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Cross Training
First Baptist Church in Watauga was founded by four Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary students in 1939.
“They came out to Watauga, which was a small, rural community north of Fort Worth at that point, and they decided they were going to plant a church here. They laid the groundwork for it,” said Dennis Hester, pastor of FBC Watauga.
The students had a goal of having L.R. Scarborough, the seminary’s president at the time, fill the pulpit on the first Sunday.
“So they went into his office and told him that the Lord had told them that he was supposed to preach the first sermon at this new church plant,” Hester said. “He did.”
In the years following its founding, FBC Watauga was a small church where seminary students served as pastors. The average tenure of each pastor was two or three years, and no pastor had been there more than four years until the Hester’s predecessor, who stayed 14 years. Hester has been there 18 years.
“The church was hurting when I came, and my heart is to love the local church,” he said. “I just loved the church and preached the gospel and we saw the church begin to take off.”
"What we see the Lord doing now is [allowing us to mentor] young men and women who are going off into the ministry in other places.”
One of the most exciting ways God has moved recently has been through giving the church a ministry of raising up the next generation of leaders. In a slight shift from its history of having seminary students as pastors, FBC Watauga now has Hester serving as a mentor to ministers.
“We have a plethora of interns regularly, and this has really happened over the last eight or 10 years,” he said. “What we see the Lord doing now is [allowing us to mentor] young men and women who are going off into the ministry in other places.”
The church sees between 150-200 people in attendance on Sundays and has a handful of interns. One is a young woman interning as a chaplain while her husband interns as a young adult pastor. The church has a couple of worship interns as well.
On the staff, the student pastor grew up in the church and recently finished a master’s degree, while the worship pastor is pursuing a degree at Texas Baptist College.
“Both of those guys are young men that we’re raising up,” said Hester, who has been in ministry 30 years, pastoring in May, Texas, before Watauga.
In recent years, Hester earned a doctorate in pastoral ministry at Southwestern. “It has given me a lot more tools in my toolkit to mentor these young men and women,” he said.
“They need a place where they can come and be mentored and discipled because, obviously, if we’re not raising up the next generation of pastors and chaplains and worship ministers from a theologically sound and biblically firm foundation, we’re not going to have [biblically conservative] ministers,” Hester said.
FBC Watauga aims to make Scripture the foundation for everything, particularly worship and preaching, the pastor said.
“What we see is that even some of the young adults who have come through our church that went maybe to a university where the vast majority of their professors were very liberal and did not hold to the inerrancy of Scripture, they were able to stand firm,” Hester said.
Another ministry God has blessed the church with is praying for the lost. After the pandemic, FBC Watauga wasn’t seeing many people baptized.
“We start meeting, whether it’s half a dozen or two dozen people meeting, on Tuesday nights at 6:30. We write down the names of lost friends or family members,” Hester said. They split into groups, pray over the names, and then hand them off to the staff for prayer the following day.
“Not long after we did that, we started seeing God move and save souls,” he said.
A 27-year-old man who had not been in church stepped into a worship service and was saved the same day, the pastor said. A retired veteran in his 60s had been attending regularly but went forward during the invitation, broken and with tears in his eyes, to receive Christ as Savior.
The church has built relationships with people in the community through being involved in the town’s civic organizations, through back-to-school supply efforts, and through the pastor serving as a local police chaplain.
“They see us loving people and caring for people,” Hester said.
