By Quinn Lavespere, Message Staff Writer
SHREVEPORT – A successful church merger isn’t easy to pull off, but Kingston Road Baptist Church seems to be close to accomplishing that goal.[img_assist|nid=7524|title=Successful Merger|desc=Pastors Trey Lewis and Woody Janise of Kingston Road Baptist Church and Southern Hills stand in front of Kingston Baptist Church. The two Shreveport churches are completing a successful merger.|link=none|align=left|width=640|height=480]
Under the leadership of Pastor Morris “Trey” Lewis III and Associate Pastor Woody Janise, Kingston Road has used its merger with Southern Hills Baptist Church to bring about greater opportunities to lead people to Christ.
“It’s not just this area that we want to focus on,” Lewis said. “We want to use and equip this ministry to spread the gospel to other parts of the world.”
As he was being interviewed, the Kingston Road’s pastor showed a great burden and passion for his church and others. He recounted why and how his church merged with Southern Hills.
“We had already experienced a successful merger with Ingleside Church,” Lewis said. “Over the last five years we have welcomed congregants from several of our sister churches, some of which intentionally made the decision to join as a group. When Westside Baptist Church merged with Temple Baptist Church, a number of families chose to come here instead, for they were aware of Ingleside’s merger with us. Since we had these congregants and those from our Ingleside merger, the possibility of merging with Southern Hills had a successful precedent. Church mergers aren’t necessarily successful, but we felt we had developed a good ministry, and we believed that we could accomplish more ministries by working together.”
The pastor stated that during the Louisiana Baptist Convention at Summer Grove in 2009, the people of Kingston Road and Southern Hills had a chance to work together with a Crossover block party and enjoyed the experience. After successful other collaborations between the two churches, Lewis and Janise became interested in the possibility of a successful merger and led their church members to “take things to the next level.”
“We met with our Director of Missions, Wayne DuBose, about the possibility of merging with Southern Hills, and he gave us recommendations and met with us,” the pastor said. “We elected teams to discuss these ideas and met regularly for about six weeks.”
Janise, who was the pastor of Southern Hills at the time, said the teams came to a conclusion that their churches “could do better together things they had tried to do separately.”
“It was always kind of Brother Trey’s perspective and my perspective that I was going to function more in an executive pastor role, though we weren’t going to call it that,” the associate pastor said. “We decided to put it a vote, and thus we came last July after having merged the congregations for eight weeks. During that engagement period, we remained separate identities, but functioned much in the same way as one congregation.”
Lewis said the church normally runs about 175-200 people on Sunday services and 150 or more in Sunday School, though attendance varies. The pastor spoke about how a church merger can affect the congregations involved.
“People have to keep their eyes on Jesus,” Lewis said. “They have to remember it’s ultimately the Lord’s church and we must ask what’s best for the Kingdom and His mission. If we do this, we come to realize that’s it better to share and cooperate than do this on our own.”
Both Lewis and Janise strongly agreed merging together into one body has allowed the Kingston Road and Southern Hills congregations to prosper more through God’s blessings.
“God has blessed us beyond measure,” Lewis said. “In addition to getting people who support us with their valuable experience and eager hard work, we’ve seen more people come to our church over time. We’ve seen couples who have become mission-minded and displaying Christian love. One of our custodians needed a car, and one of our couples gave one to her! We’ve been allowed more opportunities to minister and have been able to use our resources better. Really, it’s been a win-win situation.”
The associate pastor said the merger has allowed him the opportunity to help Lewis in areas such as administration and lessen the burden on the pastor by handling matters in his role as executive pastor. He also talked about the positive reaction of the Southern Hills congregation to the merger and the inspired role they have played in making the merger successful.
“The Southern Hills congregation absolutely loves Pastor Trey, as he visits with them and is friendly to them,” Janise said. “I’m always going to be their pastor, but that’s not an issue at all. I know my role as Bro. Trey’s right hand so my ministry is a complement to his. One of the great assets we’ve seen over the past year is that they’ve embraced my attitude about the whole thing, and they have come on board to remind the congregation that we are not Morningside, Ingleside, Westside, or Southern Hills; rather, we are all Kingston Road Baptist Church. This isn’t boasting, but my deacons have proven themselves to be quite active and they are helping to instill a very strong ministry aspect here.”
The merger allowed Kingston Road to establish its own identity, the associate pastor said.
“The community is now realizing we’re Kingston Road and not the church in the old Brookwood building,” Janise said. “We’re still working on a total common identity, but we’ve been able to at least establish one. We’ve been able to really drive home the value of missions. One of our great successes is our Soul Sisters ministry, which operates on ministering to one another as well as reaching out to other souls.”
“After a year, I feel comfortable emotionally with the direction of our church,” the associate pastor continued. “The most prevalent thing God has taught me is to be sensitive to His will.”
The church’s many plans and hopes for the future were summed up well by Lewis.
“We hope to be successful in the mission God has given us,” Lewis said. “We want our people to grow into the full stature of Christ. Not only that, but we want to keep our thoughts on missions even further south from here. We want other churches to know that mergers can be successful and that you can work together.”
Janise gave this summation of the church’s purpose.
“I hope 50 years from now, someone can write the story of how churches came together rather than separating,” the associate pastor said.