ST. LOUIS — Noah Oldham, lead pastor for August Gate Church here in the downtown area where Interstates 44 and 55 meet, is not trying to attract people to a church building.
“We understand that we need to go to the world’s turf and take the light there to push back the darkness,” he said.
Oldham, 30, is part of a group of young Southern Baptist church planters who are illuminating urban centers. August Gate launched in August 2009 and is up to 200-250 people every week, with another 50-80 meeting with a church planting resident in O’Fallon, Ill.
“I’m a country boy from southern Illinois, and the city felt very dangerous, distant, and unfamiliar,” Oldham said. “But we started understanding Jesus’s heart for His city when He went to Jerusalem and He wept over it. We asked God to give us a heart like that for St. Louis.”
Along the way he realized that he needed training. The first entity that caught his eye was the Acts 29 Network, a creative incubator that has been a gathering place for many young church planters.
“I saw their assessment,” he said. “They had a couple of young guys who were amazing preachers, and that’s what I felt my call was to be as a preacher who could preach to a post-modern generation. I knew I wanted to be a senior pastor one day, a lead pastor of a church plant, and so I went to seminary. I actually had a generous donor, a friend of the family, who paid for me to do two online master’s degrees through Liberty University.
“With Acts 29, they told me I needed to do a church planting internship. That’s why I hooked up with Matthias’s Lot (another church in the St. Louis area). When I moved to St. Louis, I met a man named Darren Casper (in 2008) at the St. Louis Metro Baptist Association. I sat down with him and he started explaining to me about church planting there, and he explained to me this thing called the Cooperative Program (CP). I had never really heard of it. We didn’t have this in my church. I wasn’t a Southern Baptist kid. So I said to him, ‘You’re telling me that there are thousands of churches that give millions of dollars to take the gospel all over the world?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I want to be a part of that.’
“Doctrinally, I was already there. I aligned everything with the Baptist Faith & Message. It was a very easy fit.”
Oldham told a couple of friends from his college days at McKendree University in Lebanon, Ill., about the new work, and Josh Jones and Todd Genteman were called to the city. Oldham had left a large country church in Harrisburg, Ill., named Little Chapel for the challenge of reaching urban dwellers in their 20s and 30s. Now the five of them (Genteman was single, but the other two had wives) laid out a map of St. Louis and began to pray for a location.
God did show them the area—right where the interstates intersect. And his evolution as a church planter has led him to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC), North American Mission Board (NAMB), and International Mission Board (IMB).
“I’m not into building a monument, and I know that a lot of church planters wouldn’t say they are either, but if we only get focused on our church plant, then all we’re about doing is building a monument,” Oldham said. “I’m not into that. I believe Jesus called me to this city.
“We want to be a part of a movement. To be a part of a movement, you’ve got to have a system set up for the next one down the road, the next generation. And so we don’t care to give back—we know that we’re being given to. We have the Cooperative Program.
“We had churches this summer come and help fix up the building. We provided the supplies and they did all the work for free. Why? Because teamwork makes a dream work. They understand that we love Jesus. We want to make disciples, and they do, too. So we lock arms. We just want to see a movement of church plants, and we know that can’t happen if all we’re concerned with is my thing now. We want to be about our thing.
“I didn’t grow up in SBC life, and so I’ve never been jaded by anything weird and political that’s happened in the past. Everybody’s got a story that something happened to somebody. I don’t have any of that. I just say, ‘This is the way it’s set up, this is what they’re saying it’s supposed to be about, and I believe them.’ What I’ve seen so far is that. I’ve seen Southern Baptist churches come alongside of us and help us make disciples, help us plant.”
Oldham works exclusively in the city, where government-centric urban values are being lived out on the streets, due to a couple of things that he noticed early on in his ministry. First, he saw that people in their 20s and 30s were leaving church in droves. Second, these young adults were turning against the lordship of Jesus Christ while at the same time proclaiming that the church of their parents and grandparents was irrelevant. He found those trends to be quite disturbing.
“We do a thing called covenant membership, where everyone who becomes a member is covenanting to be involved, to be a missionary, full-fledged,” he said. “They’re committing to give, to serve, to attend. They are our leaders. They are missionaries in the city.”
With that approach comes multiplication. The new work across the Mississippi River is an example of how Plant St. Louis, a gospel-centered, church planting network that August Gate belongs to, is supposed to function. NAMB wants planters like Oldham to be key building blocks in the “Send St. Louis” strategy as they keep on depositing their missional DNA into the marketplace.
“It’s growing into a church plant,” Oldham said. “We have this strategy we call ‘Gather, Grow, Go.’ It’s a three-pronged strategy where we gather around the gospel on Sundays, we grow in the gospel through gospel communities, small groups of people who are meeting together and serving their neighborhoods, on mission to make disciples in their neighborhoods, and we go on mission and we gather together to do bigger things in a region or an area of the city.
“As we have a pocket of people from a different area of the city that are kind of growing together, we want them to eventually become a church plant. And so we did that in the Metro East. We had about 40 people coming from Illinois every week until eventually we grew it and we brought in a church planting resident.”