August 28, 2000
Key Church strategy gets new
ingredients to increase appeal
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___Jim Burgin may well be the Emeril Lagasse of Texas Baptists.
___Lagasse is the New Orleans restaurateur who hosts a Food TV cooking show and is "Good Morning America's" chef-in-residence. He tosses a bit of Cajun spice into whateverhe's cooking and shouts: "Bam! Let's kick it up a notch."
___Not that Burgin is flamboyant. He isn't. He is certainly not a chef of renown. His only culinary specialty--he says--is a bologna sandwich on white bread.
___It's just that he has taken the Key Church program of the Baptist General Convention and kicked it up a notch.
___The soft-spoken, unassuming Burgin was employed in September 1997 to become director of the BGCT's creative church development department. He followed two legendary leaders in church planting--JV Thomas and Win Oakes.
___The Key Church concept was developed among Texas Baptists more than 20 years ago as an effort to start new congregations.
___The push of Mission Texas toward a renewed missions emphasis gained impetus when Thomas challenged the churches with this simple question: "Why can't churches give the same kind of emphasis to missions at home as they do to music and education?"
___At first, the thrust was to plant mission congregations. Leaders worked to recruit strong congregations to start new churches. Churches that agreed to be Key Churches also agreed to start six new missions. That limited the program to the larger and financially stronger congregations.
___"JV and his colleagues were ahead of their time to be able to help churches become leaders in missions," Burgin said. "They were helping churches start churches. Their strategy was to get churches to look outside their own congregations to begin to see the need for establishing new work."
___The strategy worked.
___The first pilot project for Key Church was launched in 1979. That pilot project occurred at Gambrell Street Baptist Church in Fort Worth, when the congregation embarked on multiple church starts to impact their local community and launched more than 40 congregations.
___Other churches soon caught the mission fever: First Baptist Church of Houston; Cliff Temple Baptist Church, Lakeside Baptist Church and Casa View Baptist Church of Dallas; Lakeland Baptist Church of Lewisville; First Baptist Church of Arlingto; First Baptist Church of Midland.
___"Large churches able to commit to missions and church building became actively engaged in the Key Church strategy. These churches reached out to reclaim dying churches and to start Bible studies and congregations in Anglo, ethnic and African-American communities," wrote Bob Bull, a retired school administrator who is helping research the history of the Key Church movement in Texas.
___Under Thomas' leadership, the Key Church program was primarily aimed at large churches which agreed to call full-time ministers of missions. The BGCT helped financially for up to three years.
___While Oakes shifted the focus to include small and middle-size churches which used bivocational and volunteer ministers of missions, the program still had a primary thrust of starting churches. Missions was interpreted as church starting.
___Lakeland Baptist Church in Lewisville is an example of the program's success. It was one of the pioneers in the movement. Across the years, the mother church has grown to average 800 in worship on Sundays while starting six missions that now have become freestanding churches. The missions have, in turn, started missions, and Lakeland is starting the process again, sponsoring church starts under the tutelage of a new minister of missions.
___The Key Church strategy has been successful because 40 percent of the new church starts in Texas have been by churches with a minister of missions and a Key Church emphasis, Oakes said.
___But even at its peak, there never have been more than 200 churches involved at any one time as Key Churches.
___Under Oakes' directorship, a new component was added to the Key Church mix--multi-housing ministries. But while the thrust had a ministry component, the primary aim was to establish Bible studies in apartment complexes that ultimately would become freestanding congregations.
___Burgin is a strong believer in the church planting aspect of the Key Church strategy.
___"Currently, there are 199 Key Churches in Texas. That is about 3 percent of the 6,000 congregations affiliated with the BGCT," Burgin said. "Half of those Key Churches produced a new congregation this year. That means 40 percent of all new work in Texas was started by 1.5 percent of our congregations."
___In addition, he said, "many of our key congregations support community ministries which result in professions of faith. In the 32 key churches that provide monthly reports to us, more than 5,000 people accepted Christ as their personal Savior this year alone.
___"It doesn't take much to see how the Lord is working through our Key Churches," he said.
___Burgin wants every church in Texas to give missions the same emphasis it gives religious education and music and to participate not only in church starting and multi-housing ministries, but to promote missions education, partnerships and direct missions efforts.
___After 18 months on the job, Burgin used his experience of having been a minister of missions in two Texas and one Georgia churches to shift the focus, to kick the program up a notch, as it were.
___In August 1999, the BGCT State Missions Commission approved a redesigned Key Church strategy.
___"The essential definition of a Key Church has not changed," Burgin said. "A Key Church places missions at a priority level equal to the music and education programs. This generally involves staffing for missions, whether the staff member is paid or volunteer, full time, part time and/or bivocational.
___"Simply put, a Key Church believes if people won't come to church, for whatever reason, then the church must take the gospel to the people."
___The Key Church strategy is an Acts 1:8 strategy, which includes both the world of missions and the whole world, he said. It includes church starting, missions ministries, missions education and world missions.
___"A second significant change is that each church sets its own priorities. Under the old system, the state convention assigned the goals, which were that a church had to start a certain number of churches and maintain a baptisms-to-membership ratio of 1 to 8.
___"Under the new system, we ask each church to ask God what goals should be set. The business of the state convention then becomes to help the congregation accomplish whatever goals God has shown them," he said.
___The program of Key Church is one of the areas Texas Baptists support through gifts to the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions. The 2000 offering will provide $200,000 to help Burgin and others kick it up a notch.
___Burgin may not be a world-famous chef, but his recipe is simple: He thinks every church should be a Key Church.
___How to get involved
___For more information on how your church can become a Key Church or draw upon the resources of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in church starting, missions and ministries, contact Jim Burgin's office at (214) 828-5370. In addition to general budget funding from the BGCT, the Key Church program receives major funding from the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions.___
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