May 6, 2019
By: Dwayne Page
Outreach Baptist Church in Smithville is living up to its name.
After only 38 months in existence, the church has grown in membership, attendance, and its outreach to the community and is planning for a new home.
Following the morning services Sunday at the church’s current location in the old Dogwood Plaza Shopping Center on South Congress Boulevard, Pastor Nathan Thomason and the congregation went across the road to break ground for construction on the first phase of a new worship center.
Thomason, the focus of WJLE’s “Preacher Feature” this week, said plans are to have the first of the three phase building project completed by Easter Sunday next year.
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“We are currently in a rental facility at Dogwood Plaza and it’s been an awesome building but the time has come for us to move to our own facility. We started in February 2016. Our core launch group was 12-15 people and that has grown exponentially. Our rough average on a weekly basis is around 270 to 275 but on Easter Sunday we had over 400 people in attendance for our worship services and we give all the glory to the Lord for that. Jesus said if I be lifted up I will draw all men to myself. Outreach just focuses on lifting up Jesus. Our mission statement is that we introduce sinners to our Savior and to reach people to know and follow Jesus”.
The new worship center will be located on an 18 acre site at the corner of Vaughn Lane and South Congress Boulevard.
“We purchased the property a couple of years ago and it’s already paid off. We have worked real hard and the folks have sacrificed. We’ve also raised some extra funds and had some architectural work done and Sunday following the morning service we broke ground on the site work for our new facility which is the first phase of our project. Our goal is to have it completed by Easter of 2020. We are waiting for the state fire marshal’s office to approve our plans. Once those are approved we will begin with the construction phase. Right now we’re getting the site work and compacting done to make sure that everything is ready for the building to start,” said Thomason.
“The first phase will consist mainly of our new worship center. It will be north of 12,000 square feet and will seat 475 people. It will have a large foyer space, seven meeting rooms and a great room and there will be plenty of space outside for the children to go out and play and do other things. The second phase will be an education building and the third phase will be a gymnasium,” he continued.
Thomason, whose father B.J. and grandfather Bobby Thomason are also ministers, never thought he would follow in their footsteps but he began to feel the call after working for the sheriff’s department.
“I grew up in a pastor’s home and my grandfather was a pastor so I had a great respect for the pastorate but I never saw myself as a pastor. I worked at the sheriff’s department and loved my job and who I worked for. I just wanted to do that for the rest of my life. But by seeing some of the things I was exposed to at the sheriff’s department it put a burden on my heart for the ministry to tell folks about Christ. I answered that call though it took me a little while. I have been in the ministry now since August 2011. I started filling in at churches and later took a church in 2012 at Lebanon. We saw God do many things there and I had a wonderful relationship with those folks but I felt a strong call to come back home and begin a fresh work and that is where we are at today,” he said.
Thomason and his wife Ashlee have two children, 7 year old Grady and Emma who is almost 5 years old. “God has given me a fantastic wife and children who support me. One of the strong points about Outreach is our children’s ministry and my wife Ashlee has a tremendous heart for children so God gave me a spouse and family that supports the calling of pastor on my life,” Thomason continued.
Outreach seeks to serve all ages especially children through its Awana, Vacation Bible School, and student ministry programs.
“One of the major things we do on Wednesday nights is a children’s program called Awana. Its based on 2 Timothy 2:15 that says approved workers are never ashamed. It’s about scriptural memorization . We have over 100 children that attend our Awana programs. We run three bus routes in the county and city and bus in several children. It’s also supported by an army of volunteers. We feed all of those children a full meal every Wednesday night. It’s an opportunity to get into a lot of homes and get a lot of un-churched kids in church that night. Our student ministry also meets on Wednesday nights and they run at around 30-35 students,” said Thomason.
“Vacation Bible School is coming up too and I tell people if it weren’t for Vacation Bible School there probably wouldn’t be an Outreach Baptist Church because my dad was saved through VBS ministries which led to the salvation of most of my family. I’m big on reaching kids through VBS because that’s how God won our family to the Lord”.
“Our Vacation Bible School is coming up the first week of June and we’re excited. We’re already registering kids. Last year we had 487 registered for Bible School. That’s workers and children. We saw over 30 saved. That’s our big push,” he said.
Outreach is also involved in mission work, door to door evangelism, and other community service ministries.
“We’re always ministering somewhere. We do life groups on Sunday mornings. They are like Sunday school but each life group is responsible for a Sunday night of the month so the men’s class may be assigned this Sunday night. We go to the mission in Crossville. We support a drug rehab there. We do door to door evangelism a few times a year. We do free yard sales and a lot of kingdom work. We lead several foreign mission trips a year. We see God do a lot of things from right here in our Jerusalem to the whole world. Outreach is a church that never sleeps,” he said.
Thomason said statistics show that most people in DeKalb County are not affiliated with any church so the need for outreach is great.
“We have 20,000 people who live in this county and 70-80% of them don’t go to church regularly and most of them don’t have a relationship with Christ. When we began to think about starting a church I researched the 2010 census and found that 50% of DeKalb Countians marked no religious affiliation so that tells us 10,000 people in this county don’t even affiliate with a religion or a relationship with Christ. We are here as another place. If it’s not our church go somewhere that preaches the Bible. That’s our message. We just want to reach people,” he said.
“Our Sunday morning worship is at 10 a.m. and Wednesday night is at 7 p.m. We have children’s classes available for all ages during those times. We invite you to come visit us but If you already have a church be active there. Our prayer is that all the churches in Smithville will thrive. We’re not here to build a castle. We are here to build a kingdom,” Thomason concluded.