English
Korean
Spanish
South Texas church becomes first to put boots on the ground as part of the SBTC’s Reach Nevada initiative
RENO, NEV.
“Ma’am, would you like a water? Coffee?”
It’s a little after 10 a.m. at Idlewild Park, and members of First Baptist Church of Woodsboro, Texas, are hard at work offering refreshments to passers-by. The park is pretty busy considering it’s a weekday, peppered with people sneaking in a walk or a jog before temperatures climb into the low 90s later in the day.
A few feet away from the table where the Woodsboro members are offering drinks, Scott Lamberth, pastor of Reno’s Pathfinder Church, is engaged in conversation with a woman pushing a stroller. He hands her a business card inviting her to church, and, with the Truckee River whooshing behind them, they have a conversation about spiritual things.
“If I come to your church, are you really going to ask me to believe that Jesus is the only way?” the woman asks.
“Look, we do believe Jesus is the only way,” Lamberth replies, “but we will give you the space to come and explore that at your own pace. … Come and check it out and just see what God does.”
Ministry is happening, and the partnership between FBC Woodsboro and Pathfinder Church is playing out as planned—with the Texas team working the drink giveaway table so Lamberth is free to break off to the side and have more in-depth spiritual conversations with local residents.
“More spiritual conversations, more invitations to church, more bridges built— the work that the Woodsboro team has been doing here has just led to such a good result.”
The previous evening, the Woodsboro team was at another park with Lamberth, running an arts and crafts outreach. With children and adults from the nearby neighborhood participating, Lamberth—and even several members of the Woodsboro team—went table to table, striking up conversations and inviting people to church.
“The amount of spiritual conversations I’ve been able to have this week is the most I’ve had in any single week in the year we’ve been here,” Lamberth said. “More spiritual conversations, more invitations to church, more bridges built—the work that the Woodsboro team has been doing here has just led to such a good result.”
In July 2022, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention entered a partnership with the Nevada Baptist Convention to strengthen its existing churches and plant new ones. As part of that partnership, the SBTC committed to not only provide financial resources, but also connect its affiliated churches with those of the NBC.
Since then, the NBC has hosted an Equip Conference similar to the one put on by the SBTC each summer. In 2023, NBC’s Equip Conference held in the Vegas area attracted 300 attendees. This year, it hosted two Equip Conferences in different parts of the state and saw more than 500 attend total.
And in June, FBC Woodsboro became the first SBTC church to travel to Nevada to serve side by side with an NBC church.
An exciting mission field
The SBTC has partnered with the Nevada Baptist Convention to plant churches and strengthen existing churches. Here’s a glimpse at the opportunities this mission field offers:
An open frontier, a great gospel need
Reno is home to roughly 265,000 people, comparable in population to the Texas cities of Irving, Laredo, and Lubbock. That population swells to about a half-million when considering all the residents of nearby Sparks and Carson.
Much of Reno’s booming population is attributed to an influx of Californians trying to escape soaring home prices, high taxes, and even higher crime. Though Reno is 450 miles northwest of sister city Las Vegas, it’s just 12 miles from the California border—making it a natural landing spot for many fleeing east.
Lamberth said the people of Reno are friendly and open to conversation, which is why he commits time most weeks to set up a table at a local park offering free drinks to those passing by. Many people Lamberth talks to describe themselves as spiritual, though pinning down exactly what that means can be difficult. One thing usually becomes clear in those conversations—a great number of those he speaks with do not agree Jesus is the only way to be reconciled to God.
According to the latest numbers available, nearly two out of every three Reno residents are unchurched. In 2017, Lifeway Research declared Reno the second most unchurched city in the U.S., trailing only San Francisco, Lamberth said.
The Reno metro area offers contrasting extremes. Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada, which claims to be “one of the world’s highest volume plants” for the production of electric motors, energy storage products, vehicle powertrains, and batteries, is located about a 30-minute drive east on I-80. Gigafactory has grown into one of the state’s largest employers, offering high-paying jobs that can provide life-changing financial stability.
But just outside the Sparks city limits sits the state’s largest legal brothel which—along with the area’s gaggle of casinos and an out-of-control substance abuse problem—is tearing lives apart with increasing efficiency. In 2020, Nevada experienced a more than 300% jump in the number of people who admitted using marijuana, according to the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services. Alcohol and drug-related deaths have spiked in recent years, with fentanyl overdose deaths rising more than 200%.
Reno, once known as the “biggest little city in the world,” sadly is now referred to by many as the “Sodom of the Sierras,” Lamberth said.
“But one of the positives is, people here are open and hungry,” Lamberth said. “People who are needy are ripe, and there are a lot of needs here.”
That makes the call to not only plant churches in Reno, but strengthen existing Southern Baptist churches like Pathfinder, all the more urgent.
“It’s our God-given responsibility to support churches like this. We’re just a small church ourselves, but that don’t matter. Church size don’t matter when it comes to the Great Commission.”
A call to get involved
So how can churches of the SBTC partner with NBC churches?
First and foremost, NBC churches need prayer, said Damian Cirincione, NBC’s executive director. Some churches need help putting on events such as vacation Bible schools, while others have buildings in disrepair that need to be remodeled or rebuilt. Ideally, longterm relationships would form between SBTC and NBC churches that would allow them to work together for years to come.
“[Our churches] need people to come alongside them, love on them, love on their pastors, and encourage them to continue to reach their community,” Cirincione said. “The most important thing is sharing the love of Jesus and making His name known in these small communities.”
The Reach Nevada initiative is one of several partnerships the SBTC is building using an Acts 1:8 model, developing statewide, nationwide, and global ministry partnerships to accomplish the Great Commission. In addition to Nevada, the SBTC has a similar relationship with Southern Baptist churches in Puerto Rico, and it is considering other such partnerships in Europe and Asia.
SBTC missions mobilization associate Colin Rayburn said local churches often lack the connections to engage in missions opportunities with other churches. In other words, they have a heart to do cooperative gospel work on multiple levels, but they just don’t know where to start. By using the SBTC’s connections with Southern Baptist churches on the state, national, and international levels, churches will be able to find partners more easily, he said.
“We realized we have this unique opportunity born out of this desire to amplify what the Lord is doing in other places to help mobilize our churches to find the partnerships that they need,” Rayburn said. “There’s no reason a small, local church would naturally have connections with other small churches all over the world, but when we all come together, we get to create something profound.”
Carroll Borden, an FBC Woodsboro elder who came on the Nevada trip, said the call to work with other churches outside one’s own context is not only a desire, but a command from the Lord.
“It’s our God-given responsibility to support churches like this,” he said. “We’re just a small church ourselves, but that don’t matter. Church size don’t matter when it comes to the Great Commission. You just have to have a passion for spreading the Word of God.”
‘We know the way’
When the Woodsboro team arrived in Reno, Lamberth asked members to begin not by prepping supplies or even knocking on doors, but by praying over some of the areas where they would spend hours over the coming week meeting people and building relationships.
At the first stop, in a park, Newberry said he was walking and praying when he came across a bench. Someone had used a marker to scrawl a message into the wood: “Make Life Beautiful—Smile.” For reasons he still doesn’t understand, the words gave Newberry pause. His mind swirled as he considered them, and he soon found himself recalling a conversation he’d had earlier with some people who believe there are many ways—aside from Jesus—to be right with God.
“There are a lot of good people here, but they are good people who are lost,” Newberry said later. “When I read that written in Sharpie, about making life beautiful, I thought, ‘Someone here is searching. They’re searching for the point, for the purpose, looking for something good, and they just don’t know where to find it.’
“But we know the way—it’s the gospel. … The gospel is the key to everything they’re searching for.”
