[1]EL PASO, Texas – Cielo Vista Church is in the middle of a summer season that is recognizable to most large Southern Baptist churches. The summer will include an evangelistic vacation Bible school, student camps and mission trips to Cambodia and the Philippines. The church’s weekly calendar is full of ministries including men’s and women’s Bible studies in Spanish and English, Celebrate Recovery and collegiate gatherings.
Church leaders credit the energizing effect on the decision to clarify their mission and values a few years back. The church values are:
- Biblical truth alive in love
- The power of prayer
- Life-changing generosity
- Unity in diversity
- “Before you’re ready”
“We recognized that God had been blessing, so we said, ‘Let’s sharpen the pencil and prepare for another 70 or 100 or 200 years, unless the Lord comes first,’” said Charlie Arellano, the church’s executive pastor and men’s ministry pastor.
Using its core values as a guide led the church to new ministries such as Ship Builders, an outreach to local schools that provides everything from backpacks to mentors and tutors. But it also led to some changes that moved away from established ministries, including a shift to a new children’s apologetics curriculum.
‘Just pray’
Lead Pastor Larry Lamb said prayer has been part of Cielo Vista’s culture throughout its 72-year history.
“We just pray about everything,” Lamb said. “It’s not complicated. I don’t think anybody has to have a degree of Semitic languages to understand what prayer’s about. Just pray. Pray with people. Pray for people. Believe God. Fast and pray. Do extended times of fasting and believe God can change things through prayer.”
Prayer can be found all over the church. Lamb said prayer teams gather during the decision time in worship services, groups often gather in the hallways to pray for one another, and a church member he didn’t know well stopped him in the hall just to tell him she was praying for him. Prayer has also become a natural and intentional part of the myriad weekly ministries of the church.
“If we have an event, prayer is not just an aside or something you do to kick things off or to transition, but it’s steeped in prayer. [Prayer happens] beforehand and then during and after,” Missions and Evangelism Pastor Seth Brooks said.
A pursuit of unity
Lamb has served Cielo Vista since 2009, first as teaching pastor and then as lead pastor beginning in 2017. He knew the church well and had a good opportunity to observe other leaders of the church as he sat with the elders before becoming lead pastor.
Lamb’s tenure included a time when leaders recognized a need to unify their vision to move the church forward. The result of this renewed harmony was a “streamlining” of decision making – not so much always agreeing but having the possibility of peace even when church members do not see things the same way.
“Hey, we’re not going to agree on everything, but we can still live together and have respect for each other,” Arellano said. “That’s a big one. And this leaks out from leadership. Like Pastor Larry said, it’s from the pastoral staff to our staff to our deacons, our elders. Everyone understands this ….”
Nine years down the road, the merging of the church’s core values into its culture has fostered a sense of freedom within the staff as well as growth in major ministries such as the weekly men’s gathering, which has grown from around 40 to more than 100.
“If you’re given the authority to carry something out, you know you’ve got the authority to do it,” Brooks, a relatively young member of the pastoral staff, said. “You’ve got the freedom and the room to do it and even to make mistakes.”
An encouragement to others
“I don’t want to give you any illusion that this church is somehow connected to the very gates of heaven – that we have got it all wired together,” Lamb said. “I wish we had more people involved in ministry, in our lay ministry. I wish more people were getting saved. I wish sometimes when I preach, the preaching’s a little better.”
But something seems to be going right during this season of Cielo Vista’s ministry. Lamb, Arellano, and Brooks have served in multiple capacities and they’ve seen the state of the church from more than one perspective. Their hope is that even doing the hard things in church leadership might be a positive encouragement to other churches.
“I don’t care how large the church is or how small the church is,” Lamb said. “I don’t care if it’s a community church somewhere out by Amarillo, my hometown, wherever. [I hope] some pastor could read an article [like this] and [be inspired to] say … ‘I want to be the man God wants me to be, and I want to deepen my focus in prayer, and I want to deepen the track of unity in this church.’”
This article originally appeared in the Southern Baptist TEXAN [2].
[3]
