greenville_51903

Posted: 5/19/03

Greenville Hispanic church cultivates
a seedbed of outreach by training

By Ken Camp

Texas Baptist Communications

GREENVILLE–Jose Amaya views Iglesia Bautista Ridgecrest as a seedbed, a place where new believers can be nurtured, nourished and then transplanted to other places for ministry.

“We see ourselves as a training center,” the pastor said. “The Lord keeps sending us members with leadership qualities, people we can train, who the Lord has called for his ministry.”

One way the church trains these future leaders is by offering Saturday classes in basic biblical instruction and practical ministry, following the curriculum of Hispanic Baptist Theological School in San Antonio.

For several years, the training program was a satellite of HBTS, where Amaya currently serves as a trustee. While the San Antonio school is completing the review process leading to its accreditation as a Bible college, responsibility for satellite programs has been transferred to the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Texas Baptists help support theological training for Hispanic church leaders through gifts to the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions.

In just over 10 years, 40 students have graduated from the training program at Iglesia Bautista Ridgecrest, and they serve in church leadership positions throughout Northeast Texas.

Manuel Lerma of Duncanville teaches classes in Greenville and helps direct the training program there.

“We have had some students who have driven 80 miles one way for five years,”
Amaya noted.

But while the training program draws students from as far away as Tyler, many past and current students came out of Iglesia Bautista Ridgecrest. One graduate, now serving as pastor of a church south of Dallas, was working with a circus when he was reached by the church and felt a call into ministry.

Victor Ramirez and his wife, Martha, were part of a troupe of Latin American circus performers spending the winter in the rural Jacobia community, northeast of Greenville.

“We didn't find them. They actually found us in the Yellow Pages, and we began ministering to them,” Amaya recalled. The church eventually baptized 25 trapeze artists, clowns, jugglers and other circus performers.

Some of that original group left the circus, settling in Florida to work at Sea World. Others continue to tour with various circuses, starting Bible study groups wherever they go. “All of them consider this church their home church,” Amaya said.

Amaya not only helped build Iglesia Bautista Ridgecrest from a small mission to a thriving church but also has helped rebuild it several times after key leaders left to follow God's calling into vocational ministry.

“We've sent out our treasurer, deacons, Sunday School teachers, the backbone of our church. After our first graduating class, our church felt the effects. But it felt good that we gave our best to the Lord's work,” he said.

Attendance dropped significantly at Iglesia Bautista Ridgecrest because the church lost not only the graduating students but also their extended families. But in time, the church began to rebuild its leadership base.

“Then the same thing happened again,” Amaya recalled. “We just keep sending and sending. We're a seed church. Our role is to send them out. It's all for the kingdom of God.”

“We've sent out our treasurer, deacons, Sunday School teachers, the backbone of our church. … But it felt good that we gave our best to the Lord's work.”