Being Surprised You've Been Attending a Baptist Church the Past Few Months

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 6:58 am by Josh Daffern

Being Surprised You've Been Attending a Baptist Church the Past Few Months 2014-08-05T06:58:12-06:00 Josh Daffern

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The church I pastor is technically Mt Vernon Baptist Church, but on all of our letterhead, signs and communications we’re just Mt Vernon Church. We drop the Baptist for a reason. We’re not ashamed of our heritage nor are we planning on leaving the Southern Baptist Convention. The main reason we do it is because of the people we’re trying to reach. Our target audience is the dechurched, those who have had some type of religious experience growing up but haven’t been back to church in years.

There are millions of dechurched in the Deep South. Seemingly everyone was dragged to church by at least a grandmother, if for nothing more than VBS. But too many had bad experiences at church. We’ve found that the dechurched haven’t given up on God, they’ve just given up on the church. And if they saw Baptist on our sign, many would immediately associate our church with their negative experience growing up. We want people to judge our church based on what they experience inside our four walls, not on their preconceived notions of a Baptist church. So, we take the name Baptist off of everything.

One of the side benefits of this is that it leads to some pretty entertaining conversations. Whenever I teach at “Discover Mt Vernon,” our membership class, I always surprise someone when they find out they’ve been attending a Baptist church for the past few months. Sometimes I even have to settle fights.

Yesterday I was talking with two women who have attended our church for the past month or so. I was called in to settle a dispute: were we a Baptist church? One was convinced we were, one was convinced we were non-denominational. They were passionate about it. Figuring I would know as the pastor, they asked me. I broke one of the lady’s hearts when I told her we were a Baptist church. She grew up in a traditional Baptist church and walked away from it a long time ago. She thought she was living on the edge, rebelling a little by attending a non-denominational church. Nope, just a Baptist church that doesn’t act very Baptist!

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