Bethany Baptist Church Reflection Paper

In 2016, Bethany Baptist Church celebrates eighty-four years of ministry in the Highlands area of Louisville. The church’s peak membership of more than 1,100 people occurred in the 1970’s, during the ministry of the senior pastor with the longest tenure at Bethany—a tenure of twenty-four years. From 1986 to 2010, the church saw five senior pastors come and go, with an average pastoral tenure of less than four years. At the time of my call to serve as senior pastor in 2011, much work had recently been done to ensure that membership rolls were up to date and accurate. The church’s membership stood at approximately 230 people, with an average attendance of 105 people in Sunday morning worship services.
During the last five years, I have rejoiced to see several areas of growth in the ministry of Bethany Baptist Church. The …show more content…
A handful of our members are active in local gospel ministries and are laboring to witness for Christ in their spheres of influence. However, I believe the majority of our membership is languishing in a state of apathy when it comes to evangelistic outreach. For some, there may be no sense of urgency in reaching people for Christ in our community, while for others there may be a desire to do so mixed with a feeling of being ill-equipped to the task. Many of our members are above sixty years of age, and they fear they have no way of finding common ground with the younger generation in order to build relationships. Some have grown accustomed to relying on attractional events as the sole means of outreach, expecting the lost to come to the church rather than the church reaching the lost. I believe that attractional methods that may have been effective a few decades ago will not be as effective in our current culture. As the culture has shifted, we must adapt our methods in order to reach people with the