KELLER  Kason Branch knew God had led him to plant a church, but how? Where?

With ministry plan in hand—plus resources and encouragement—provided by the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s church planting team, Keystone Fellowship of Fort Worth pastored by Damon Halliday as a sponsoring church and Concord Church of Dallas as a sending church, Branch started Creekstone Baptist Church in Keller in April of 2016.

Joining with SBTC “seemed to be a fit; we shared the same values,” Branch told the TEXAN. “Richard Taylor [SBTC associate for personal evangelism and fellowships] did a great job of shepherding and encouraging me through the process during the initial stages.”

“It feels like a warm family as we’re about 80 people,” Branch continued. “We’re in a great facility and have baptized 19 new believers since last August.  God is moving!”

The Reach Texas State Missions Offering helps churches like Creekstone Keller get started. 

Branch left the corporate world in 2010 to be chief operating officer at Concord Baptist Church, a sizable independent Baptist church in south Dallas, where he’d been discipled and mentored since 2005 by the senior pastor, Bryan Carter.

Being part of the leadership of an established church that grew to 9,000 members while he served there would be vastly different from planting a church, especially one in Keller, a north Tarrant County suburb of Fort Worth, where he felt led. Branch sought advice and was referred to the SBTC by trusted mentors and peers.

“The SBTC helped further my understanding of church planting, and also the encouragement I’ve received has given me great hope and has strengthened me,” Branch said. “I feel like there’s a team of people who are rooting for our kingdom success.”

The Branch family, including his wife Shanea, son Owen and daughter Kayden Grace, sold their home in DeSoto, south of I-20 in suburban Dallas, and moved into an apartment in the Keller area, north of I-30, where they’ve been living for three years as they plant the church.

Shanea Branch found a teaching job at the school their children attend. The youngsters are involved in baseball, soccer and dance, and the family has adapted well to its new culture, Branch said.

“The Lord really did bless us in the transition,” he noted. “We changed our whole life for this, but it’s been worth it because we’ve seen God move in an amazing way in the lives of other people.”

Finding a meeting place for the church was difficult. “I was told ‘No’ 22 times as to a [church] location,” Branch said. Finally a discount movie theater in nearby North Richland Hills said ‘Yes.’ Six months later the church moved to its current location in the Keller Pointe indoor/outdoor community recreation center.

While Creekstone does do some door-to-door ministry, the church’s main outreach has been through partnering with the City of Keller, and with the recreation center. 

“All the training I went to talked about ‘blessing the city,’” Branch said. “Nic Burleson [pastor] of Timber Ridge Church in Stephenville was one who talked about it, and it got me to thinking about how we could bless the city with the events they already have.”

For Keller’s Daddy-Daughter Dance in February, Creekstone Church sets up and cleans up before and after the event, with time in between to build relationships and share their faith with participants. There’s an Easter Egg Scramble, September “Rec the Park” and, in December, Holly Days, plus a “Trash Bash” twice a year to pick up along city roadways. Four partnership events with the community center last year included a carnival-type Pumpkin Splash, with dozens of pumpkins floating in the pool. 

Creekstone Church has received funds from the Reach Texas State Missions Offering in hopes that it will help establish another strong, evangelistic church, and the support is greatly appreciated.  

“The money we’ve received from Reach Texas has helped us advance the ministry,” Branch said. “There are a lot of people in the SBTC with a heart for God and his people, who want to see the kingdom of God expanded among all people.

“Creekstone Church has the same desire,” Branch said. “That’s what I see in the SBTC’s initiatives. We have the same heart.” Creekstone Church gives 5 percent of undesignated offerings to missions through the Cooperative Program, the SBC’s method of supporting missions and ministries in Texas and throughout the world.

Branch said he was drawn to Keller, with its 45,000 residents—up from 27,000 residents in 2000—because “this area is growing rapidly and all the numbers point to it continuing to grow.” In 2009 the town was listed by Money magazine as 7th of the nation’s 10 best places to live. 

“We wanted to establish a presence in the community so we can reach people here. There are a lot of people who have come to the area who haven’t connected with a church. We have an opportunity to help them come to know Jesus Christ and to grow, and to give people a great big glimpse of God.”

That being said, “We live in a culture increasingly neglectful of God and preoccupied with other things: rodeo, baseball, kids’ sports,” Branch said. “We’re battling the culture in regards to getting people to church, but those we’ve been able to reach are becoming family.

“People aren’t rushing out after services,” Branch said. “As a pastor I see us growing deep in relationship with God and with one another, and that warms my heart. You want to grow deep before you grow wide and we’re doing just that. It just confirms we’re headed in the right direction, doing it God’s way.” 

FORT WORTH—A nine-member presidential search committee announced Aug. 23 by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary trustee chairman Kevin Ueckert includes three Texans—Jamie Green of Katy, Philip Levant of Hurst and Danny Roberts of North Richland Hills.

Roberts, executive pastor of North Richland Hills Baptist Church, was named to serve as chairman. A 1979 SWBTS alumnus, he received a master of church music degree, and began serving as a trustee in 2016, sitting on the communications, policies, and strategic initiatives committee.

Green, a layperson who began serving in 2013, is a retired speech-language pathologist and member of Houston’s First Baptist Church, and was named to serve as secretary of the search committee. Levant began serving on the trustee board in 2015 and is pastor of Iglesia Bautista LaVid in Hurst. He received the master of church music degree in 2002 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in theological studies.

Remaining members are Denise Ewing of Illinois, Guy Grimes of California, Todd Houston of North Carolina, Tom James of Kentucky, Andre Palmer of New York and Calvin Wittman of Colorado.  Trustee chair Kevin Ueckert and vice chairman Connie Hancock will serve as ex officio members of the committee.

The seminary’s release indicated that the committee’s composition includes two women, one African-American, and one Hispanic. The committee also is mixed geographically and in terms of trustee tenure (with five being in their first five-year term and the other four in their second five-year term). Levant and Green also serve on the executive committee, as do ex-officio members Ueckert and Hancock.

In naming the committee, Ueckert stated, “Between now and the October Board meeting, the presidential search committee will be focused on developing the candidate profile and the application process, as well as entering a time of focused prayer.” In the meantime, nominations and expressions of interest should be submitted to swbtspresidentialsearch@gmail.com. 

The full board will have an opportunity to approve Ueckert’s selections in accordance with the bylaws at their regular meeting Oct. 16-17.

More often than not, the search committee is named and approved at the same meeting that a transition is announced, however time was not allotted for that on May 14 when the board closed out their 13-hour executive session at 3 a.m. after dismissing Paige Patterson as president.

When SWBTS President Kenneth Hemphill announced his retirement April 8, 2003, to accept a position as the national strategist of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Empowering Kingdom Growth initiative, a search committee was named the same day and took two and one-half months before recommending Patterson who was elected unanimously by the board.

Hemphill had been approved unanimously by the board, four months after a search committee was announced on March 9, 1994, shortly after Russell Dilday was dismissed as president.

In contrast, the committee that ultimately recommended Dilday was announced several months after SWBTS President Robert Naylor gave trustees two and one-half years’ notice of his retirement plan. The presidential search committee took 20 months before announcing Dilday as their choice to become president-elect in at the beginning of 1978 and assume presidential duties Aug. 1, 1978 when Naylor completed a 20-year tenure.

The heartbreaking report of a Pennsylvania grand jury alleging that 300 Catholic priests sexually abused 1,000 people in their care over the course of 70 years should be an occasion of grief and an alert to churches of all types. This violation of such a high trust is horrible, whether it is in a Catholic church or a Baptist one. Although Baptist churches do not stand in an authority relationship with one another that allows the same kind of cover up the Catholics have experienced, some of our churches have failed to protect children. I affirm SBC President J.D. Greear in his call for “bold steps” to prevent sexual abuse in our ministries. It is a call for pastors, church leaders and congregations to take seriously the risks and reality of destructive sin in our own ministries.

Pastors must recognize their own mortality and need to strive for holy living. They must not neglect their own souls and relationships with God. The sexual abuse of those in our ministries begins as a spiritual problem.

Church leaders must be diligent to ensure that staff ministers and all those who minister to children and youth have a criminal background check before they begin that service to the church. This is common sense, a legal imperative in our day and a moral obligation to those who trust their children to our churches.

Congregations must ensure that policies and practices are in place and strictly implemented to protect the integrity of the church’s ministry and the safety of children. Churches should also recognize that their pastors are also brothers in Christ who need encouragement as they grow in godliness.

The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention is prepared with help for churches that need to implement wise safeguards within their ministries. Our Church Ministries department regularly helps churches across the state in this work. Additionally, the SBTC has scheduled a Sexual Abuse Summit to address this issue. The conference is October 23 at Christ Chapel Bible Church in Fort Worth and you can register by calling us at 817.552.2500 or going to sexualabusesummit.com.

We must all recognize and address this tragic failure on the part of some of our churches to ensure basic protection for those entrusted to our spiritual nurture. I pray and believe that we can work together to end sexual abuse in our churches. 

GRAPEVINE Thirty pastors and staff of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention continued a conversation around unity and racial reconciliation Aug. 8 at the “We Are One Symposium.”  

SBTC personal evangelism and fellowships associate Richard Taylor addressed the need to wrestle with the racial reconciliation divide, seeing the discussion as a launching point for having a conversation about unity.

“We are in a highly polarized and contentious environment in our communities and even in our churches,” Taylor said. To move down the path, Taylor said Southern Baptists need to discuss what it means to be unified and reconciled.

Kevin Smith, executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland-Delaware, said Southern Baptists and Bible-believing Christians in America contend for biblical truth, “but haven’t put the same energy into contending for biblical unity.” He pointed to the first 15 chapters of Acts as a model of Jews and Gentiles coming together as followers of Christ, united as the family of God.

“There’s something wrong or dysfunctional or sinful when family members don’t look out for one another or are insensitive or indifferent to the pain of others,” he added, recalling the “one another” references cited in the New Testament to bear one another’s burdens, forgive and prefer one another.

“We’ve done horribly with the one anothers because we’ve not appropriately and biblically considered the ‘we.’ If you are just some whatever that ‘other’ is, I can dismiss you in a way that I can’t if I’m seeing you as my brother or sister,” Smith explained. 

Economic, ethnic, cultural or ideological sub-identities often override the definitive identity that believers have with one another in Christ. “Your commitment to Jesus Christ should be able to check every other commitment in your life.” 

Using the analogy of a family, Smith spoke of the hurt of “going through something and you think nobody in the family cares.” In the broader evangelical life, he said, “Indifference and insensitivity is killing us.”

Terry Turner, pastor of Mesquite Friendship Baptist Church, gave a historical snapshot of the perspective of African Americans in the development of the United States. “When we look at how slavery has impacted our country and racism got started, it is something we have to understand has always existed from the beginning of America,” he said. 

“Most theologians accepted that all black people are cursed, and they deserve slavery and mistreatment,” Turner said, referring to “the erroneous theology that Ham was cursed in Gen. 9:20-27.”

Turner recalled that even the respected preacher Jonathan Edwards warned that if the massive slave population was freed, “they would cut our throats; they would endanger the peace” and “be so idle that they would not provide themselves with necessities,” but rather, “live by thievery and plundering.” 

Citing research from his book, God’s Amazing Grace: Reconciling Four Centuries of African American Marriages and Families, Turner spoke of the psychological impact of slavery that continues to affect the generations that followed. 

“What happens in one generation affects the next generation,” Turner said. “When you find what we’re dealing with in our society, a lot of it has to do with post traumatic slave syndrome and how we’re still affected,” he explained, citing studies by sociologists and psychologists. “We now have a cultural trauma that we deal with much like the Jews have the Holocaust.”

Turner said, “God sees everything through his amazing grace, yet there is a trickle-down effect of racism in our country,” describing 246 years of slavery, Jim Crow laws that relegated African-Americans to an inferior legal status, 150 years of white supremacy movements beginning with the Ku Klux Klan and social risk factors that create racial inequalities.

“The Look Like Heaven movement started by [SBTC Executive Director] Jim Richards and myself with the intention of bringing together all of our races to love one another, care for one another and make a difference in this convention has spread across the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” Turner said. Challenging the group to embrace the unity of racial reconciliation, he concluded, “I believe we’re getting better, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

Pastor Dennis Watson of Celebration Church in New Orleans introduced a brainstorming session by addressing how Christians in America remain divided racially, having forgotten where they’ve come from spiritually and historically. 

“Professing Christians have omitted the contributions of people of color in our nation,” he said, adding that “pastors in churches have resisted speaking against blatant racism and inequality” and forgotten that “the Lord has saved us so that we can together change the world and be his witnesses.” 

Watson called on believers to “intentionally befriend people across cultural and ethnic lines” and “to ask about the other person’s perspective about the economy, politics and racial issues going on in our world and listen without interrupting.”

Gathered around tables, the pastors and SBTC staff shared ideas on strengthening unity across racial lines. One pastor said, “We have to be intentional in how we confront our own biases toward each other and begin to dismantle the stereotypes constructed over years and see that we are all one family.”

In times past believers have failed to discuss issues in a calm manner without becoming frustrated or angry, another participant said. “I treasure all of my relationships with my various brothers of different ethnic makeups, but if we can’t talk about the subject rationally without letting anger set in or allowing ourselves to get caught up in shallowness so we don’t adequately express what we really feel, then we miss the whole point.”

Discussion that “drives us to action to dismantle some of the systemic things we see in our communities and churches” was encouraged by another pastor. “True repentance doesn’t happen until action is employed,” he said.

In praying for the group, Richards confessed “that we as a nation have sinned against you, not just against those of different skin colors or ethnicities or languages—we’ve sinned against you for not being like Jesus.” He asked God to challenge those present “not just with our minds, but to love our neighbor as ourselves” and to walk together with arms linked in ministry. 

I made an unusual number of visits to the doctor(s) this year. Nothing unusual going on except I had neglected normally annual things for too long and had to catch up with the labs and scans and pokes that are usually spread over three years. I knew I was overweight but it wasn’t real until I was standing in the hall in the clinic looking at the scales. I swear I could hear a judge’s gavel land as the very young woman behind me called out (yelled out really) the number. Hard facts are facts whether we face them or not. With the help of a small army of medical professionals I have faced mine this year. 

It’s not always fun to face objective appraisals of our health or work. Maybe that is why it has become so difficult to get church leaders to examine and report the statistics of their own ministries. Our state convention struggles to get 50 percent of our churches to report basic information on an Annual Church Profile. It is pretty basic, too. At one point the ACP was as detailed as the U.S. Census report—baptisms by demographic, mission training attendance grouped in six categories, music ministry by age-graded choirs, and much more. Our current report has five questions—membership, worship average, Bible study average, baptisms and total giving. Most pastors or church administrators could complete the information in five minutes. But why should you? 

Facing the facts: As in my story of doctor visits, it is beneficial to know how you’re doing. It’s not enough to feel fine or to think you’re in better shape than “that guy”; what do the facts indicate about how you’re doing? But it’s just numbers, right? Sure, but whether that number is the number of people you’ve been privileged to baptize this year or an indication of high blood pressure, numbers stand for something that we should consider important. 

Benefit from analysts: The SBC is just chock full of people who think about how we are doing at our most important tasks. Not only are they studying the trends of our denominational groupings of churches, they are also able to help you see trends in your own ministry—even to help you seek reasonable solutions. You could do it yourself but it is hard to be objective about your own work. You could hire someone, but they’d likely ask for much more information than those five basic questions. 

Be honest with your sister churches: We do not control one another but we are connected in our Great Commission work. You have a row to hoe and the church down the street does too. Are you making progress? Do you have something you might add to the understanding of another church facing the same challenges? Is there a reason you’d dread another pastor or church knowing how your ministry fares? I know one pastor friend who considers such reporting to be immodest or distracting and he will not participate. That’s his conscience and I leave it to him, but I also know of at least one case of a pastor who stopped reporting because his ministry was declining and he wanted to move to another place. Is it easier to report your stats when the trend is up? Are you at peace with the heart behind that self-conscious pride? 

Feed your analysts: From a denominational perspective, the more information we can gather about the progress of our mission together, the more on-target our efforts to help churches will be. We know anecdotally how churches are doing and we have reports from some quarters that suggest needs, but the picture is less hazy as we have more reports. 

Build an effective and relevant denomination: The work denominational employees are about is a response to what churches have directed, enabled and suggested by their specific needs. It’s your work, then. If you want it to succeed, help those who serve your church know what needs to be done. A church or regional collection of churches whose numbers are all down suggests a completely different situation than a church whose baptisms are way up and Bible study numbers are leveled off or declining. Seeing signs of more and less health in a church prompts your servants to reach out for more details and to offer help or encouragement particular to your church. The help will be increasingly less relevant if we aren’t directed by facts to areas, or churches, in greatest need. 

The fact that church reporting has become easier and minimalist (you can mail your five answers in, you can register them online, you can give us the information by email—we’ll even call you and fill out the report over the phone) but still declining in percentage suggests that making it easier is not the issue. As is the case with some other aspects of denominational life, I suspect the perceived value of our fellowship and cooperative work is in a downward trend. 

I’ve heard it said pretty often that the denomination is irrelevant, that it adds little of value to a church’s ministry. That is more likely to be true if we have no report from the churches. Simply reporting can be a first step to accessing expertise and resources that could change the direction of the reports you make in coming years.