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More than money
United City Church has been known by a few names over the years.
“They had three different names for the church in a period of 15 years, and each one of those names kind of carried with it different levels of baggage or expectations or positives,” United City Lead Pastor Chris Kouba said.
But the church that started in 1906 as First Baptist Church in this Northeast Houston suburb now carries a name that fits not only its mission, but the mission of Southern Baptists everywhere. To effectively spread the gospel both locally and across the world, a united effort is needed.
Through cooperative work, United City has developed partnerships with at least six church plants in Send Cities through the North American Mission Board and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, and it has started a Spanish-language service on campus with the help of such contacts.
“The Cooperative Program is not only a facilitator of money, but we’ve found it’s a facilitator of relationships,” Kouba said.
United City has been able to have the impact it does, in part, by standing on its legacy as one of the top state and national CP supporters.
Weathering the storm
United City—like many churches in the region—fell on hard times in 2018 when Hurricane Harvey flooded the campus, as well as up to half the homes of church members. Those members remember that it was Southern Baptist Disaster Relief that set up on its campus after Harvey and got to work—yet another example of cooperation that helped the church recover and reach a new season of health.
By Easter Sunday 2020, the church had gone through a yearlong study that included the planned rollout of another name change, updated core values, and a new mission statement to correspond with the unveiling of a building renovation. Then came COVID.
“We were able to make some adjustments, and the church is unrecognizable now,” Kouba said. “The name change was over five years ago, and now it’s not about what it used to be. The church is more about what it’s becoming.”
Baptisms are a high point, with United City on track to “shatter our record that we shattered the year before,” said Kouba, who has been pastor since 2019. About 250 people were baptized at United City last year, and this year the church is on pace to reach 300. Sunday attendance is about 2,200.
“It’s a lot of true life-change that’s happening everywhere, from our prison ministry to our men’s ministry to our kids and youth,” Kouba said.
A priority for the church has been involvement in local schools, which has become a strong connection point with the community. The church provides a chaplain for four football teams, and several coaches, teachers, and administrators attend United City.
“In Houston, there’s a church on every corner and there’s a Mexican food restaurant on every corner,” the pastor said. “What we’ve found is there are a lot of people who have a place they may write down if they’re asked on a form what church they go to, but there’s not a lot of people that necessarily go to church.”
Another inroad to the lost is the prison ministry, which includes streaming worship services on the PandoApp—“the first Christian app available behind bars”—as well as sending volunteers to engage in evangelism.
“It’s a lot of true life-change that’s happening everywhere, from our prison ministry to our men’s ministry to our kids and youth.”
Diversity on display
“My prayer for the first few years of being here was that we would have unity and diversity—unity in our vision, unity in our mission, unity in where we’re going, but diversity in the sense that we would look a lot more like our community,” Kouba said. “I was thinking in my head racially, but what I think the Lord has done is really answered that in so many different ways.”
Racial diversity has been part of the progress, but age has been another.
“We are very young, but we’re not only young,” he said. “We get grandparents who join our church all the time. We’ve got prisoners, and we’ve got executives. It’s not uncommon for us to meet someone who watched us online in prison, got out, and showed up a month later.”
The Spanish service on campus averages 175 on Sundays two years after its start. United City partnered with Champion Forest Baptist Church in Houston to gain a Spanish pastor who “is as much a part” of the church staff as anyone, Kouba said.
“I threw a vision out there three years ago that I wanted to have the largest growing Spanish ministry in Northeast Houston, and I asked the church to pray with me because I had no idea how to do that,” Kouba said.
One of United City’s core values is “better together,” and that means participation in small groups, but it also includes planting churches and sending missionaries.
“I’ve found no other organization, no other program that does it more effectively than the Cooperative Program,” Kouba said. “If I find one, I’ll go to that, but at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s anything close.
“There are a lot of trendy things out there that get attention, but they all kind of rise up and then they all kind of fall down,” he added. “I’ve just found the consistency of the Cooperative Program to be something that is worthy of not only the investment, but it’s also something that will pay a lot of dividends through the relationships.”
