Milwaukee to Chicago
This morning I started out on the north side of Milwaukee in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin by visiting Baptist College of Ministry out of Falls Baptist Church.
Baptist College of Ministry is a small, local church, Bible college which focuses on training students for the ministry - pastors, Christian school teachers, missionaries, etc. The college is small enough that I was able to take a very direct approach and quite literally hand one of my cards to every student - whether they wanted it or not!
The students of BCM were very friendly and I enjoyed speaking with a number of them. One young man, Sam, spoke with me right before I left. He is a senior and is studying Secondary Education. He is planning to continue on, in his education, by attending seminary for the next couple of years. I asked him to keep in touch so that I could at least pray for him but also, I have no idea what our needs may be in the next couple of years! One of the goals of recruiting is to make contacts that may "bear fruit" in future years!
After lunch, I packed my things and headed back to the Greater Chicago area to visit DaySpring Bible College, a ministry of Quentin Road Baptist Church. It is a school that, until just recently, I did not know of.
The DaySpring campus is located about 10 miles from the church campus in a beautiful, rural setting. DaySpring is also a small, local church Bible College, similar in size to Baptist College of Ministry. Pastor Mark Julian, who oversees DaySpring Bible College, met me, answered my questions and then took me on an extensive tour of both the college campus and also the church campus.
While both BCM and DaySpring are both independent Baptist schools, both use the KJV, and have similar sized student bodies, that's where the similarities end. They each are polar opposites when it comes to their style of ministry. (Pastor Julian, in describing Quentin Road Baptist Church said, "We are too Baptist for some and not Baptist enough for others!") I however, appreciated the differences and rejoiced in the differences. Both ministries are actively seeking to honor the Lord as they reach their respective communities with the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Whenever I visit other churches and ministries, I always try to learn from them and try to pick up ideas that I might be able to incorporate in the ministries of South Charlotte Baptist Church. I pray that God will continue to use these pastors and their ministries in the fulfillment of the Great Commission!
On a side note: Quentin Road Baptist Church is the only independent Baptist church that I know of that has an indoor swimming pool...for good reason. When they built their last building, they were required to install a sprinkler system, which would have required them to install water storage tanks under ground to provide the water for that sprinkler system. Pastor Scudder couldn't fathom spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that and so asked if they could just build a swimming pool to be the water reservoir for the sprinkler system. The county allowed them to do that! So, now, they have a ministry reaching area young people with the Gospel by providing swimming lessons! I will say this...Pastor Scudder, the pastor of Quentin Road Baptist Church, has certainly thought "outside of the box" in thinking of ways to reach their community with the Gospel!
From there, I traveled south, through Chicago, to Crown Point, Indiana, where I am staying the night with my wife's sister and her husband. They live just 20 minutes from Hyles Anderson College, the school that I will be visiting on Tuesday!
Until next time!
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