By Jeff Brumley
Northminster Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., embraced the “missional” concept before missional was cool — or even a word.
Its leaders say the lay-led congregation was founded in the late 1960s with a culture inclined to look outside its four walls. That orientation, ministers say, inspired an on-going inner-city outreach that continues to profoundly transform church and community members alike.
And the way pastors and members describe the founding and operation of Wider Net sounds like something right out of a missional churches handbook.
“As a church, all of us simply got in on what God was up to,” said Jill Barnes Buckley, the associate pastor for community ministry at the church. “It’s about the church stopping to look and listen for the move of the Holy Spirit.”
Warm and welcoming
Kristopher Shields was 16 when he felt that move of the spirit. First, it came when he learned of strangers operating out of a renovated house-turned-community center in the Mid-City/Georgetown area where he lives. He heard they had an after-school program, including tutoring, and a summer kids club.
A short time later he met some of these people, whom he learned were from a church he’d never seen or heard of. Then he met Buckley, who took him under her wing.
“She gave me a job working for her,” Shields said.
She also invited him to Northminster, where he was touched by the warmth of welcome he felt in the 800-member, mostly white congregation. The church is located about four miles from the the neighborhood.
Shields, now 23, also loved pastor Chuck Poole’s preaching and eventually decided to be baptized at Northminster, where he remains a member today.
Through the years church members helped him with various projects, homework and science fairs.
“They helped me graduate and helped me with the ACT,” he said. “They helped me go to college.”
And the Christianity he practices is right out of the Wider Net handbook, he said.
“Now I do the helping, the feeding of the poor and helping the elderly,” he said.
Shields added that he definitely sees it was a move of God to bring his path and Northminster’s together.
“If they weren’t there, I don’t know where I’d be,” he said.
‘Listening and acting’
Northminster’s foray into the Mid-City/Georgetown community has been equally meaningful for the church, Buckley said.
Once the decision was made to focus on that community — a decision taken after much investigation and touring of Jackson’s most troubled neighborhoods — the doors started opening.
It began with a decision to hire an associate pastor tasked with overseeing Northminster’s outreach in those neighborhoods. That’s how they found Buckley.
“That’s me,” she said. “That was in 2004.”
Next was to partner with Habitat for Humanity for five years.
“We bought 20 lots for Habitat,” Buckley said. “We funded a construction supervisor for five years and we helped build six houses.”
Then came the longer-range piece of the plan — to rent or purchase space from which to offer a variety of programs for Mid-City/Georgetown town, adjoining neighborhoods separated by a single thoroughfare.
It happened when a resident connected the church with a local man who had recently renovated a house in the community.
“He did not have the funding to operate it at the time,” Buckley said. He invited Northminster’s Wider Net in for that.
“So we partnered with him,” she said.
Poole conducted a neighborhood tour to gauge needs and soon started a weekly Bible study. Soon after came the after-school programming and summer camp.
“We also host other events as needed, like birthday parties and baby showers,” Buckley said. “We even had a wedding in December, which I officiated.”
None of it would have been possible without the Holy Spirit, she said, as God led the church to the building’s owner, and led him to them.
“We were both listening and acting on what God was showing us,” she said.
The ministry has made it into the church budget and at least 350 church members have been directly involved with Wider Net, she said.
“It’s changing their lives in the relationships they are forming when they work on a project or visit a person in Mid-City,” Buckley said. That can be in working with people in substandard housing, helping children learn to read or clearing abandoned lots in the neighborhood.
“When it comes to real transformations of individuals, it’s the relationships where that happens.”
‘Every day a door opens’
Jim Johnston can vouch for that.
The retired physician and Northminister member didn’t have much to do with Wider Net until just about four years ago.
It was then, about six months before his retirement, that he took a tour of the Mid-City/Georgetown area. It bugged him how many debris-strewn vacant lots there were, and how many abandoned homes.
“I decided something needs to be done about this,” he said. “It’s not right for these young kids growing up in these Habitat houses to be living next to these drug houses and criminal activity.”
Today, Johnston helps run a nonprofit that hires ex-offenders to clean up those lots for the city. In the process, he has met a lot of ex-cons and grown close to some.
The impact on his faith has been huge, he said.
“The whole process has made me much more spiritual than I was before.”
That’s because, like Buckley, Johnston said he sees God’s hand in every challenge he faces.
“Almost every day a door opens, something happens, and it’s obvious to me it wasn’t happenstance,” he said. “I think the Holy Spirit is helping us through a very challenging task.”
Johnston said he’s been mistaken for an undercover cop, a preacher or someone with something to sell. All of that pales compared to the relationships he’s made in the community.
“It’s the most interesting thing and the most worthwhile thing I have ever done,” he said. “Practicing medicine didn’t hold a candle to what we are doing now.”
‘The next frontier’
Poole said he isn’t surprise to hear stories like that. Wider Net has become a part of Northminster’s core identity because of its focus on relationships.
In fact, Poole never refers to the program as a ministry or mission, but as a relationship between equals.
“We have learned to think not of being on a mission to a neighborhood but being in a friendship with a neighborhood,” he said.
The reason: mission terminology assumes church members can drop in or drop out of the community.
“But if I’m in a friendship with a community, then that indicates real conversations, two-way streets and lots of listening on both sides of the equation,” Poole said.
It also took listening to even come up with the Wider Net concept.
That started more than 14 years ago when a church committee recommended going ahead with a long-standing plan to pave a parking lot, build a balcony in the sanctuary and construct a new education building to meet growing Sunday attendance.
Poole said he felt some discomfort with the idea of the church spending a large amount of money to make itself comfortable for an hour or two on Sundays, and not making an equally large commitment to the poor and struggling in Jackson.
So he challenged them to form another committee tasked with developing what eventually become Wider Net.
The challenge was accepted, he said, because it fell on ears open to such balance in church spending. Since Northminster’s birth there has been a serious commitment to providing help and hope “in the most difficult corners of Jackson,” Poole said.
That was followed by a very long and lay-led process, including numerous town hall meetings, from which the Wider Net concept was born and launched.
Now the construction pieces are completed and Wider Net is thriving.
“We’re sitting here 14 years later and this seed the congregation sewed has come up in ways we would never have imagined,” he said.
And that is the friendships piece which, Poole added, may hold the key to the future for the wider church.
“I really think the next frontier is how do you move from missional to friendships?”
— Baptist News Global’s reporting on innovative congregational ministries is part of the Pacesetter Initiative, funded in part by the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation.