MANKATO, Minn./COLUMBIA, Mo. – Columbia’s Anthem Church is a fairly young Missouri Baptist church that’s putting an emphasis on missions, missions training, and church planting. Though it was a church plant itself just seven years ago, it’s already starting to grow other churches and recently sent members to Mankato, Minn., to aid a new work in the hometown of Minnesota State University.
A member of the Heart of Missouri Baptist Association, Anthem is also a Salt Network church. The network plants churches and student ministries in university cities.
Don Combs, Anthem’s Deacon of Missions, explained that his church was founded through the network, so members wanted to help plant the new Great Oaks Church in Mankato.
Anthem sent a five-person team there in June to do initial community outreach, then a 12-person team in July to serve the new church as its core members met.
July “was the very first gathering of (Great Oak’s) core team,” Combs said. “It allowed them to be all together and to start laying the foundation of what they are, about who they are.”
The meeting also allowed the 40 Great Oak members to see and use their new space in a Christian academy for the first time.
Anthem members “basically did servant work,” Combs said, which included providing childcare, meals, labor, and community outreach while the Great Oaks members met, trained, and planned.
The new church members had come from different areas of the country through the Salt Network and the Anthem group helped with home projects such as landscaping, structural improvements, and cleaning spaces.
Before the July team’s arrival, Anthem’s smaller team “did a lot of the legwork and the planning for when we arrived,” Combs said.
“One of the things they were very involved in over the summer is what I would call ‘evangelistic pickleball.’ They found some pickleball courts where a lot of young people gathered.”
“They’d start playing pickleball but then God opened doors for conversations. So, it was a great outreach.”
Combs said his team also performed community outreach.
“It was so hot in the afternoons so we went to the mall and went walking and looking for people to have conversations with. There were several spiritual conversations, most of them fairly short, but a few of them deep.”
He said the Anthem team prayer-walked on the MSU campus and in local neighborhoods. It also served the Salvation Army where members “got to have very long, in-depth conversations with the volunteers and workers there.”
Combs said the church planting in Mankato is similar to how Salt Network plants churches. The Columbia congregation was sponsored by Candeo Church in Cedar Falls, Iowa – another Salt Network member.
“Candeo has established several churches,” Combs said. “Candeo started our church here in Columbia about seven years ago. There were about 30-35 people from Iowa that came down here from their families, got jobs, and established the church.”
Combs said the Salt Network plants in communities with a student population of 10,000 so it can create a college ministry—the Salt Company—as well as a new church.
In Columbia, the Salt Company meets on Thursday nights.
“That’s when the college students gather for a time of worship,” Combs said. “There will be a time of teaching from the Scriptures and a time of networking. They’re also very involved in leadership training.”
Those meetings have over 300 students attend. On Sunday mornings Anthem Church has 250-300 in worship.
“I just love this (ministry) pattern, “ Combs said.
Missions and church planting are priorities for Combs and his wife, Diane, who were IMB missionaries for 13 years.
“For people to hear God’s call to ‘go’ and then obey, that is so richly meaningful,” Combs said. “‘Go’ means across the street, across the community, across several states, or across the world.”
At Anthem, he and Diane oversee the church’s missions efforts.
He said that means educating and training members in missions activities. Explaining who Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon were and their importance to missions is part of the education, as well as explaining the Cooperative Program, he said.
Each summer, Anthem sends short-term missions teams out for seven to eight weeks of service. Previously, teams served in southeast Asia and Ireland besides domestic locations.
Anthem’s women’s group supports missions through education and prayer, and helped with the MK ReEntry Retreat in August at Lake of the Ozarks for the high school graduates of international missionaries.
And Anthem will continue its church planting efforts. It has members planning to move to Knoxville to help the Salt Network plant a ministry in Tennessee next fall.
“Our folk are learning from, and growing into, living a missionary lifestyle,” Combs said.