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The bathroom smells like shrimp, the office is packed with preschoolers, and up on stage, all the Neverland props from the previous night’s very-off-Broadway performance of Peter Pan have been shoved to one side.
But it’s not the environmental idiosyncrasies of the Sneads Ferry Community Center that make Pillar Church of Topsail a truly unique Sunday morning experience.
It’s the people.
“We’re located right outside Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune,” says Joshua Brown, “and so that means more than 80% of our church is not just active duty military, but a lot of people in our congregation are special operators, snipers, intel, recon and amphibious assault — it’s definitely a different dynamic.”
Several years ago, Joshua and Brittany Brown planted Pillar Church of Topsail in Sneads Ferry, North Carolina as part of the Praetorian Project, a family of churches in military communities worldwide.
“The whole idea of the Praetorian Project comes from Philippians 1 where the Apostle Paul talks about how his imprisonment resulted in the Praetorian guards coming to know about Christ,” Joshua says.
“Now, we’re planting churches near bases all over the world so that as the military moves families from place to place, there are these churches waiting for them that understand military culture and lingo, know what kind of help a mom needs when her husband is gone for nine months, and, while they’re autonomous, are all cut from the same cloth so newly-arriving military families can easily plug in. I can’t think of a more strategic place to plant a church, and not just because military families need a church that’ll love them well, but it’s because the military is unbelievably unreached.”
The Department of Defense currently recognizes 221 different belief systems in the U.S. military — some of them are mainstream, like Southern Baptist and United Methodist — and others are more unconventional, like Wicca, Humanism, and Heathenry.
“The military is surprisingly unchurched,” Joshua says. “So you can imagine when a young person leaves home and gets sent to some place like Camp Lejeune, they’re away from their families, away from mom and dad and grandma and grandpa, and they have no support system. If they don’t see a gospel presence, they could very likely find themselves in a dark and vulnerable place. Add to that the fact that people especially in this special operations community are going around the world and facing death-defying situations regularly — having conversations about where they’re going to spend eternity is a very natural thing for us to do in this space.”
Speaking the language
Those gospel conversations come easily for Joshua, who for 20 years was an active duty Marine. He and Brittany speak the language of a military family and understand the stress that comes not just with deployments, but constant moving from place to place.
“Imagine a setting where families are constantly separated,” Joshua says. “They’re struggling through deployments, times apart, reunifications, training, and then throw in the added stressors of a very difficult job and kids and then the fact that they’re only going to be in one place for a few years and then move on to the next duty station.”
“We lived it, so we understand,” says Brittany. “Joshua did multiple deployments to Iraq. As a matter of fact, that’s where he was when we had our second child. He was in a Humvee in the middle of the desert when he found out she was born and then he didn’t meet her until he came home five months later. That was hard, and a common thing we used to hear all the time was, ‘Well, you know what you signed up for.’ And while that is true, these people know exactly what they sign up for, it doesn’t make it any easier. And even now planting a church, it’s difficult when you pour into a family and then they leave. But we embrace that. We tell people, ‘Movement is the method.’”
When the Browns say that, they’re referring to the unique sending culture God creates when a new church gets planted in a military community.
“I can’t think of a better place to plant a church.” Joshua says, “These people are highly trained, they can endure hardship, they’re ready to be transient at any moment, and they’re used to being sent. So if in the short time we have them, we can reach them with the gospel and then help them grow in their walk with the Lord, when the military sends them somewhere else around the world, now they’re a missionary who’s traveling on the government’s dime and taking the gospel into places most of us will never go.”
“That’s kind of a radical church planting and evangelism model,” Brittany laughs. “But I suppose ‘radical’ is how Marines do things.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Tony Hudson and originally published by the North American Mission Board.
