Arizona Southern Baptist Convention

Spanish Portraits, July-August 2010.

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Teens piling out of vans, buses and cars, carrying sleeping bags and dragging suitcases. At first glance, it may seem like just another summer camp. Yet, a closer look reveals that PowerPlant is a totally different adventure.

PowerPlant is a North American Mission Board experience focused on church planting. Church groups of students in junior high, high school and college are teamed up with a local church plant in the host city to help with practical ministry and to learn about the church plant's field of service and the culture of the church plant.

Phoenix was just one of 19 cities that are hosting PowerPlant projects this summer.

PowerPlant participants gain insight through training from an experienced church planter in the host city. They also engage in worship each evening led and facilitated by a traveling team of four summer staff chosen and trained by NAMB. The misson board also selects coordinators to manage and oversee the local event.

The hope is to give the students a close-up look at the oft-glamorized, but very challenging world of church planting and to develop a passion for church planting that will fuel future church plants.

This year, six church groups from Georgia, Wyoming, New Mexico, California and Arizona were teamed with six church plants in Estrella Association.

Legacy of Life Community Church, which meets in the Avondale-Goodyear area, was aided by a team of students from Trinity Southern Baptist Church, Casa Grande, to inform several neighborhoods in Avondale and Goodyear about their new location. They also hosted a free car wash on the Thursday evening of PowerPlant. Pastor Mark Scott reported that five new families worshiped with Legacy of Life the following Sunday.

Woolsey Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Ga., helped The Well Christian Fellowship provide a Vacation Bible School for the children around Palm Valley Elementary School in Goodyear, where The Well meets. Pastor Greg Sawyer met some new families during the week. A couple of them gathered with The Well for worship the next Sunday morning.

Monte de Sion, a Spanish-speaking church plant in the Rainbow Valley area of Buckeye, hosted a sports camp with the help of a team from First Southern Baptist Church, Avondale. Pastor Rodrigo Castillo and others from Monte de Sion saturated the area with flyers about the camp in the week prior. Monte de Sion saw immediate fruit in their attendance the next Sunday.

The First Southern, Avondale, team also endured the searing summer heat to prayerwalk in two communities where the Estrella Association hopes to plant Spanish-speaking churches soon.

Estrella Falls Baptist Church, a church plant that meets along the Estrella Parkway corridor in Goodyear, used the help of a team from First Baptist Church, Bloomfield, N.M., to put out information about the church, offer free car washes at two different retailers in the area, and serve root beer floats at the Goodyear skateboard park on Thursday evening. Max Stabenow, a Nehemiah Project church planter working with Estrella Falls, had the opportunity to initiate some new relationships with businessmen and skaters in the area.

Crosspointe, the Church at Tartesso, a church plant at the western edge of the Valley, had the help of First Chinese Baptist Church, Walnut, Calif., to offer the families of Tartesso the annual Kidz Kamp in one of the community's parks. A great relationship has developed between these two congregations over the last three years as First Chinese has provided the labor for the Bible-based day camp each year.

The team from Hilltop Baptist Church in Green River, Wyo., was perfectly suited to help The Church at Sun Valley, a church plant in the Festival Ranch community in northwest Buckeye, with the cowboy-theme Saddle Ridge Ranch VBS for the families of Festival Ranch. Pastor Ray Strauss was thrilled with the excitement evident in the families who attended.

While some of the fruit of the week was seen immediately, the real impact of PowerPlant will typically be seen in the months and years that follow.

That fruit will be the relationships between the established churches who came to serve and the church plants they helped, as they grow into deeper connections and affections. It will also be in the new believers and growing disciples that result from the initial contacts made during the ministries offered to the communities of the church plants in the Estrella Association.

The fruit will further be seen in the new church plants that will result not only in the Valley, but in various places in the United States as the students who attend respond to the call to church planting in the places they will live in years to come.

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