By Meredith Flynn
For the next week, the IB staff is in New Orleans covering the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. Check back here often for updates from the convention floor, the latest from other meetings and events, and some fun bits and pieces you might not see anywhere else.
Tonight’s post: Crossover, the SBC’s annual missions partnership in the convention’s host city. Visitors come a day early to work with local churches in block parties, door-to-door evangelism, prayer walking, and a host of other outreach events.
New Orleans church-goers understand missions. In the seven years since Hurricane Katrina, the city has seen thousands upon thousands of volunteers, people who want to bring hope to a place that had lost all hope. Oak Park Baptist Church on New Orleans’ Westbank has hosted many of those volunteers on its third floor, which was converted into dormitory-style housing after Katrina.
The city can be a draining place to do ministry. When you ask Pastor Bobby Stults if the work is tiring, he smiles, hangs his head in mock despair, and asks, “Does it show?”
Oak Park has seen its neighborhood change drastically in the five years since Stults became pastor. Rapid migration out of the city’s center meant a mostly Anglo neighborhood very quickly became a mostly African American one. Stults, who came to New Orleans to attend seminary in 1995 and never left, has led the church to make a conscious decision (followed by years to conscious effort) to become a community church. A place where its neighbors feel welcomed, accepted, ministered to.
That’s why Stults planned a block party, with the help of volunteers from Texas, Illinois and Arizona, that also featured six African American rappers from a sister church. “This is the music of our community,” he said.
His church has gone through attendance ups and downs, as people have gotten comfortable (or uncomfortable) with Oak Park’s new mission. But the people who worship at the church now are unified behind the idea that this mission field is their responsibility, and they’re led by a pastor who knows, even when the work is draining, that God has placed them here for such a time as this.
For more on Crossover, see the July 2 issue of the Illinois Baptist. Go to IBSA.org/IllinoisBaptist to subscribe.
Pastor Bobbby Stults (right) greets K.C. Leonard, a member of his church, during their Crossover block party June 16.
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