is part of a new generation of pioneering Southern Baptist church planters who are re-engaging the major unreached cities of North America, like Cleveland, with the gospel through church planting.

By Tobin Perry 

CONCORD, Tenn. – It’s rarely glamorous work. It’s raking leaves, painting and cleaning carpets. Yet Karen Claypool knows she’s serving Jesus by serving Cleveland church planters.

“We’ve done everything from cleaning toilets to cleaning carpets. We’ve done all kinds of things,” said Claypool. “I won’t see the people coming into the building, but I know that by the building being ready that we’re having an impact.”

Claypool has been helping to organize trips to Cleveland from First Baptist Church of Concord, Tenn., for two years. At least two dozen people from the church have made the trek to Cleveland to help local church planters with a variety of projects crucial to the task of reaching the city.

By Mickey Noah 

BONIFAY, Fla. – Four years before Send North America was launched by the North American Mission Board to mobilize existing churches and local associations to plant and support new churches in underserved parts of the United States, Todd Unzicker was down in Holmes County, Fla., doing it.

In 2007, Unzicker, 31 at the time, came to Bonifay, Fla.—located in the Florida panhandle just off I-10, about 50 miles due north of Panama City—as one of the youngest directors of missions ever in the entire Southern Baptist Convention.

Bonifay is the county seat for Holmes County, one of Florida’s most rural and poorest counties. Only some 19,000 residents live in the entire county. At the time, the Holmes Baptist Association consisted of only 29 churches, and 25 of those had bivocational pastors.

By Staff 

ALPHARETTA, Ga.—The North American Mission Board’s Send North America: New York City church planting focus garnered attention from the New York Times over the Christmas holidays.

“Seeing City in Need, Southern Baptists Plan Growth,” the headline stated. The article was posted to the newspaper’s website on Christmas evening and ran in the print edition December 26 on page 25 of Section A.