Carl Martin has a vision to start 14 high-yield churches in the next seven years that will “create a global network for kingdom advancement.”
Carl MartinMartin, pastor of East Pickens Baptist Church, became convicted after reading Isaiah 49:1-7 that God was calling him to reach the people of the “coastlands,” particularly those of the Lowcountry. He stepped down from his pulpit of more than 10 years April 30 to embark on a church-planting effort, “Arms Around the Triangle,” which will focus its outreach ministries in the Bluffton, Hilton Head and Beaufort area.
“Our dream is to be used of God to see many lives changed around the world,” Martin states. “By creating a hub church that intentionally becomes a training center for the grass-roots development of church planters and marketplace ministers, we facilitate the future development of thousands of churches around the globe,” Martin said.
East Pickens Baptist, CrossPoint Baptist Church, Clemson, and Savannah River Baptist Association are partnering with him in the task of creating a “hub church” that will serve as a satellite for local missionary training and as a sending body, to deploy Christians to plant other multiplying churches. The goal is to plant two high-yield churches per year that are designed to relate to a specific demographic – such as Anglos, African-Americans, Hispanics – and to support these teams with trained, well-resourced leadership teams.
Martin anticipates partnering with other strategic churches, the South Carolina Baptist Convention, Savannah River Baptist Association, the North American Mission Board, and the state’s three Baptist universities to accelerate the development of college and seminary students, semester missionaries, bi-vocational pastors and other ministers who desire practical field experience in church planting or missions. Steve and Trish Cloud, certified coaches with the Pastor’s Coaching Network, will work with the hub church to provide other training opportunities.
With assistance from Bill Dieckmann, director of missions for the Columbia Metro Baptist Association, new church planters will be trained in the eight characteristics of a healthy church, utilizing the “Natural Church Development” materials. “These eight principles have been field-tested universally in thousands of churches and provide a measurable ‘score card’ for the health of our churches in the network,” Martin said.
Lead church planters for Arms Around the Triangle include Andr? Rogers, church-planting strategist for Columbia Metro Association and the SCBC and pastor of Church of the Open Door, which has planted two churches locally and five in West Africa; and Marcos Elizondo, pastor of Alianza Hispanic Mission, which has started Hispanic congregations in Myrtle Beach and North Charleston.
“The tremendous need to plant more churches to reach lost people has birthed a new strategy,” said Dino Senesi of the SCBC’s church multiplication group. “Our state is changing so rapidly that simply to add a new church here and there is not enough.
“The Arms Around the Triangle project is an example of God at work birthing a vision through multiple kingdom partners. Partnership is the very heart of God and will be the way he uses to touch the world,” Senesi added.
Marshall Fagg, state director of evangelism, said, “This is Baptist cooperation at its very best: churches, associations, and the convention working together to build the kingdom of our Lord. He has afforded us a unique opportunity to create a church-planting model that will be replicated across South Carolina and the country.”
The Savannah River Association has been moving toward a church-planting movement since 2000, according to director of missions Steve Scudder. In 2002, the association set a goal of starting seven churches by 2009 and established the Derris A. Davenport New Work Fund. More than $200,000 has been contributed to that fund thus far, and Arms Around the Triangle is a result of a vision tour conducted in January 2007, Scudder said.
In emphasizing the need for the church-planting partnership, Martin noted that Beaufort and Jasper Counties nearly doubled in size between 1990 and 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, only three new Southern Baptist churches were started, and total church membership in the area increased by less than 2,000. An estimated 70 percent of the population is unchurched, he added.
While Hilton Head’s population reached 34,977 in 2005, only three Southern Baptist churches are located on the island, with a combined seating capacity of 475. In Bluffton – where the population now exceeds 25,000 and is expected to grow by 8,000 by 2011 – Martin said that if all Southern Baptist churches in the area, which have a combined capacity of 700, were full for two services, only 10 percent of the growth could be accommodated.
Other statistics show that Bluffton and Hilton Head Island have a Hispanic population of more than 7,200, and that number is expect to increase by nearly 3,000 by 2011. Currently there are no Southern Baptist Hispanic works in either area.
“The explosive growth of our area and the diversity of our community challenge us to move beyond a traditional strategy of planting to a regional approach,” said Scudder. “Rather than focusing on a single plant, we need to start a diverse cluster of churches through a church-planting center.
“The center will focus on saturating this area and its diverse population with the gospel, gathering different unchurched crowds, and developing them into new congregations based upon affinity or ethnicity,” Scudder explained.