Christian Unity Ministries

H2H

Unity News

August, 2005

Support Group Ministry

Reaches Hurting People

[He] comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
II Corinthians 1:4

In January of this year, First Baptist Church, San Antonio launched Heart 2 Heart, a support/recovery group ministry that is turning Tuesday nights at FBC into a night of small group fellowship, Bible Study, prayer and healing. There is a large variety of topics around which individual groups meet, including Divorce Care, Divorce Care for Kids, Grief Care, H.O.P.E. (for family and friends of homosexuals), Body & Soul (for eating disorders), Men of God (for sexual or pornography addiction), Shelter from the Storm (for victims of sexual abuse) and Trusting God’s People Again (for people wounded by the church).

The realization for church leadership is that this is yet another track of small groups for people to use to connect with each other around the Word of God. The more opportunities a church gives for that to happen, the better. In fact, the leadership of Heart 2 Heart envisions a day in the not-so-distant future when Tuesday nights at FBC will look a lot like Sunday mornings at FBC—with hallways buzzing with hundreds or even thousands of people there to meet with their small group and deal specifically and practically with a very real pain in their life.

The truth is, the pews of America today are filled with people who are in too much emotional pain to even begin thinking about ministering to others. Their pain simply prevents any thoughts of fulfilling a larger purpose such as ministry or mission. If the church did nothing but find a way to connect with those people and re-engage them in their walk with the Lord, it would have accomplished much!

Bringing healing through God’s Word and re-engaging those people in ministry is exactly what FBC leadership hopes to accomplish through Heart 2 Heart.

The Birth of a Ministry

Almost as important as that healing, is the impressive way in which this lay-led ministry came about at FBC. It was born in the hearts of laity and recognized by a pastor who sees God moving among his congregation.

Several years ago, Laurie Wilson, one of the church accompanists and a divorcee herself, began a Divorce Care ministry at the church. That ministry has done well, but Laurie always had a vision of something larger.

Over recent years, church members began to come to the pastor, Don Guthrie, with various ministry ideas: one with a desire to help parents whose children had entered the homosexual lifestyle, another man whose heart was for men with an addiction to pornography, and still another who saw the pain of people wounded by the church. None of these burdens were necessarily on the heart of the pastor—at least any more so than any of the thousands of other burdens with which he deals regularly—but he could see the common thread running through all of these burdens.

Guthrie called many of the people he knew in the church who had a heart for emotionally hurting people of one kind or another and put them in a room together to begin dreaming about what could be. One year later, Heart 2 Heart was born, thanks to God’s working in the hearts of a few lay people, and to Don Guthrie’s awareness of God’s activity in his congregation. In this case, “pastoral vision” had less to do with what lies out on the horizon and more to do with paying attention to what God was doing across the landscape of the congregation.

And so, a ministry was born. We’ll check back in a few years and see what Tuesday nights at FBC San Antonio looks like!

Heart 2 Heart is a ministry of San Antonio’s First Baptist Church. For more information on this ministry, go to www.heart2heartsa.org or contact First Baptist Church at 515 McCullough, San Antonio, Texas 78215, (210)226-0363.

___________________________________________________