The First Baptist Church has thrived at the corner of Main and
Crest avenues in Morgan Hill for half a century.
The First Baptist Church has thrived at the corner of Main and Crest avenues in Morgan Hill for half a century. Over the years, the congregation built many facilities on the property, including classrooms, offices, a kitchen and large auditorium.
Recently attendance plunged, and the outlook for the church was grim. With only handful of members remaining, the church decided to seek assistance from to continue its existence.
The Rev. Kyle Windsor, a highly experienced pastor, was brought in to help revitalize the church. Results have been remarkably successful, with attendance reaching nearly 80 at the end of August, generally a time of low participation due to summer schedules.
Under the new name Community Christian Church, the congregation’s leadership has instituted several changes in its Sunday services held at 11 a.m.:
– A full band providing contemporary Christian music for worship was added.
– A drama team producing brief plays to illustrate biblical messages was formed.
– Weekly sermons are now built upon a single “big idea” and are specific, biblical and life-changing. Among recent examples are titles like these: “How to live with God,” “How to see prayers answered” and “Winning at the $$ game.”
The Morgan Hill facility is shared with two other separate but like-minded congregations: Christ Our King Lutheran Church and Jubilee South Valley Church. There are also plans to start a Spanish church this year.
One goal of Community Christian is to expand beyond the walls of their physical building, to “bring the church to people,” especially for those who are uncomfortable in traditional churches.
One aspect of the modern church is forming smaller churches that meet in members’ homes. Pastor Windsor suggests that providing a pianist or guitarist for the home services and simulcasting the message being preached at the main church site is “a scalable and realistic way” to do this.
“About 1.5 million people in Silicon Valley live outside of a vibrant relationship with God,” Windsor said. “Our vision is to take the roadblocks away so that people can clearly see who the real Jesus is.”
One of the ways to meet this goal is through holistic help (ministering in the community) through some of these methods:
– Community Christian shares a driveway with P.A. Walsh Elementary School. Before school started last month, the congregation presented teachers with baskets of supplies for their classrooms.
– They have been collecting donations to build cisterns to provide clean water to villages in Kenya in east Africa. To date they have sponsored two cisterns and are planning more.
– Planning has begun for an ESL (English as a Second Language) program that would serve people in the South Valley.
Although it has existed for only a few months, the new church is rapidly expanding opportunities for its members:
– Junior and senior high youth ministries meet on Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m.
– A children’s ministry for grades one through five provides children an opportunity to participate in the service and then have their own lesson.
– Various adult Bible study groups will meet throughout the South Valley.
– A weekly 20-minute conference call is held at 4:30 p.m. Thursdays to give the congregation updates on what is happening at the church.
– An internet/web-based church will be launched at the end of October, seeking to help people throughout the world find their way back to God.
Pastor Windsor is a San Jose native whose family attended Valley Church in Cupertino while growing up. While attending Cupertino High School, he felt himself called to become “a disciple of Jesus Christ” on Christmas day in 1981.
He studied for the ministry at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and moved to the Caribbean island of Trinidad upon graduation to become interim pastor of a church. Returning to the United States, he and his wife, Kim, studied at Columbia International University in Columbia, S.C.
After moving to California, Windsor helped found Sunnyvale’s King’s Academy, a large Christian school, and spent seven years there teaching various courses and managing its business operations. In 1998, he became senior associate pastor of San Jose’s South Valley Christian Church and then spent two years as senior pastor of Crossroads Bible Church, also in San Jose.
For the past two years, Windsor has served as a financial consultant to several Silicon Valley start-up companies, but he felt God was calling him back to the ministry last spring when the Morgan Hill church contacted him with a request to help rebuild the congregation.
Windsor invites South Valley residents to give Community Christian Church a try. He promises “a body of faith that sees and touches God with no bureaucracy or politics.” The official “public launch” of the church is Sept. 26.
For more information, call (408) 779-1854, email [email protected], or go to www.cc-mh.com.
