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Jeremy Sanders scheduled a meeting with Alan Small, executive director of the Dogwood Trails Baptist Association in East Texas.
“I took my resume and said, ‘We’re going to be moving to the area. I’m a pastor. I’ll be looking for a church,’” Sanders recalled.
“As I sat down and handed him my resume, a gentleman had just left, and [Alan] jumped up and said, ‘I need to go get this gentleman. I’ll be right back.’
“[Alan] brought him back and [the gentleman] said, ‘You are the man we have been praying for for months.”
It turned out that while an established church was closing and leaving its property and assets to the association, God was providing a new opportunity for Sanders’ wife as an elementary principal nearby. The association had hopes of starting a new church in the old building. All it needed was a church planter.
“This gentleman was working with the church that was closing, and it just happened he was there the day I was there, which is a God thing,” Sanders said. “I kept pushing my resume over, going, ‘I’m not a church planter. I’m just a pastor.’
“And he goes, ‘Jeremy, I’m just telling you, we’ve been praying for you. You are the man God has called to this area.’”
That was about three years ago. Sanders agreed to start a Bible study, which soon grew into Cedar Creek Community Church in Payne Springs.
“I am a rural country pastor. I had no church planting experience at all, but God gave me a vision of the people that we would reach in this area,” Sanders said. “It’s the clearest vision I’ve ever been given, and it was to reach the marginalized, the broken, the forgotten people who fall through the cracks.”
“I am a rural country pastor. I had no church planting experience at all, but God gave me a vision of the people that we would reach in this area.”
After two and a half years, the church has reached about 30 people, and many of them did not have church backgrounds.
“We’re reaching people, but it’s just little by little as we work the ground,” Sanders said.
That ground includes lives ruined by drugs, alcohol, and homelessness. Sanders had worked with the down and out before, and he knew he had to build trust.
“They go through a lot of change in their lives. People walk in and out of their lives constantly, and you have to earn the trust from them. Once you do that, it’s an amazing thing,” he said. “They are as loyal and loving as can be.”
Though residents of Payne Springs can drive to Mabank or Gun Barrel City in five minutes, Sanders said, thousands of people aren’t being reached by any church. “Those people are not going elsewhere. They’re staying in their area, and they want to be reached where they’re at.”
One of the ways Cedar Creek Community Church has accomplished that is through a Christmas outreach. Members loaded up a wagon for an old-fashioned hayride and went caroling through neighborhoods, handing out goody bags and praying with people.
Right around the time the church was starting, an RV park was opening across the street. Sanders had envisioned the park being a prime location to meet new people and invite them to church, but, surprisingly, efforts bore no fruit.
“We prayer-walked it. We knocked on doors to pray with people, share the gospel, and invite them to church, all kinds of things,” he said.
The caroling hayride was the breakthrough. “It was by far the best outing we’ve had there yet,” he said. The pastor was able to minister to a family whose uncle had died the day before, and the church made connections with a few other people.
A recent development is that a nearby Christian school is looking for a larger place to meet, and they’re working out a plan to occupy the unused education building on Cedar Creek’s campus.
“The education building is two stories tall, and we had to close that building down last year,” Sanders said. “We had the water and electricity turned off. It was just costing us way too much as a very small church.”
With the activity a school would bring to the campus, Sanders hopes people in the community will realize something new is happening and investigate.
“We are the most come-as-you-are church there is,” he said. “You can come in shorts, flip-flops, and everyday clothes—not dressed up. What I love more than anything is what our people tell other people: ‘You come, you’re going to be welcomed, and you’re going to be loved.’
“They are the most nonjudgmental people ever. You don’t have to even physically clean up. Just come. To me, that is what the church should look like.”
