Bethel Baptist Church Reduces Debt to Further the Kingdom

Capital Campaigns are commonplace in churches for building projects and reducing debt. What you don’t see all that often is a church participating in a debt reduction campaign to invest their resources for Kingdom advancement outside of the four walls of their church. However, that is what Bethel Baptist Church in Brookings, SD, is doing.

The campaign is called S.O.S., and its design is to free up resources to respond to the needs they see. S.O.S. has a three-pronged approach, Send, Open, and Serve. Bethel desires to allocate funds to train a pastoral resident for the work of ministry (Send), help start a new church (Open), and significantly partner with an organization in town (Serve).

I first heard about the S.O.S. campaign when senior pastor, Josh Roberston, asked me to preach at Bethel last fall to talk about the need for church planting in South Dakota. I preached in October about why we start churches and then joined the church for lunch to explore what it looks like to parent a church plant.

It was a great start, but the real work in church planting is in the follow-up after the initial contact. Pastor Josh and I have had numerous conversations since October, and we have been working on recruitment strategies, development, and prayer. He recently told me, “I don’t want this to just be about money. I want our people to invest themselves into this mission.”

The first week of May, Pastor Josh and I met in Watertown, SD, to plan the next steps for Bethel. We chose to meet in Watertown because it is a city poised for another church and is within an hour of Brookings. It is ideal for Bethel to parent a church close to where they are in order to best serve the church plant and planter. Over the following months, I will make more trips to Brookings as we begin cultivating the land to plant a church. Church planting cultivation looks like focused prayer, vision trips to surrounding towns, and hosting dinners to cast the vision of church planting to all who are interested.

There is something extraordinary happening at Bethel Baptist Church in Brookings. They are a church looking outside themselves to reach more people for Christ. They are aggressively paying down debt to expand the Kingdom.

If your church wants to know more about church planting, please email steve@convergeheartland.org to start a conversation!

Josh Robertson family and the Bethel Baptist Church facilities