Celebrating Baptist associations

For related coverage, click image.

Baptist associations in the United States celebrated their 300th anniversary in 2007. The Florida Baptist Witness is honoring Florida’s 49 associations in a series of articles that will showcase each association and its ministries. This is the sixth installment.

CHOCTAW BAPTIST ASSOCIATION

Choctaw Baptist Association will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2008 while associational leadership looks forward to making sweeping changes in its work and philosophy. In the association’s January newsletter, Director of Missions Hershel Adams, who has served the 25-church association nine years, outlined major goals for the year, including: “Find a new location for our offices. Reorganize the association.”

For more than a decade, Choctaw association has maintained offices in Cinco Baptist Church in Ft. Walton Beach. An adult Sunday School department on Sunday morning is the associational office Monday through Friday. While the arrangement has benefited both entities, Adams says it is time for the association “to have an identity separate from one church.”

He said he is looking for a “handy-man special” house that volunteer construction crews will make suitable for the association’s use. Its location could be in Ft. Walton, Niceville, Valparaiso, Shalimar or Destin, but it will not be in the geographical center—that land is occupied by Eglin Air Force Base.

Also in 2008, the association will examine its past and present to draw up a plan for the future. Its 1958 stated purpose was “promotion of the faith, fellowship and cooperative work of Baptists.” It numbered its “great causes” as those “fostered by the Florida Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention.” The present statement defines the work of the association, “to unify, encourage, and equip its member churches to fulfill the Great Commission.”

According to Adams, a reorganization team of clergy and lay people will begin with the question: “Why are we an association of churches?” Cecil Seagle, director of the Missions Division of the Florida Baptist Convention, will direct a study of urbanization and cultural changes and their challenges for ministry before they begin their work.

“We need to be real honest and not assume that we know why we exist,” Adams told Florida Baptist Witness.

After a mission statement is formulated, the team will look at what other associations have done in reorganization and put a model together to accomplish the purpose, Adams said. The veteran DOM said he foresees the focus moving from developing programs to individualized help for churches.

Meanwhile ministries in Choctaw association continue to flourish. The association sponsors a counseling ministry that encompasses the work of a licensed counselor and a licensed pastoral counselor, and its year-old Crossroads Medical Clinic has grown from an associational project to an enterprise involving wide community support. The clinic began with a $32,000 investment from the association for a clinic to be available one day a week. It now is open five days a week in a suite donated by Ft. Walton Beach Medical Center, and is run by a small army of volunteers and one paid employee. The Okaloosa County Health Department donates personnel three days a week. The County Commissioners recently voted to allow the clinic space in the old hospital adjacent to the health department.

“It has become a million dollar operation from nothing,” Adams said.

In an another project that is supported jointly by Choctaw association and the City of Ft. Walton Beach, hundreds of World Changers make the Gulf of Mexico community an annual destination. In 2007, 386 teenagers painted and re-roofed homes while 600 volunteers from local churches served 2,300 meals at 31 locations.

“They didn’t miss a meal,” Adams said. “And boy, were they hungry!”

Around 250 World Changers are expected this June.

Only two weeks after the World Changers leave Ft. Walton Beach, a team of 20-25 volunteers from Choctaw association churches will head to West Virginia to work at the Mountain Market Place Mission in Gaulie. The Floridians will conduct Vacation Bible School and do maintenance and construction on the facility of the mission that distributes groceries and clothing to 350-400 families weekly.

OKALOOSA BAPTIST ASSOCIATION

Okaloosa Baptist Association, with offices in Crestview, and its churches are ministering in an area that has doubled in population over the last 20 years to more than 40,000. Director of Missions Eugene Strickland expects the growth to continue, perhaps doubling again in the next decade.

The veteran DOM attributes the growth to the burgeoning Eglin Air Force Base that covers about a third of Okaloosa County. The military base realignment of the last few years has added several thousand more military families to the rural county’s population.

It also is changing the face of ministry in the area. One of the association’s newer ministries is the New Life Korean Church that meets with Live Oak Baptist Church. Live Oak Baptist, which includes a large military membership, began the Korean congregation three years ago to minister to the Korean wives of American servicemen. Pastor John Hong leads the congregation. Also, a growing English as a Second Language class meets every Tuesday evening at Valley Road Baptist in Crestview. A brand new mission, Mosaic Baptist Church in Crestview, moves the association closer to its goal of starting five new churches before July 2009.

As the population of the area grows, the rural culture of the 85-year-old Okaloosa association is being challenged, Strickland said.

“The rural culture may not be very receptive to outsiders, and our churches are having to adjust to accepting outsiders,” he said.

The association faces another challenge perhaps unique to rural areas. Twenty-five of its 32 churches are led by bi-vocational pastors. To include these pastors who also hold secular jobs, most associational gatherings are held on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Every effort is made to avoid day-time meetings, he said.

“It is easier for our larger churches to accommodate the others and come to evening meetings than it is for the small churches to meet in the daytime,” he said.

The association also hopes to further accommodate ministry among its churches by offering individualized attention.

“We are discovering that ‘canned meetings’ do not attract people. There is so much competing for their attention,” Strickland said. “We want a church to say ‘help us with this’ and we will put together a conference for it, and for other churches with the same need.”

Accommodation and cooperation already allow the association to support a disaster relief ministry that serves both its own west Florida area and also has traveled to other areas affected by disasters. The association’s fully-equipped trailer and team were headquartered in Hattiesburg, Miss., following Hurricane Katrina. The association also works with the Coordinated Christian Response Group, based in Crestview. Strickland said Okaloosa Baptists mount an immediate response to local disasters and others in the interfaith organization coordinate long-term repairs.

Disaster relief was the focus of association-sponsored youth mission trips to Poydras, La., after Katrina. Members of several rural churches “experienced how the other side lives” as they repaired homes and Poydras Baptist Church. The group will work during spring break at Blue Springs Baptist Conference Center in Marianna this year, “but their hearts will be in Louisiana,” Strickland said. Adult groups also have ministered in Hazel Green, Ky., on annual summer trips.

Closer to home, the association is hoping its churches will plan simultaneous revivals during September following a I-366 prayer emphasis in August. The strategy of I-366 calls for each church to give 24 hours to prayer before September revival meetings.

“Simultaneous revivals will give the community a sense of unity among our churches. They will see that we are not competing or trying to outdo each other,” Strickland said. “People respond to solidarity.’

PENSACOLA BAY BAPTIST ASSOCIATION

Director of Missions Bob Greene believes relationships are most important in his work with the Pensacola Bay Baptist Association. He hopes to strengthen the association by building relationships not only with the pastors and staffs of the 74 churches, but also with the physically and spiritually needy of the community.

The mission of the association is “to see our churches cooperating together with a Kingdom perspective so that our community is influenced and transformed by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” To accomplish the mission, a five-pronged strategy focuses the effort on administration, church planting, cooperative ministry and missions, spiritual formation and leadership development.

Greene has established peer groups for pastors, ministers of music and ministers of education. In four groups, 38 ministers meet weekly for study and fellowship. Greene said the two-year-old program evolved from being “curriculum-driven” to being “relationship-driven.”

“We encourage pastors,” Greene said. “This is their testimony to one another—‘You are not in this by yourself.’”

Greene hopes to add three more peer groups in August. The first group is almost at the end of its prescribed existence, and the group has asked Greene for a third year.

“At this point, we are making it up as we go,” he said.

The peer groups have also nurtured relationships between Greene and the other ministers, so that a pastor feels comfortable saying “come help me here,” Greene said. He also is finding ways to “work into the fabric of the churches,” discovering that a personalized approach works best.

“These ministers have proven with their feet that they are not being served by ‘ya’ll come’ meetings anymore,” he said.

Greene said his greatest challenge is working with churches who are struggling to survive. He said the congregations have to “get past the intense emotional pain” to see the possibilities of hope and realignment. He can point to a recent merger of Northside Baptist Church, an Anglo congregation of about a dozen members, and Korean First Baptist Church with 75 members. The First Korean American Baptist Church is now “in an adjustment period,” Greene said.

Pensacola Bay Baptist Association ministers to the needy in its community through a medical clinic and counseling ministry housed in the association’s office building. The Health and Hope Medical Clinic is open Monday and Friday mornings and Thursday evenings for its 1,000 patients. Its 80 volunteer force includes doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants and pharmacists, along with clerical workers.

Meet the Church, a ministry begun by the ministers of the first peer group, agrees on local mission projects and volunteers from 8-12 churches gather one Sunday night of the month. A Meet the Church project may see 100-200 volunteers in 6-8 teams working on projects. Greene credits Jeff Howard, pastor of Heritage Baptist Church and the association’s moderator, with the new ministry that Greene calls “the coolest thing.”

Greene cited the “wonderful partnership” of the Pensacola Bay association with the Florida Baptist Convention.

“They invest in us like we want to invest in our pastors,” he said.

Another partnership takes west Florida volunteers to the southern hemisphere. In August a team will journey for the second time to Ceara, Brazil to work with Baptist churches there. The team will hope to duplicate the results of the 2007 trip during which three church plants were begun and hundreds made professions of faith. The 2007 team included people from ten association churches, most of whom “could not have planned their own trips,” Greene said.

“They came back with the sweetest testimonies,” he said.

SANTA ROSA BAPTIST ASSOCIATION

Santa Rosa Baptist Association Director of Missions Richard “Chip” Fox says he has spent a lifetime preparing for the job he has held for two years, and his dreams for the future of the 100-year-old association include many more healthy churches in west Florida communities.

“In the history of our association, we have discovered that it is the new churches who are reaching people. When we planted churches, the numbers grew,” Fox said. “It is obvious that God intends for churches to reproduce. God blesses churches who do not major on themselves.”

Two areas of the association have been targeted as locations of two new church starts: the CrossBridge near Holly by the Sea and The River in north Milton. “Vision” tours of the area by associational leaders keep them current on the trends in population growth and residential developments. The county spans an area from farmland near the Alabama state line to tourist meccas along the Gulf Coast.

“Everywhere we go we see bulldozers at work,” he said.

Fox has personally observed the explosive growth of Santa Rosa County. Raised a few miles south is Gulf Breeze, he worked to plant a church in the center of Santa Rosa under the sponsorship of First Baptist Church in Milton and then served 16 years as pastor of First Baptist Church in Jay. His knowledge of the diverse area and his experience with large, small and new churches gave him a head start on his work with the association. “It would take four years to learn what I already knew from living here so long,” he said.

He also could sympathize with churches still recovering from hurricanes over the last few years. Ivan and Dennis heavily damaged several churches of the Santa Rosa association. James Street Baptist Church only recently moved into a new facility that replaced what was destroyed by Ivan in 2004. The association formerly owned the property, and has now deeded it to the James Street congregation. Garcon Point Baptist Church, the only church which has not rebuilt since the storms, is trying to raise funds to build a building more in keeping with its now-affluent neighborhood, Fox said.

Because of its experience in hurricane recovery, the association has purchased and equipped a disaster relief clean-up trailer; it carries chain saws and other tools needed for debris removal and mud out.

In October, Santa Rosa Baptist Association celebrated its 100th anniversary. What began in 1907 with six churches has grown to a cooperative effort among 38 churches. Its stated purpose follows an acrostic of S.E.R.V.E.: to Share what God has given us through benevolence; to Evangelize the lost for Christ; to Relate and foster fellowship among churches and fellow Christians; to Venture forth in missions; and to Equip church leaders for servanthood.

Venturing far from its newly-refurbished offices in Milton, associational leadership has organized mission trips that will take volunteers north to Indiana and south to Haiti. Volunteers will work in ministries in the inner city areas of Indianapolis in July. A trip to Haiti in September will offer opportunities to work in an evangelistic crusade, on construction projects, and may include specialized training for police and fire personnel in the area. “This is the beauty of a Baptist association. Even really small churches, who might not have finances or people to do mission trips by themselves, can be involved,” Fox said. “It takes a real cooperative spirit.”