SLIDELL, HAMMOND – Two congregations that started meeting as mission churches before Katrina, weathered the storm and in recent days both constituted into full-fledged church status.
Thompson Road Baptist Church in Slidell, formerly known as Cornerstone Baptist Church, constituted Jan. 17. Randy Boyett is pastor. It meets in a worship center and educational space constructed by the Louisiana Baptist Mission Builders.
Crossroads Community Church, which meets in a renovated former movie theater across the street from Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, constituted Jan. 31. Asah Hudgins is pastor.
THOMPSON ROAD
This congregation started in 2003 as a Bible study. After Katrina, the mission church withered from 45 people to six, but they forged ahead with the help of Calvary Baptist Church in Slidell, Louisiana Baptist Convention, Georgia Barnett state missions offering, and the Louisiana Baptist Builders, who constructed a 7,000 square-foot church house on a well-traveled road southwest of downtown.
Today, Thompson Road has an ongoing ministry to an orphanage in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, across the border from Laredo, Texas. Thompson Road members use their Mardi Gras break to minister there each year. The church also financially and hands-on supports a ministry to families who have children dependent on technology to live, called Sick Kids Need Involved People, or SKIP.
Thompson Road also prepares a meal once every two months for about 300 homebound and homeless people, and uses the time between meals to gather the food used in the meals. The church also is a relay station for the Operation Christmas Child shoebox ministry, and last year five people went from the church to help in the Boone, N.C., processing facility.
All this in addition to giving 10 percent each month to missions through the Cooperative Program, and 2 percent through St. Tammany Baptist Association.
“We have two sayings at Thompson Road Baptist Church,” Boyett said. “One, ‘we’re a work in progress.’ Two, ‘it’s a God-thing.’”
Being a constituted church positions Thompson Road in the future to help start other churches, the pastor said.
CROSSROADS
This church started in 2002 with a home Bible study. Its public launch was April 4, 2004.
Today about 150 people worship each Sunday at Crossroads.
“We wanted to constitute so we can go on and plant other churches, and help revitalize churches that have gotten down,” said Asah Hudgins, pastor since March 2007. “We’re able to fully support ourselves now; we no longer need the supplements” from the Louisiana Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Program. “We are so thankful for the supplements that we have received.”
Crossroads focuses on small groups, relationships, life-changing worship and expository teaching as it reaches out to, through and past the college campus to the entire community, Hudgins said.
It does have a bit of a “college church” stigma, in part because it met for five years in the building owned by the Southeastern University’s Baptist Collegiate Ministries organization, the pastor added.
Now that they’re in the former theater, they have just about everything they need, except for a baptistry. They use a portable one owned by the association.
“Things are going so well,” Hudgins said. “A third of our members are college students and we are thankful for what God has and is doing there, but our focus is all generations, all ages, all races. The church is for all God’s people.”