Jeremy Everett will minister among residents of the West San Antonio neighborhood known as Alazan Creek thanks to a new partnership involving the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Baptist General Convention of Texas, Baptist Child & Family Services, San Antonio Baptist Association and Trinity Baptist Church. Photo by Craig Bird/BC&FS Communications

SAN ANTONIO – An innovative ministry partnership linking the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship with four other sponsors aims to empower – spiritually and economically – a San Antonio neighborhood with the designation as "one of the poorest zip codes in America."

Jeremy Everett, point person for the experiment in long-term Christian community development, is employed and supervised by Baptist Child & Family Services, supplied with an office by Trinity Baptist Church and additionally supported by the San Antonio Baptist Association, the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Fellowship.

"Over the past 50 years Christians – and government programs – have thrown a ton of money into the Alazan Creek area doing benevolence work, and there have been a lot of fantastic individual results. But the same problems exist," Everett explained. "Thank God for those who come to the rescue because if they don’t, then people die. But we want to try another, a parallel, approach. We want to shift from benevolence to empowerment, to help the community organize and utilize its own resources and to lead the way in solving its own problems."

Five Baptist organizations joined forces to promote Christian community development in an economically-ravaged San Antonio neighborhood last week. Signing the agreement were, from left, Jim Young, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas’ Mission Equipping Center; Debbie Ferrier, minister of missions at Trinity Baptist Church, San Antonio; Jeremy Everett, who will head up the program; Dena Dalton, Trinity’s director of community/lay mobilization; JoAnn Hopper, Trinity’s mission team leader; Barbara Baldridge, CBF’s Global Missions coordinator; Janie Cook, executive director of Teen and Youth Services for Baptist Child and Family Services; and Camille Simmons, coordinator of ministry missions for the San Antonio Baptist Association. Photo by Lance Wallace/CBF Communications

The Fellowship’s participation began with "our effort to respond to the missional desires of a local congregation (Trinity)," said Tom Ogburn, CBF’s associate coordinator for volunteer and partnership missions. "As the partnership grew, it has invited us to work side-by-side with an excellent group of Baptist organizations for the sake of transformational ministry that can have a profound impact on the life of those living in the West Side."

The Fellowship contributed $10,000 to the initial program funding. Additionally, the Friday night offering at CBF’s We Love Missions Conference in San Antonio was designated for the effort.

Everett’s goal "is to support activities which highlight the needs of the most vulnerable and distressed and promote self-reliance, ethnic harmony and development," he said. "The method, of course, will be biblically based and rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We can take courage in the fact that God has been doing good work in this community before we arrived and that God will continue to do good work after we leave."

CBF is a fellowship of Baptist Christians and churches who share a passion for the Great Commission and a commitment to Baptist principles of faith and practice. The Fellowship’s mission is to serve Christians and churches as they discover and fulfill their God-given mission.