By Brian Blackwell, Baptist Message staff writer
ALEXANDRIA, La. (LBM) – A record number of baptisms last year, 13, and two years in a row of double-digit baptisms indicate that New Life Baptist Church in Deridder is rightly named.
“We have been really fortunate,” Keith Manuel, pastor of New Life and director of evangelism and church growth for Louisiana Baptists, told the Baptist Message. “The church has been through a difficult season ministry-wise. That’s how I became affiliated with them.
“We started the revitalization process. Then Laura hit, and it devastated the area,” he explained. “Then COVID came in and hit really hard. We went to everything online. Came back together. Another wave of COVID hits.”
These circumstances and space considerations caused the congregation to take a new look at how they conducted ministry and discipleship and they decided to focus on growth through life groups.
“We have a great worship space and parking space,” Manuel said. “We don’t have adequate education space for the number of people who attend worship. In looking at how we could make it work, this church has been great to ‘try and see.’”
“We do two things – worship and life group,” he said. “Everything else supports those two things. We have simplified the process. This is what we want to do well.”
Manuel said that traditional classes continue to function and offered that “they are thriving.”
But he was exuberant about the emphasis on life groups.
“If you get someone in a life group, they are there seven years later,” he noted. “If they are just in worship, two years later they may be gone. So, you don’t get the great opportunity to grow them and impact them if you don’t keep them.
“I don’t want the door to continue revolving of people coming in and out of worship,” he added. “Now we are averaging 110 in worship, up from 60- 70 since COVID,” Manuel said. “Life groups are exploding as well — 110.”
However, Manuel said that success with life groups will eventually lead to the need to address education space, which in part prompted the move to life groups.
“At some point with opportunity we will have to address space,” he said.
Moreover, he said members already have been working to position the church to expand their facilities.
“When I got here the church had approximately $400,000 in debt left on the building,”
Manuel recalled. “And we had money in the bank.”
The finance team felt it was “not wise to pay it all off not knowing what the economy would do,” he said. They decided to pay an additional principal amount each month on the mortgage, leaving them the option to regroup if at any point the economy changed for the worse.
“In just four years, we paid it all off (July 2),” he said. “So, we can look at building if needed — knowing that we want to build the church on small groups.”
Additionally, Manual said they plan to pay forward the equivalent of at least one month’s loan payment to the First Baptist Church in Longville, similar to a gift that New Life received from the First Baptist Church in Deridder when they paid off their loan debt. Meanwhile, the church will continue to be creative with their life groups focus, and Manuel related an anecdote about how this emphasis is impacting Deridder.
“A local businessman and his wife, Casey and Kim Vinson, came to me about starting a new life group at his place of work,” he recounted. “I thought he was just trying to figure out how he could attend, given his hours.
“Later he told me he had a mandatory meeting with his 40 employees, and he shared the Gospel with them,” Manuel continued. “He said, ‘From now on every week we will have a life group meet here and you are welcome to attend.’”
About 12-15 workers now come to the life group regularly, he said. But the best news is that two of the employees gave their lives to the Lord and were baptized at the business.
“Who knows,” Manuel pondered. “We may plant another campus out of that restaurant.”
