DELTA, Colo. – An uncommon number of youth have become ministry leaders and missionaries from one small-town church in western Colorado.
The former youth – some now full-time campus ministers with CRU, others formerly working with YoungLife, YWAM, serving indigenous people groups and in full-time ministry with churches – have served and are serving in places like Alaska, Panama, Michigan, Cambodia, Kenya and Pennsylvania.
“We try to be a mission-minded church,” Pastor Greg Teel told Baptist Press about Calvary Baptist Church in Delta, where up to 150 people attend Sunday services each week. “We give our 10 percent to the Cooperative Program each week, another 3 percent to Uncompahgre Baptist Association, and then we branch out from there.”
Calvary Delta routinely sends its teens to summer (and winter, for the first time this year) camps at Ponderosa, the state convention’s retreat and conference center in eastern Colorado. Youth and adults participate in several community ministries in Delta, a small agricultural community of nearly 10,000 on the Western Slope of Colorado.
The youth serve the local homeless shelter during the holidays. They engage in service projects like cleaning up local trash in abandoned lots and painting over graffiti on business walls. They also have hosted an annual car show, participate in local city Christmas parades, fill about 100 Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes – the church is a regional collection center for about 850 shoeboxes– and otherwise serve the community in Christmas musicals and productions, such as last year’s “Scrooge” play and this year’s musical extravaganza, “A Baby Changes Everything.”
The church’s youth (and adults) have participated in short term mission trips to build homes in Mexico through Casa Por Cristo, cooperating with Vista Grande (Southern) Baptist Church in Colorado Springs. It’s been a fruitful partnership that also includes missions in Ireland. Yet, the real key to youth development has been the cooperation between the home and the church, the pastor said.
“We have great kids from great homes, a great church, and a great community here in Delta,” Teel said. “That produces godly youth with a heart for Jesus. We have really good families who have raised their kids in the Lord and in cooperation with the church, and the collaboration between the two is good for their spiritual life.”
Teel also credited former youth director Nikki Short, who was raised in the church and went to Louisiana College to be trained for ministry. She served two years as a summer intern for the church and then became their full-time youth director for four years.
“Nikki was an excellent Bible teacher and very relational,” Teel said. “She encouraged the youth to find in the Scriptures what God wanted for their lives,”
Calvary Delta has a long-time connection with Grace Baptist Church in Killarney, Ireland. The pastor and the missionary, Mark Webb, were students together at the Rocky Mountain Campus of Gateway Seminary. The church plans another mission trip there next summer, where they’ll help with Grace Baptist’s walking trail ministry and children’s ministry and share the Gospel in local pubs through music ministry.
The pastor also went to seminary with a man who today is an IMB missionary in a closed country in Central Asia, whom the church supports financially and in prayer, as it does with Bethel House in Monterrey, Mexico. The church has sent two teams to Monterrey and supports the Bethel House’s efforts with sex-trafficked girls and young women.
Calvary Delta has been a planting church twice, in nearby Hotchkiss and in Delta. The church in Hotchkiss is still thriving, and the other church planter is now a pastor of another former Southern Baptist church plant in nearby Olathe.
“I feel strongly about not losing churches,” Teel said. “We need new church plants but we also need the revitalization of churches. It costs so much in money, manpower, prayer and everything to replant a church.
“It’s better pumping effort into giving new life than allowing it to die and replanting,” said Teel, co-director of The Pastoral Institute of the Western Slope, a pastoral trade school for those unable to go to seminary. “We have decided this is important: for God to raise up people here, train them and revitalize churches so we don’t lose them.”
Teel just completed his second term as president of the Colorado Baptist General Convention, and a total of seven years as an officer. Through that service and through Calvary Delta, his first pastorate, Teel has seen the Cooperative Program in action, and the benefit of partnering together.
“It’s easy for pastors to feel they’re all alone with their problems, the issues they’re facing with their churches,” Teel said. “With us, men don’t have to feel they’re on an island, and we work together for solutions.
“There’s good work going on in Colorado,” the pastor continued. “Cooperation among the churches is becoming better, the cooperation among the associations is coming together, Mike [Executive Director Michael Proud Jr.] is always casting vision, has developed regional directors who care for the churches, and all of that has been a great thing for Colorado.
“Colorado now has a lot more of these pastoral development pipelines and discipleship pathways and that’s been huge; it’s been a gamechanger,” Teel said, referring to the partnerships between the Colorado Baptist General Convention, the Rocky Mountain Campus of Gateway Seminary, and NAMB. “These partnerships are the Cooperative Program in action. They are critical for the future of the church. It’s getting back to the book of Acts, raising leaders from within and cooperating together for God’s Kingdom work. We are better together.”
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