Travis Collins
A prominent Cooperative Baptist Fellowship church in Alabama will vote on a new pastor Feb. 7.
A pastor search committee at First Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., is recommending Travis Collins, a veteran pastor now serving on staff with the Baptist General Association of Virginia, as next senior pastor. He will meet church members over the weekend and preach in view of a call on Sunday, Feb. 7.
If elected Collins would succeed David Hull, who stepped down in 2014 after his wife became a pastor in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in another community.
As part of his pastoral ministry at First Baptist, Collins will continue his involvement with Fresh Expressions, a missional church movement that started in the United Kingdom and is coordinated in the United States by the Baptist General Association of Virginia’s executive board.
Collins joined the Virginia Baptist Mission Board (now BGAV executive board) in 2014 as director of mission advancement and Virginia regional coordinator for Fresh Expressions, a renewal movement that now comprises more than 3,000 new churches in almost every denomination and tradition in the U.K.
Fresh Expressions advocates the creation of new congregations or churches which vary in ethos and style from the church which starts them. They are designed to reach a different group of people than those already attending the original church, a radical departure from the traditional parish structure of the Anglican Church that has resulted in the starting of thousands of new churches alongside traditional congregations.
Fresh Expressions U.S. partners are the BGAV, Fresh Expressions UK and The Ecclesia Network, a fellowship of missional church planters incorporated in 2007. The 2016 Fresh Expression U.S. national gathering is scheduled April 7-9 at First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Va.
Founded in 1813, First Baptist Church in Huntsville today has an annual budget exceeding $4 million. A combined 900 people show up for worship in two services on Sunday.
In 1836 the church helped establish the East Liberty Baptist Association, now affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. In the 1990s First Baptist shifted the bulk of its mission support to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group formed in 1991 by moderates disenfranchised by the SBC “conservative resurgence.”
Prior to joining Fresh Expressions, Collins served 12 years as senior pastor of Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond, Va. Before that he was pastor at First Baptist Church in Mount Washington, Ky., from 1996 until 2002, and a missionary to Nigeria, where he taught at the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary from 1991 to 1995.
An Alabama native, Collins is a graduate of Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., who went on to earn the M.Div. and Ph.D. at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Directionally Challenged (2007) and Tough Calls (2008).
His wife, Keri, is a trauma nurse with Duke University Hospital. They have three adult children and two grandchildren.
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