EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third of eight stories highlighting North American Mission Board missionaries as part of the 2010 Week of Prayer, March 7-14, and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions, with a goal of $70 million to help support Southern Baptists’ 5,300 North American missionaries.
WENTZVILLE, Mo. (BP)–North American Mission Board missionary Vivian McCaughan enters Hidden Valley Estates and thanks God for the changes she sees at the 200-unit apartment complex in Wentzville, Mo.
She points out the new community center, the tidy landscaping and the covered pavilion built on the dusty spot where outdoor baptisms once took place in a rented cattle tank.
But mostly, she thanks God for transformed lives. She remembers back almost 20 years ago when she first saw the apartment community as a suffering mass of humanity. In those days, the complex was infested with drugs and crime.
McCaughan got behind the work begun in 1990 by pastor Dan Hite and 45 members of Christian Family Fellowship, which started its ministry by serving a Thanksgiving meal to 230 residents.
The Twin Rivers Baptist Association had targeted the complex as a strategic focus area. In those early days, McCaughan taught children and women and helped to make connections with churches and resources.
“She became our greatest cheerleader,” Hite said.
By the next year at Thanksgiving, the new church served 350 people. It also ran a week-long Life Fair ministry, holding various life skills workshops for adults, VBS for the children and ended the week with a Christian concert. Hite said management noticed a significant drop in the number of complaint calls to the police and to the complex’s office that week — down from 40 calls to just two.
The complex manager later called Hite and said, “I don’t know what you did, but all I know is I want you here all the time.” That week, the church saw 123 professions of faith and would later rent a cattle tank for outdoor baptisms in the middle of the community.
After meeting for those first years at a nearby dance school, the church now meets in a community center built on 11 acres bought in 1996. The center serves the community’s 600 residents — consisting of a majority of single mothers and children — and offers daycare for infants up to 5-year-olds, an after-school reading and sports program, GED and pre-college tutoring, mentoring, cooking classes and counseling for fragile families.
Serving as the North American Mission Board’s multihousing/church planting missionary to Missouri and as the Missouri Baptist Convention’s missions/evangelism team leader, McCaughan sees a huge mission field in multihousing communities.
McCaughan is one of about 5,300 missionaries in the United States, Canada and their territories supported by the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions. She is among the North American Mission Board missionaries featured as part of the annual Week of Prayer, March 7-14. This year’s theme is “Live with Urgency: Share God’s Transforming Power.” The 2010 Annie Armstrong Easter Offering’s goal is $70 million, 100 percent of which benefits missionaries like McCaughan.
In 2007, McCaughan was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and she recently completed two years of chemotherapy following surgery and radiation. At first, McCaughan said she worried more about how her husband Jim would handle her cancer since his first wife — the mother of his three children — died from cancer. She said tiredness is the main side effect from the treatment, but she continues to work her busy schedule.
“I lost my hair and wear a wig now, but no big deal,” she said.
In Missouri, where 37 percent of its population of 5.9 million lives in multihousing, McCaughan’s job is not a small one. She said that every county in Missouri has some type of multihousing facility, whether an apartment or condominium complex, an inner-city housing project, a mobile home park, cluster homes, duplexes or blocks of homes that are subdivided. And 97 percent of the residents who live in multihousing are unchurched, according to a national NAMB study.
McCaughan said among these unchurched multihousing residents, studies show that generally 40 percent will go to a Bible study or worship experience on the property but only three or four percent of residents will attend a church off the grounds.
After ministries are launched on the multihousing properties, she said, “the ultimate goal is to hold Bible studies and worship experiences on the property and to have a long-term presence.
“The long-term presence on the property is a body of believers. It may not have a church-looking facility, but having that body of believers who come together on that property is our goal,” she said.
“The biggest fallacy in multihousing/church planting is that people think it can happen overnight, and they are willing to jump in and go into a community for a week, two weeks, maybe even for a year,” McCaughan said.
She stressed that missions is all about building relationships over time.
“In some instances, it may take five or 10 years for a church plant to take hold so that the residents see it as their church and their mission field. It’s a long-time process.”
But McCaughan has always had a passion for reaching people where they are.
“We [the church] have to figure out that we’ve got to go where the people are,” she said.
Though McCaughan was appointed as a missionary in 1988 by the former Home Mission Board, NAMB’s predecessor, it wasn’t the first time she had done missions in multihousing.
As an elementary school teacher, she soon realized many of her students had no church affiliation. She had some students who lived in a trailer home park, so she came up with the idea to hold backyard Bible clubs for three consecutive summers. The first summer, two summer missionaries helped her. They had 87 children, and 27 of them received Christ.
“Back then,” she said, “I didn’t even know what multihousing was.” Later, her pastor asked her to consider working in the field.
Today, McCaughan works with leaders and volunteers in 20 year-round, established multihousing ministries, and with another 30 or so properties with seasonal ministries.
Encouraging churches and leaders in the state’s 63 associations to see their opportunities to serve and to support them with resources for multihousing/church planting is one of McCaughan’s main responsibilities. Her other assignments include serving as coordinator for WMU/Women’s Missions and Ministry, Heartcall Evangelism and World Hunger. And she leads a ministry for wives of pastors and the state’s 56 directors of missions.
Her long to-do list usually rests on the console of her car — her “office” — as she logs about 3,000 miles monthly, roaming the state from her Missouri Baptist Convention office in Jefferson City and from her home in St. Charles, visiting state and associational ministries. She keeps in contact with DOMs and their wives through e-mails, phone calls and notes when she cannot visit in person.
McCaughan’s missionary plate is full, but all the work fits together and does not deter her, even though at times she admits that if she thinks too much about all of her responsibilities, she “may panic or even feel sick to her stomach.” That’s understandable.
But missions is what McCaughan was made for. She said it’s in her DNA. After all, her father was a pastor widely known in Missouri for his missions heart.
Before receiving her call to missions at 13, as a young girl, McCaughan traveled the highways and back roads of Missouri — much like she does now — only then she accompanied her father when he served on the state’s missions staff and as a church pastor.
Routinely, McCaughan makes the drive from Lebanon to Springfield to visit Bolivar Road Apartments. There, she meets with Winston Barnett, pastor and executive director of Lifebuilders Ministry, which in 2008 began an outreach program in the 90-unit complex largely populated by single mothers and children. Serving with volunteers from four local churches from the Greene County Baptist Association, the ministry runs a weekly Bible study for adults and children, averaging about 30 in attendance.
Like McCaughan, Barnett hopes that more churches will see multihousing communities as their mission field.
Letting people know she cares is important to McCaughan. “We have to earn the right to share Christ,” she said.
On a recent visit to a local restaurant McCaughan frequents with her husband, a waitress stopped by her table to tell her she was excited about the upcoming Sunday’s church service at her complex. After not having a church home for quite some time, the waitress planned to visit and consider joining the church.
The waitress then told McCaughan how she appreciated the couple’s encouragement and friendliness over the years, and she thanked her for the notes and Christian pamphlets the couple usually left behind with their tip.
One business card they left simply said, “Introducing Jesus to you is the best way I know to say thank you.”
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Laura Sikes is a photojournalist in Alexandria, Va. View video profiles of all 2010 Week of Prayer missionaries at www.anniearmstrong.com/2010video.
