“My father was a rough-necked miner who could cuss the wallpaper off the wall, and the next thing I know he gets saved and called to the ministry.”
LONGVIEW, Wash. (BP) – “My father was a rough-necked miner who could cuss the wallpaper off the wall, and the next thing I know he gets saved and called to the ministry.”
Kevin White, pastor of First Baptist, credits the salvation of his entire family to the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ unified plan of giving through which cooperating Southern Baptist churches give a percentage of their undesignated receipts in support of their respective state convention and SBC missions and ministries.
“I was born and raised in the western states,” White explained. “If it hadn’t been for a mountain missionary who came to the gold mining town of Crescent, Nev., who knows what my life would be like today. There was no church in the town I lived – not any church. This missionary came out every Thursday night and held worship services, and in the summers, vacation Bible school. That missionary’s salary came from the Cooperative Program,” White said.
“The Cooperative Program means something to me personally because it’s directly related to the salvation of not only me, but my mother and my father and my brother and my sister,” White said. “I’m 43, and the Cooperative Program is doing the same thing today as it did when I was a kid – it’s reaching people with the gospel of Jesus Christ who wouldn’t be reached otherwise. I believe if more leaders – pastors – within our convention had been reached through Cooperative Program missionary efforts as my family was, they would see the value of CP and strive to lead their church to participate wholeheartedly.”
Despite the demands of a relocation and costly building program, First Baptist is holding strong to giving 10 percent of its offerings to missions through the Cooperative Program, because the pastor and other church members understand its importance, White said.
“This church was started by Leonard Siegle, who started so many churches in Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada,” the pastor said. “From its first days of being one of the charter Southern Baptist churches in the Northwest, First Baptist was taught to give to missions through the Cooperative Program for the Kingdom work of God, so that people would get the opportunity to know Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, and so that churches could start – which would reach still more people.”
The Cooperative Program helps people serve as Jesus’ hands, feet and arms as they serve people in His name, White said. He saw that first in his father, when he received some Cooperative Program assistance that helped in his ministry to Native Americans in Nevada.
“It wasn’t much, but it helped put food on the table,” White said. “The value of the Cooperative Program is that it keeps us from thinking just about ourselves and our little projects. I’ve never been to China, but I’m helping someone in China.”
White, pastor at First Baptist since 1994, has led his congregation to get involved in God’s kingdom work. Several from the church have gone into short- and long-term missions – in South America, India, Dominican Republic, Russia and Haiti.
“I lead it; I go with them,” White said of short-term trips. “I preach that God is only going to bless First Baptist Church as much as our eyes are not on First Baptist Church. If all our eyes are about us and our building, we won’t really see the God who is out there. God is a lot larger than First Baptist Church.”A recent trip to Haiti proved his point, White said.
On a trip to help a local physician, more than $2,000 in medications was confiscated by the government.
“We went into a nine-hour prayer meeting,” White said. “We decided we’d do medical missions as long as we had medications. Every day, the doctor would come out and say, ‘I have enough medications for one more day.’ It was almost like the five loaves and fishes. For seven days we had enough each morning for that one day, and 58 people got saved.”He encourages people at First Baptist to go on a mission trip so they can experience God at work in ways they sometimes don’t notice at home, White said.
“Youth have said they feel more rewarded doing a mission trip; they seem to get more out of it than just camp,” the pastor said.Men and youth recently returned from a week of construction missions in Owyhee, Nev., the Duck Valley Reservation, a church White and his then-new wife, DeeEdra, planted in 1987. It was First Baptist’s third time to go to the reservation. The first two times were for VBS.
“We put the flooring down, pulled wires, hung doors and windows, and walls in Sunday school classrooms,” White said. “We’re going back later this summer for VBS.”
The youth also have participated in construction missions in Casper, Wyo., and Bremerton, Wash., through the North American Mission Board’s World Changers. First Baptist is one of the larger churches in the Pacific Northwest; about 400 people participate in Sunday morning worship. After struggling for at least seven years with being landlocked and having insufficient parking space, the church voted to relocate to an 8.9-acre site on the west edge of town and build.
“We’re a classic textbook Southern Baptist church,” the pastor said. “You can only run 80 percent of your building capacity for so long before you start losing people. … Our building was built in the 1950s; renovation was going to be more expensive than building, and that wouldn’t take care of the parking problem.”
They paid cash for the land, and in two capital campaigns and the sale of the current building raised $5 million of the $7 million cost of construction for a one-level – worship center and education space – structure with a Pacific Northwest flair.
“We’re doing a whole new revisioning thing for our church this summer,” White said. “We want to be prepared to go into our new building. We want to be ready to minister to the community.”Not that they aren’t already.
FAITH, an evangelistic strategy for growing a ministering Sunday school, has been a major component of the church’s outreach since 1999. About 160 members are FAITH-trained; as many as 80 have gone out on a weekly basis. As a result, First Baptist has baptized an average of 30 people a year since White has been pastor. Local ministries include FISH, in which six area churches, one each week, distribute food to low-income families.
“We go to COSTCO and to other stores for donated food,” White said. “We get as much donated as possible, and the rest comes from our benevolence offerings. We give about 60 families groceries for a week or more.”
For the last four years, First Baptist has offered weekly Celebrate Recovery sessions, a ministry started by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. A professional counselor also offers free counseling through the church to people who can’t afford counseling.
Other local ministries: filling baby bottles with change, which is given to a local crisis pregnancy center; packaging items for low-income moms of newborns and delivering them to the hospital; and making care packages during the Christmas season for AIDs victims.
Some Sunday school classes prepare meals once a month at the community house for homeless and low income Longview residents.
First Baptist had 25 small groups as they went through Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Community last fall. Each group took on ministry projects in the community, many of which remain. Examples: building wheelchair ramps for area residents; preparing meals for Habitat for Humanity workers.
The youth plan to have evening Bible studies at the park this summer, including music and other things that draw a crowd.
“Our challenge is keeping people focused,” White said. “Focused on the kingdom. The building is not the end-all. It’s a tool to do the kingdom work of God. It’s not built for us who are here. It’s built for those who are yet to come. I think the only way to keep people focused is to keep them realizing the value we have in Jesus. When we don’t value Him we don’t value worship and we don’t value ministry.
“When we start taking God for granted, we fail,” the pastor continued. “I want to keep them saying, ‘Wow, it’s a privilege to be a Christian.’”