Grant Gaines, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, talks about focusing on evangelism efforts.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Grant Gaines: If you as a pastor will schedule evangelism into your week every week, it will revolutionize the evangelistic effort of your church.
Chris Turner: Hello, and welcome in to this edition of Radio B&R. I’m your host, Chris Turner, director of communications here at the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. Today, we have Dr. Grant Gaines.
Chris Turner: Grant is pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee. And he’s eight years into that position and has really seen some movement in his church over these past few years. Grant, welcome into the show.
Grant Gaines: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.
Chris Turner: Well, we really do appreciate you being here and we’re excited about talking evangelism with you. Coming out of this recent Evangelism Conference that was held over at Union University there in Jackson, you had the opportunity to be one of the breakout speakers and cover some things that your church is doing.
Chris Turner: That’s really kind of where we want to focus today. We have April coming up, late Easter this year really at the end of April. So, hopefully with the timing of this podcast, it still gives some folks to focus on their evangelism efforts on reaching their community.
Chris Turner: But really talk a little bit about how evangelism for you is not a seasonal emphasis with Easter and Christmas, it’s something you’re really trying to do year round. So just tell us a little bit about how your church is approaching evangelism.
Grant Gaines: Yeah. Well I did say that Easter is a natural time to focus on inviting people to church. So, one of the parts of our evangelistic strategy is that we believe that inviting people to church is still a great way to do evangelism.
Grant Gaines: A church invite is not necessarily direct personal evangelism because you’re not necessarily explaining the gospel to your neighbor, or your coworker, or your family member that you’re inviting.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: But it is a great way to get them into a worship service setting where they can hear the gospel. So we do try and emphasis that.
Grant Gaines: For Easter what we are doing is we have invite cards that we’ll pass out to all of our church members in the week leading up to Easter. Then also we’ll canvas some of the neighborhoods around our church building, and that’s part of focusing on the neighborhoods around our building is kind of part of our overall evangelistic strategy, which I’ll talk more about in a moment.
Grant Gaines: But then also, one of the things that we’ll do and this might be a new idea for some, it might be something that’s an old idea for others, but it was new for us as of about a year ago, and that is Ed Stetzer who writes in the church growth area.
Grant Gaines: He talked about not wasting your bump. And what he means by that is that there are times in the year, and if you’ve been a pastor for very long you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: Where you have ups and downs of attendance. So Easter and Christmas and Mothers Day are kind of three of those natural bumps where you will have an attendance bump and you will have people in your worship service that may not come to church any other time of the year.
Grant Gaines: So, one of the … He talks about not wasting that. And so one of the things that that means is first of all, pour into your efforts of inviting people to that service. But then also one of the things we started doing is we build, even this year around Easter we will build a miniseries, sermon series, that will launch on Easter Sunday.
Grant Gaines: So, this Easter when I’ll preach on the resurrection, it’s going to actually be the first of three sermons in a series that we’re calling New Life.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So, I’ll preach on Easter Sunday the sermon about obviously how Christ was raised back to life and new life. And then the next two Sundays I’ll preach sermons on what it looks like to have new life in Christ.
Grant Gaines: And the key there is that when you have all those guests present for Easter, at the end of the service we’ll say, “Hey, guys thank you for coming to Calvary today. We know that some of you this is your first time here and you’re not regular attenders at our church. We want you to know this is the first part of a three-part sermon series called New Life. And we just want to ask you to give us two more weeks of your time that you would come out and finish the rest of this series with us.”
Grant Gaines: We did that around Christmas time and challenged them to come back to a series that we were starting in January and we had several people come back as a result of that.
Chris Turner: Wow. Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So it’s just one little idea.
Chris Turner: I love, I love that idea of that being the launch and then really … A lot of people they don’t want to miss, if it’s a miniseries on Netflix or something. They don’t want to miss the rest of the episodes especially once you start and get immersed in it.
Grant Gaines: Right.
Chris Turner: Man, I really like that idea of starting that out and drawing people back in. And really those that will hang with you for three weeks they may hang a lot longer with you, at least kind of hang around here some more.
Chris Turner: But it was a real good change the Lord will work in those three weeks and go from Jesus’ resurrected life to their resurrected life.
Grant Gaines: Yeah.
Chris Turner: So, you’ve also talked about how it’s not just focusing on those bumps. Those are strategic times that you need to plan for and prepare for. But you guys have really woven into the life of who you are as a congregation trying to be consistent evangelists in your neighborhood.
Chris Turner: Just talk a little bit about that consistency and what you’re doing. You’ve mentioned working in the areas around your church. But what does that mean beyond that?
Grant Gaines: Yeah. Well there are several things that as I look back over the past year we’ve seen God do some amazing things over the past year that we’ve not seen him do before, at least to that degree.
Grant Gaines: As I think back over the characteristics that kind of mark that time period and what I can attribute that to, obviously first of all we just attribute it to the Lord and His grace to us and His power.
Grant Gaines: But then there are some things that kind of stand out. One of them is we began to really have a passion for the neighborhood right around our church building. So, we kind of … We drew that on a map, a one mile radius around our church.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: And we just started prioritizing our church’s neighborhood. Mark Clifton who writes for the North American Mission Board or who leads a revitalization embassy for the North American Mission Board has written some books on that.
Grant Gaines: He, in all of his studies of established churches, he says that the number one reason that established churches decline over the years is that they move away from being a community church to becoming a commuter church.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: So, a commuter church is where the majority of your church members commute from, maybe even long distances, from where your church building is. And a community church is one where you have a good portion of your church members that actually come from the local community around it.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So it’s just interesting to me that that is the number one reason, he says, for the decline of established churches.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So our church is about 130 years old. We are very established. So we just have a heart now for reaching the community around us. Now, some of the things that we’ve tried to do to really reach the community is first of all just knowing the community around us.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: I think a lot of people don’t really even know what’s going on in the neighborhoods around their church building. So, for us that kind of began with figuring out what’s going on around our church building? What’s going on in the lives of the people around us.
Grant Gaines: So one of the things we did was we just did a little research. We used … there’s a website and a program called Bless Every Home and a mapping system that goes along with that that churches can use.
Grant Gaines: So we started using that mapping system and it tells you all kinds of information about the households around your church building, whatever section of your community that you want to research, it will tell you all that.
Grant Gaines: So what we found is we have a really, really diverse group of people around our church building. Within one mile radius of our church, we have a lot of different religions from Catholics, to Jews, to Muslims, and Buddhist, and Eastern Orthodox, and Hindu, and Greek Orthodox, and Shinto, which is a Japanese religion.
Chris Turner: Yes.
Grant Gaines: That’s all within one mile of our church building. Then we’ve got people who are white, and then black, and Hispanic, and Jewish, and Mediterranean, and Scandinavian, and Eastern European, and Middle Eastern and Far Eastern and South East Asian and Polynesian and Native American and Central and South West Asian.
Grant Gaines: We have at least 10 different languages spoken that we know of within one mile radius of our church.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: And we just realized, look, our local … Our congregation does not reflect that diversity right now. So what that tells us is we’re not reaching our community.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: We’re not reaching the neighborhoods. We’re reaching a certain sector of the neighborhoods but we’re not reaching the whole neighborhood. We’re not reaching the whole community. So we kind of just repented of that and said God help us to reach the neighborhood.
Grant Gaines: One of our mottoes became hey, we want to reflect the community as we reach the community.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: And by God’s grace we’re starting to see some headway in reaching people in our neighborhoods, around the church and then also reflecting that diversity within our church.
Chris Turner: You talk about that and you’re talking about where your church is located and of course just the history of being in that location. It’s interesting here in Tennessee we have over 145 different people groups.
Chris Turner: So one of our things that we say here is reach Tennessee, reach the nations, change your world. The reality is the world is here. When I grew up in West Tennessee you might hear some Spanish every now and then and generally we were black and white and occasionally you’d see some Hispanics.
Chris Turner: But like okay, Jackson, Tennessee is not one of the top five cities as far as populations density in our state. However, just the diversity of the culture that you described that there is a baptist church sitting in the middle of, that is not something that is uncommon in our state. We have historic churches that are located in neighborhoods all across the state that are like that.
Chris Turner: Boy, what a global impact the church could make if they followed suit. And it sounds like some of the things you’re doing any church can do. So, I know you’re a big fan, big proponent of door-to-door evangelism, which I don’t know if you know, but that doesn’t work anymore. Is that correct?
Grant Gaines: That’s what I’ve heard, yeah.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: Now what have I experienced? That’s not what I’ve experienced, that’s what I’ve heard. Yeah.
Chris Turner: Yeah. So how does-
Grant Gaines: Yeah. So, that’s definitely one of the ways that we try to reach the neighborhood. It’s not the only way but it’s definitely one of them. It’s not even the most fruitful form of evangelism.
Grant Gaines: But I will tell you this, when it’s … I can trace the evangelistic harvest that we’ve seen in our church over the past year, I can almost trace it to the day that we started doing door-to-door.
Grant Gaines: Even though not all of our evangelistic fruit or even a majority of our evangelistic fruit has come from door-to-door directly, it was when we started going that God started blessing. I don’t think that that’s by accident. I think that God honors our going.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: And door-to-door is just one way to go. So, we used the church mapping program that I told you about and we broke up all the neighborhoods within a one mile radius of our church building into kind of manageable blocks.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So then we have a packet of information for each one and we send out teams every week. We took a break during the winter just to not freeze people to death out there.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: But we would send people out with one of those packets for one of those neighborhoods and they would visit the person and then take notes afterwards. Kind of our approach is using our proximity to these people and the neighbors right around our church building to our advantage.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So what we found is this past semester I took my wife with me on Wednesday evenings and my wife and I went out together into some of these neighborhoods around five or six o’clock at night.
Grant Gaines: And we would knock on the door with a little gift bag in our hand and when somebody came to the door, we would say, “Hey, I’m Grant. This is Melissa. We’re from Calvary Baptist Church just down the street.” And 9 times out of 10, as soon as I got the name Calvary Baptist Church out, they started shaking their heads like they knew exactly what church I was talking about.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: And that’s because they drive past it every day.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: On their way to work, or on their way to school or whatever they’re doing because they live in the neighborhood right around our church building.
Grant Gaines: So, that immediately was an ice breaker, so to speak, and gave us an advantage. So then we’ll tell them, “Look, we’re just out in the neighborhoods around our church building praying for people that live around us. And we want to know if there’s any way we can pray for you.”
Grant Gaines: When they tell us, inevitably they’ll have something that they like for us to pray for them about. I’ll pray for them right then and there on their doorstep or in their home if they invite us in.
Grant Gaines: And after we pray for them and say amen, I’ll say, “Hey, do you mind if I share with you what Christ has done in my life?” And then just very, very briefly share a short version of my testimony. After that I’ll ask them, “Has anything like that ever happened to you?”
Grant Gaines: And depending on what they say, I’ll say, “Do you mind if I draw you a picture that shows you the whole Bible in one drawing?” Then we use three circles, which is a gospel tool that we adopted and that we use. A guy named Jimmy Scroggins down in South Florida wrote the material, it’s great.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: I have a little notebook and I’ll just draw three circles out for them and share the gospel with them. We’ve had several people that have come to Christ in the past year just out of doing that very thing.
Grant Gaines: Then afterwards, after we get back, we’ll use the software, Bless Every Home to get that person’s address and have their name. And I’ll write them a little note and just say, “It was great to meet you tonight.” Put that in the mail and that’s pretty much it.
Grant Gaines: But we do that as just a piece of the puzzle, I think, of reaching our community. And I will tell you that what we have found is that you might be able to go door-to-door 30 minutes away from your church building somewhere else in Jackson, and not have the same kind of warm receptivity that you have in the neighborhoods and in the homes right around your building.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: There’s something about your proximity that opens up conversations and doors that otherwise are not there.
Chris Turner: Yeah, and I think the way you approach is you’re not showing up with some kind of a canned approach. You’re just showing up to serve people through prayer and then beyond that just engage in a conversation.
Chris Turner: So, try to break out and I’m not a proponent at all for spiritual laws of CWT or EE or any of those others. But it sounds like what you’re really doing is listening to people and listening for their need to be able to really get to know them and know how to minister to them.
Grant Gaines: Yeah, absolutely. And often times when you ask somebody how can I pray for you, they will tell you about something difficult that’s going on in their life.
Grant Gaines: Then one of the things about three circles is that if you’re familiar with it, it begins by talking about the broken world that we live in. So it’s very easy to transition from someone sharing with you a problem that they’re having in their life to then talking about well that’s because this world, the bible says is broken, it’s under the fall, and let me tell you how God has made a way to save us from that.
Grant Gaines: Just to give you an example, I went with a guy one night to do this, went door-to-door. The first house we came to, knocked on the door and a man about my age came to the door and answered it. I told him why we were there, where we were from, that we wanted to pray for him. He said, “Come on in.”
Grant Gaines: And you’d be surprised how many people will just invite you straight into their house.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: If you’re there to pray for them. So he invited me in. He called his wife over to him and we began talking and they started saying, “Actually yeah, we would love for you to pray for us. About two weeks ago my wife’s mother who was living with us and helping take care of our children dropped dead in that bathroom right over there.”
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: And he pointed to his bathroom in his house. He said, “We’ve just been … Our heads have just been spinning lately trying to figure out life and why it happened and all these things.”
Grant Gaines: So we prayed for him and for her and for the loss of her mother, went in to sharing the gospel and that night both the husband and the wife gave their lives to Christ.
Chris Turner: Amen.
Grant Gaines: So just … I think God is sovereign over all of that and just as you see in the Book of Acts, God when Paul goes out or the missionaries are sent out, God directs their steps and they’ll meet a Lydia down by the river whose heart is open.
Grant Gaines: And God has those people of peace that he calls in Luke 10, that are out there and if we’ll be faithful to go, he’ll lead us to some of them. Not necessarily every time, but often times he will.
Chris Turner: Well it sounds like especially if you knock on enough doors there is going to be enough people that respond and then you go back and get the others at another time.
Chris Turner: But it does sound like when, going back to what you said earlier, when we’re faithful to go God’s been faithful to provide that harvest. But one thing is for sure, if you guys had never left the church walls, that couple would have never been able to experience just a release from the experience that they had had and those answers that they were looking for.
Grant Gaines: That’s true.
Chris Turner: Have you found as you go out that people are hostile or closed or are people open and searching?
Grant Gaines: We have not found anyone hostile yet. We have had a few people tell us hey, they don’t really want to talk. But that is very few, very few and far between. The vast majority, the very first person we ever knocked on their door invited us into their house. I’m not … It wasn’t the story I just told you.
Grant Gaines: It was the very first time we ever sent anybody out from our church to go knock on a door when we started this. They invited us into their home. We talked for 45 minutes about the gospel.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: I had a lady we knocked on her door once and before she ever came to the door, she hollered from the couch and said, “Come in.” And I said, “Are you sure?” She said, “Yeah, come on in.” So, we just walked right in, shared the gospel with her.
Grant Gaines: And so it’s amazing how receptive people are, especially when they find out, and this is back to my point, when they find out that you’re from a church right around the corner from their house and that you’re just wanting to pray for them. That’s really been … We found that to be very helpful.
Chris Turner: But there’s a lot of communities across our state where somebody lives within that cross proximity to a local baptist church that would be shocked if somebody came because they haven’t had any contact with that church possibly ever or if they lived in that neighborhood and were not a church attender for decades.
Grant Gaines: Yeah.
Chris Turner: So it really is a church re-engaging with the community that it served possibly in the 50s or 60s, maybe that neighborhood has transitioned and so the look of the people are different.
Chris Turner: But it sounds like it’s almost like a, hey, this is an introduction. Sorry we didn’t get here sooner, kind of thing, sometimes.
Grant Gaines: Right. Yeah, and I say again that the door-to-door is not the only thing we’re doing for evangelism.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: Or that we’re trying to do to raise the community. But what will happen is a lot of your initiatives, whether it’s door-to-door or other things that we can talk about will begin to overlap one another.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So the person that you prayed for on their doorstep will also be someone that gets invited to an Easter service or something.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So, that’s exactly what happened on one occasion. We had a lady that we were canvassing the neighborhood and showed up on her doorstep and man we prayed for her that night. We said, “Is there any way we can pray for you?” And just about a year earlier her son had committed suicide and she was still just really grieving over that.
Grant Gaines: So we prayed for her. Not long after that, we had a big invite day at our church and it turns out that one of our church members that was one of her high school coaches.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: So she invited her to come to church. So there’s all this overlap now where she knows us from praying with her about her son from going door-to-door and then also is invited to come to a service and just the repetition and the overlap of those different forms of outreach, I think, can really start to build up.
Chris Turner: Well let’s say it’s-
Grant Gaines: So door-to-door … Yeah.
Chris Turner: I was just saying it’s just that consistency of presence. Being in people’s lives and really showing people they’re not a project but they are people that your church cares about because they live in your church’s neighborhood.
Grant Gaines: Right, right.
Chris Turner: You know?
Grant Gaines: Another way that we’ve tried to reach the neighborhood is through doing different kinds of service projects. We’ve had service project teams at our church for years and until recently they’ve kind of all been scattered out throughout the city.
Grant Gaines: So, we will have teams that work with the police department or that work with local schools and things of that nature. They all do fantastic work. But what we realized was we’re not really focusing any of our service projects to show tangible acts of love to people. We’re not focusing any of those on the neighborhoods right around our church building.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: So this past year around thanksgiving we did, in order to do that, we did a big thanksgiving meal giveaway and we focused strictly on the neighborhoods right around our church. So what we did was a few weeks before thanksgiving we went around canvasing the apartments and homes around our church and handing out vouchers.
Grant Gaines: And we would just show up and say, “Hey listen, our church is giving away free boxed thanksgiving meals with a turkey and sides and rolls and all that kind of stuff in it. It’s absolutely free. Would you like one?”
Grant Gaines: And when they finally came to realize the fact that we really were going to give them something free like that, they said, “Well yeah, I’ll take one.” And told them where to come pick it up on a certain day and they would come to the church.
Grant Gaines: When they got to the church on the pick up day they would wait while their box was being filled and they would talk to myself or some of our other team members there and we would say, “Hey, we want to explain to you why we’re doing this.”
Grant Gaines: And we would share three circles with them, share the gospel with them and we had several people that actually came to Christ that way as well.
Grant Gaines: So that was something where we said, “Okay, we’re doing the service projects all over the city. Let’s try to have one of those that really focuses in on those who live within close proximity to our church so they can get more of the overlap of those outreach efforts into the people that you’re trying to reach around your building.
Chris Turner: Yeah. It sounds like a really strategic concentrated effort, like a real intentionality that we’re going to make sure that we have several touches in our own community, in our … that mile around our church. And just that repetition is really starting to build fruit.
Chris Turner: You said this is just something you guys really started this last year really focusing on that. So, even in this early stage you’re starting to see that fruit. So, who knows what will happen here in the second, third, fourth, fifth year really with that sticktoitiveness.
Grant Gaines: Right.
Chris Turner: So, what … I’m making notes here as you go along and I’m looking at some of the ideas that you’ve thrown out. There’s little here that looks like much financial investment. It looks like pretty much everything is an investment and want to, like a desire, a true desire to see the community around your church come to Christ.
Chris Turner: So, this does sound like something that churches really … The whole idea of well financially we don’t have the resources to do X, it doesn’t sound like it’s a valid excuse here.
Grant Gaines: No, I don’t think so. None of the stuff … We actually, when we started doing some of these things, we had not budgeted for any of it because we came up with some of these ideas in the middle of the year.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: And you know how that is if you’ve worked with church budgets. But none of these things really have cost much money. Some of the thanksgiving meal stuff, those were canned good donations and things like that. But I think churches of any size probably have done something like that before or are capable of doing something like that.
Grant Gaines: You don’t have to have great facilities to do any of those things. So really it’s more of a time commitment and just a commitment to the great commission that I think any church can do.
Chris Turner: So, if someone’s listening to this or eventually reading the article in the Baptist & Reflector and their church has been one that has been a bit detached from their community, what would you say to that pastor, maybe a member of that church that would give them a handle? That’s great. We’d love to do that. Where do we start? How do we re-engage our community?
Grant Gaines: I would say start researching your community. You might not be as familiar with it as you think. Start praying for your community intentionally and I don’t just say that to sound spiritual. I truly believe if you don’t do that you’re not going to see any fruit.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: And then start evangelizing your community. I would say commit to a gospel tool. For us it’s been three circles. It’s something that can be easily replicated by all of our people.
Grant Gaines: And then commit to a few three or four different initiatives that are focused really right around the neighborhoods around your church. Try door-to-door as one of them.
Grant Gaines: Do a service project but do it right around your church building and some of the neighborhoods around there.
Grant Gaines: One thing I didn’t mention was start seeing your church facility as a neighborhood center.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: Not just a place for Christians to gather.
Chris Turner: Yeah.
Grant Gaines: Our church happens to have a gym. I know every church doesn’t have a gym. One of the things that’s meant for us is all throughout the week we now have people up there playing basketball in our gym that the majority of them are not believers.
Grant Gaines: Something we’re starting right now is opening up for anyone who lives within a one mile radius of our church building that can come and use our church facility to throw a birthday party for their child or grandchild just for absolutely free.
Chris Turner: Wow.
Grant Gaines: We have a team of people that will host that. So, try door-to-door, try service projects in the community. Use your church facility, however small or large that might be, as a neighborhood center getting unbelievers there and letting them use it for free.
Grant Gaines: And then there are just some overall principles that I guess we could talk about if you want that would work evangelistically regardless of where you’re focusing, whether it’s in the neighborhoods around your church building or elsewhere.
Grant Gaines: But those are some of the specific ones that I would say if you really want to start reaching the community around the building you can start there.
Chris Turner: Man, those are some great handles and it’s almost like okay, pick at least one of those and get started on doing it. But it really does sound like knowing who’s in your community so that you can pray effectively with insight and then just getting out there and telling those people that you’ve been praying for them.
Chris Turner: So that low cost, no cost, all it requires is a little effort to do that. You’d mentioned Bless Every Home earlier. I know you guys are using the mapping component of it. Even if this wasn’t an initiative of the church, an individual could get on there and find their neighborhood and see who lives around them and just start strategically praying for them and praying that their church will catch a vision for that neighborhood.
Chris Turner: We too often don’t see prayer as a first resource but the last resort. And it sounds like you guys have really emphasized that and obviously you’re starting to see fruit from that.
Grant Gaines: One thing that I would add on as the cherry on the top and this is maybe the most important thing I’ll say, I would encourage the pastors out there to lead out in this and if there is one specific thing I could encourage you to do as a pastor and as a leader to lead out in this that I found effective is if you as a pastor will schedule evangelism into your week every week, it will revolutionize the evangelistic effort of your church.
Grant Gaines: So just like I schedule my sermon preparation time, just like I schedule visits and other things and meetings that I have going on throughout the week, every Monday I try to schedule when am I going to share the gospel with somebody this week?
Grant Gaines: Will it be a door-to-door experience? Is it going to be somebody that’s visited our church so that I can take the lunch and share the gospel with them? Is it a family member of a new believer that we’re discipling? Whatever it might be, schedule that into your week, start sowing more seeds and I think that the rest of the church will follow your example.
Chris Turner: That’s a great word, being intentional about it and evangelism not being an afterthought but a forethought. That’s a great word and all of us really could use that, not just pastors. So, that’s what the Lord has us here to do.
Grant Gaines: Amen.
Chris Turner: So, well Grant, we’re excited for just the things that you have going on there. Definitely praying for the continued just being able to strengthen Calvary there and the church and it may be so across our state that certainly churches that are in those anchor neighborhoods are going to be able to step out and reconnect.
Chris Turner: And I mean what an impact that would make in our cities especially our urban centers if churches will do that.
Chris Turner: So, thanks for spending some time with us and we look forward to catching up in the future and just kind of hearing you reporting on what’s been going on.
Grant Gaines: Thanks Chris.
Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to Radio B&R, a podcast production of the Baptist & Reflector, the official news journal of the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. This and other episodes can be downloaded at Baptistandreflector.org/radiobr.
Speaker 3: The ministries of the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board are supported through the cooperative program and guests received through the Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions. For more information visit tnbaptist.org.