Forest Park reaching beyond Joplin
By Kayla Rinker
Contributing Writer
JOPLIN – Any skilled fisherman knows that the secret to catching fish is in the bait. Some fish like worms, others prefer minnows, and there are even some that favor shiny, multi-colored plastic lures.
According to John Swadley, 12-year pastor at Forest Park Baptist Church in Joplin, people aren’t that different from fish. He referred to a verse found in Matt. 4:19 and again in Mark 1:17:
“Come, follow me,’’ Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
“We believe that to be ‘fishers of men’ we need to have different hooks in the water that will reach different types of people,” Swadley said. “Just like you use different hooks, or bait, for trout and bass, we want to connect to the entire community with our different ‘hooks.’”
Because of this interpretation of the familiar scripture, Forest Park currently offers three different worship services featuring three very distinct music styles.
“We believe music is a worship language and not everyone speaks the same language,” Swadley said.
The church’s first Sunday morning service offers a blended worship style including both older hymns and chorus music, its second Sunday service features soft-contemporary worship songs, and on Saturday nights the church provides a “cutting edge” style of worship.
The various “hooks in the water” seem to be working. Swadley said Forest Park has seen an average of 100 baptisms a year in the last four years.
“We owe a lot of that success to having the different lures in the water,” said Swadley, who will deliver the convention sermon when messengers gather Oct. 27-29 for the 174th annual meeting of the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) in St. Louis.
Another attribute of the church’s overall ministry is its desire to fulfill the true needs of the people of Joplin. They are able to do this through small group Bible studies and community service projects.
“On Good Friday we bought down the price of gas to $1.99 a gallon,” Swadley said. “We had about 50 cars deep of people waiting to get gas. Volunteers would go to those cars and share the love of Christ to them and invite them to our Easter services that Sunday.”
Forest Park also makes a point to address some of the more difficult issues and needs surrounding its congregation; issues that are not limited to the city of Joplin.
“We are involved in a divorce recovery ministry,” Swadley said. “There are so many hurting people that have been through divorce, people that a lot of the time don’t feel welcome at church. We want to be like Jesus and seek after those people and help them.”
Another philosophy of Forest Park that has pushed the congregation to even greater growth is its “rule of 80 percent.”
“When the auditorium in a service is filled up to 80 percent we have found that it’s going to be difficult to grow, so at 80 percent we start another service,” Swadley said.
The logic carries over to everything from Bible study rooms to parking lots, he said. When something reaches 80 percent capacity, the church buys adjacent land and builds or paves more of what it needs.
This mantra may explain why Forest Park’s newest endeavor, a satellite church in Carthage, has been so successful. Forest Park Baptist Church, Carthage, was launched last August. Since then, the satellite church attendance has grown from 50 people in on its inaugural Sunday to a 300+ congregation today.
“We started a new campus because we are in the field of reaching people,” said Mark Dinwiddie, missions and multi-site pastor at Forest Park, “and if McDonald’s can reach more people for their cheeseburgers if they have more than one location, then we think we can reach more people that way, too, for the Lord.”
He said the plan is to have five more campuses in the next 10 years, starting a new church about every 18 months.
With its personal church growth and building projects over the last several years, it’s hard to believe Forest Park even has time to think about outside missions, let alone participate in them. However, Swadley said missions “makes our heart beat” and could never be left out.
“Our church gave more than $780,000 to missions last year,” he said. “We have built into our building fund that 10 percent of whatever we spend to build our church projects will be used to build churches around the world. We also send a mission team down to help in the process.”
The church managed to send more than 400 people on short-term volunteer mission trips last year. These local missionaries traveled anywhere from Kearns, Colo., to do rodeo Bible camps, to Thailand to help with much-needed medical clinics.
“The Bible says we are to go to Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” Swadley said. “That means we should be reaching out here and around the world.”
Dinwiddie said that in the last several years God has really blessed Forest Park and its ministries.
“I’ve seen great, great things and I am very excited about the future and about what God is going to do in the coming years,” he said.
