Darren Casper believes in missions. As the executive director of the St. Louis Metro Baptist Association, he leads a staff of eight full and part-time missionaries. Their task is to equip churches to reach out with the gospel to the city of over 300,000 people and a little over 2 million people living on the Missouri side of the greater St. Louis metro area.
Casper led the association to sell their office building in Bridgeton a few years ago. They are putting those funds into ministries and especially trying to bolster church planting efforts.
The director said he wasn’t looking for a centralized organization to manage when he came on board to lead the association five years ago. He preferred to have his staff work remotely from their homes and be mobile and accessible to the churches and leaders in the metro area.
Most of the staff have other roles with affiliated ministries, serving bivocationally with the association.
Their mission statement says they are all about “Connecting churches to develop leaders and deploy them for missions because lostness is the greatest problem in our city.”
‘Active with people’
An example of that is pastor Mike Hubbard, who serves Genesis Church in Eureka. He’s been there 18 years, having planted the church from its inception. In addition to his pastor role, he just took on the role of director of church planting for the STL Metro (as they often refer to the association).
Hubbard said he likes to draw a circle around the metro area with I-270 and I-255 as the boundaries. Inside that circle are millions of lost people he said. “I want to help plant as many churches inside that ring as possible.”
Hubbard said there are 11 new church starts in process in the city and as he ramps up his work he hopes there will be several more planted in the near future. “We have a ‘pipeline’ developed that will help train church planters,” he said. There are four centers for church planting already organized and running at various levels.
He talked with great enthusiasm about a new church in St. Charles, called Soma Church, which is being led by pastor Micah Bartig. Their sponsor church is NorthRoad Community Church in Moscow Mills, where Bartig’s father, Matt, is lead pastor. Hubbard said the church planter is leading Soma Church to get into the “New Town” community of St. Charles. They are planning a back to school rally where they will give “underserved” children school supplies and a new clothing outfit to wear to school.
They have been showing movies in a park and having fun events such as a family carnival and water game nights in the New Town area of St. Charles. They recently had one parent come to Christ at the family carnival.
Another church Hubbard mentioned is the Storyline Church in the “south city” area of St. Louis. Josh Wilson is the pastor. The church has been there for about three years. Hubbard said they are active in ministry to area university students at St. Louis University and Washington University, both located nearby.
Hubbard said, “These guys are active with people in their community. They are not waiting for people to come to them.”
Pastor Wilson said, “We hosted our first movie night at Francis Park in May and are hosting our last movie night of the summer on Aug. 1. We average 150-200 at these movie nights. They’ve been a great way for us to meet our neighbors and build a reputation in the community as a church that invests in the city.”
Reaching through education
They have also reached out to more than 40 senior adults in their neighborhood with projects in their homes in partnership with Lindenwood Area Senior Ministries. One neighbor said the impact was great and said, “It was the most fun I’ve had in 20 years!”
Casper also emphasized their association is interested in reaching people for Christ through education. They are working to establish a Christian high school called City Christian Academy on the campus of Tower Grove Baptist Church. Casper said, “Like Jeremiah 29 teaches, we seek the welfare of the city.” They have identified education as a great need. The association is putting $2 million into the new school, which expands upon the ministry of the private elementary and junior high school already established at Tower Grove.
Casper pointed out they have benevolent ministries operating in the Bevo Mill neighborhood of the city, and they are helping immigrants and refugees, many of whom are coming to the U.S. from war-torn countries. St. Louis is a hub for many new refugees.
People from Afghanistan, Syria, Bosnia and other nations are coming to America, and St. Louis is often one of their first landing spots. STL Metro staffer Rachel Hart works with a ministry called Good Neighbor Initiative to welcome these people and help them get established in the community, find places to live, food to eat, furniture and essential goods like clothing and school supplies.
There are team members in the association working with men’s ministries, ethnic ministries including outreach to Bosnian immigrants, pastor cohorts and other leadership development initiatives. Casper invites people to get in touch with them to help with mission projects, lend support for new church starts and to pray for them.
St. Louis has a lot of people and a lot of lost people. Together with the 90 or so churches and 11 church plants in process, they are trying to reach their city for Christ. There is much more to be done. For more information check their website at: stlmetro.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Richard Nations and originally published by the Pathway.
