ST. LOUIS, MO (BP) – Darren Casper believes in missions. As the executive director of the St. Louis Metro Baptist Association (often called STL Metro), 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 more than 300,000 people and a little more than 2 million people living on the Missouri side of the greater St. Louis metro area.
Casper led the association to sell its office building in Bridgeton a few years ago. Those funds are being rerouted into ministry, especially efforts to bolster church planting.
The director said when he came on board five years ago, he wasn’t looking for a centralized organization to manage. 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.
The association’s mission statement says it is all about “Connecting churches to develop leaders and deploy them for mission because lostness is the greatest problem in our city.”
An example of that is Pastor Mike Hubbard, who serves Genesis Church in Eureka, Mo. He’s been at the church since he planted it 18 years ago. In addition to his pastoral role, he just took on the role of director of church planting for STL Metro.
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. “I want to help plant as many churches inside that ring as possible,” he said.
There are 11 new church starts in process in the city, and Hubbard’s goal is to see several more 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.
Hubbard listed a few examples of churches getting started in communities around Metro St. Louis, including Soma Church in St. Charles and Storyline Church in the South City neighborhood. The churches have been intentional about reaching their neighbors, hosting events like back-to-school rallies and giveaways, movies in the park, senior adult outreaches and campus ministry.
Casper also emphasized that the association is interested in reaching people for Christ through education. Leaders are working to establish a Christian high school called City Christian Academy on the campus of Tower Grove Baptist Church.
“Like Jeremiah 29 teaches, we seek the welfare of the city,” Casper said. The association is putting $2 million into the new school, which expands on the ministry of the private elementary and junior high school already established at Tower Grove.
The association also operates benevolent ministries as well as ministry to new immigrants and 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.
Team members in the association work 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, associational leaders are trying to reach their city for Christ.
This article originally appeared in The Pathway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Nations is a husband and father to two children. He is the associational mission strategist for the Sandy Creek Baptist Association in Murrayville, Illinois. He also is a contributing writer for the The Pathway, the news journal of the Missouri Baptist Convention. He also contributes to the Illinois Baptist, Springfield, Illinois and The Baptist Paper, Birmingham, Alabama. He is an occasional contract appraisal reader for LifeWay Christian Resources and he is the author of “Why Not Me: You Could Be A Bivocational Pastor” (Lulu Press, 2019). He occassionally contributes articles for Baptist Press, several Sunday school and church growth magazines for LifeWay Christian Resources and he was the publications editor for The Iowa Baptist, the news journal of the Baptist Convention of Iowa.
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