For Wilshire Baptist Church
On our vacation to Yellowstone in September, we flew into Great Falls, Montana, the town where I was born, for a personal history tour. One of the first sites we visited was First Southern Baptist Church. The red brick building looked much the same as it did in my father’s Kodachrome slides from 1959 and in my own photos from a visit in 1999. The only change I could see was that it has a new name: Big Sky Baptist Church. Otherwise, from the outside it looked well-maintained, healthy and prosperous.
My parents were raised in Southern Baptist churches in Texas, so when the Air Force sent them to Great Falls and they found a like-minded church, they checked it out that first Sunday in town. A few days later they were visited at their temporary motel room – they’d put the address on their visitor card – and they joined the church next Sunday. For the next 16 months, they were “all in” as we like to say at Wilshire.
While Great Falls boasted a population of 50,000, it was clearly in the “mission fields” for Southern Baptists at the time. The church had been established just a few years earlier in 1953, and my parents got caught up in the spirit of service with everyone pitching in. On Sunday mornings my father taught intermediate boys and my mother taught children. When new choir robes were needed, Mom joined the women to sew. She was principal of the Vacation Bible School the summer she was pregnant with me, and on Sunday mornings she printed the worship bulletins. I’ve sometimes joked that if I seem befuddled now, it’s because of the mimeograph fumes she inhaled. During the week they were there for fellowship dinners and budget meetings. When asked to sing a solo on a Sunday morning, Dad passed while Mom offered up “Now I Belong to Jesus.”
My parents were young and busy and no doubt feeling the stresses of military service, a new marriage, one baby in diapers and another one coming. They were 1,500 miles from the watchful eyes of their parents, and they could have taken a break from church to focus on career and family. But they didn’t because church was in their genes. They both were raised in the church in their hometowns, and in fact they met at First Baptist Church in Waco while Baylor students. “We wouldn’t have done anything other than join,” my mother says today, to which my father adds, “We were young and we could do it.”
When Dad parted with the Air Force six months after I was born, we returned to his hometown of Sherman, Texas, and joined First Baptist there. And when his job moved him to Dallas, we settled in Richardson and joined First Baptist there, where I was raised and nurtured not only in the faith but this idea that church is a good place to spend one’s time and share one’s resources for the greater good.
At Wilshire we are in the midst of a “Generations” emphasis to increase financial giving. The symbol for the effort is a tree – the roots representing regular giving to support the church’s ongoing missions and ministries, and the branches representing the outward stretch of ministry through our pastoral residency program that has trained pastors for ministry from coast to coast. The message is plain: the current generation will continue what was started by past generations for the benefit of future generations.
I don’t have generational roots at Wilshire like many members, and I haven’t added any new generations to the membership roll. But I’ve put down my own roots at Wilshire in large part because of the roots my parents and their parents placed in all the churches where they lived and even those they only visited. When my grandparents came to Great Falls to check on the family, they went to church on Sunday morning with my parents. When they got back home, they began sending a monthly check to the church and continued to do so for months after my parents returned to Texas.
An email conversation this week with the current pastor at Big Sky Baptist reveals that weekly attendance of more than one hundred in previous years had dropped to a couple of dozen when he arrived in 2016. But now they’re back up to almost 50 and there is fresh hope with the start of a college group and the potential of engaging others including veterans.
Wilshire is just two years older than Big Sky, and while it has had the advantage of a large urban population and Bible Belt familiarity with what Baptists are about, growth has not been a steady, upward tick. There have been slowdowns and downturns along the way as economies and cultural attitudes about church have changed. There are no easy answers to keeping our churches vital and relevant, but there are examples we can learn from – not in the form of trendy new programs, but in the dogged commitment of individual people.
I know my parents’ 16 months at the church in Montana was just a small piece of its 66-year history. But while they were there, they were there with their time, talents and tithes. And gathered up with the gifts and energy of others who were there at the same time and those who have come and gone over the decades, the church has continued to be an outpost for the kingdom of God under the big sky of Montana.
Let it be also with those of us who worship under the Texas sky.