Readers of this column may remember the Rev. Mark Milwee, former
pastor of Gilroy’s First Baptist Church. While serving his
congregation between 1999 and 2005, he was prominent in South
County’s Christian community.
Readers of this column may remember the Rev. Mark Milwee, former pastor of Gilroy’s First Baptist Church. While serving his congregation between 1999 and 2005, he was prominent in South County’s Christian community.
Always a strong advocate of foreign missions, he traveled on behalf of his congregation to Russia. While there, he taught in a seminary, training Russian students to become ministers of the Gospel.
Milwee earned his doctorate from Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in Mill Valley, while a Gilroy resident. He used his passion for “practical ministry” to develop and implement with Sister Paula Baker a Protestant Chaplaincy Program between local clergy and patients at St. Louise Regional Hospital.
In 2005, Milwee and his wife decided they should be nearer to their families in Alabama. He resigned his position in Gilroy, and the family returned to their home state; shortly afterward he received a call to minister to Sherwood Baptist Church in Huntsville, midway between the homes of his and his wife’s parents. The church was located across the freeway from the Space and Rocket Center; he jokes about literally “preaching to rocket scientists.”
One of his accomplishments while at this church was to encourage the congregation to pay off their substantial mortgage on their property several years early. This allowed them to devote more financial resources to ministry.
During this time Milwee traveled to Korea on a mission trip. He was impressed by a Christian school that had grown from five to 500 students in only five years and also by a Presbyterian church with 4,000 members: it holds five services on Sunday to accommodate its growing congregation. Such experiences “testify to what devotion to prayer can accomplish.”
Last year he was contacted by Del Cerro Baptist Church, a congregation located in the San Diego suburb of La Mesa. Although he was satisfied with his ministry in Huntsville, Milwee felt a call to return to California where churches tend to be “less rigid and more open to innovation in ministry.” So, leaving behind a residence usually unattainable on a minister’s salary in California, Milwee began a new pastorate in January at a 50-year-old church located on a hill across the freeway from San Diego State University.
Del Cerro Baptist Church has some 300 members; it is noteworthy for its strong domestic mission thrust over the years, having planted 10 churches in the San Diego area since its founding. The devotion of the congregation makes it number 30 in giving to the Southern Baptist Cooperative Mission Program. Currently it is supporting three new churches, including a Hispanic congregation which meets on its campus.
Milwee hopes to impart some of his passion for foreign missions to Del Cerro, especially encouraging members to travel to overseas mission sites.
The rest of the Milwee family will be joining him in California when the school year ends. Meanwhile, he is living in the “pastor’s study” beneath his office, a large suite with cooking facilities, restroom, entertainment center and quiet study space. (Unimpressed during a recent visit, one of his children referred to it as the “pastor’s cave.”)
To contact Mark Milwee, call him at (619) 460-2210 or e-mail him at
mm*****@dc**.org
.
