Aaron Colyer: Okay, on with Scott Flynt from Mississippi. Pastor Scott, just to confirm one more time is it okay to be recording this interview?
Scott Flynt: Yes it is.
Aaron Colyer: All right. Let me read our ethics statement. It's important that we get this out of the way. I'm really just looking for your affirmation on your consent to use the information you give. And so, let me read it.
Aaron Colyer: Agreement to Participate: The research in which you are about to participate is designed to determine the critical elements of your church's recent revitalization. This research is being conducted by a six-man research team pursuing doctoral degrees at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for purposes of understanding and encouraging these elements among other churches. In this research, you will be asked to describe your church's experiences. During the interview portion of the research, notes will be kept for your specific church revitalization, which may appear in the publication of the research. If you desire any of the information given to remain confidential, please inform the
interviewer. Participation in this study is totally voluntary and you are free to withdraw from the study at any time. By your completion of this Interview, you are giving informed consent for the use of your responses in this research.
Scott Flynt: That's perfectly okay.
Aaron Colyer: Well I appreciate you doing it. Let me just tell you one more time, for the record, thank you for getting back and thank you for participating in this interview. The reason you were selected was from that survey that we sent out, the church revitalization survey, on it you marked evangelism as highly important. Then later in the evangelism questions about are members prepared to share the gospel, you said strongly agree. Are they engaging often in gospel conversations you said agree. Then in regards to training you're training once a month and actually practicing, which I think is so important. So, my emphasis in the church revitalization research is the connection to church revitalization and evangelism. So, that's why you're selected to work with me. And I just, again, I appreciate you being willing to do this.
Aaron Colyer: So there's five primary questions that I'm going to ask and if we're slowing down, I may push you forward. It's important to make sure all those questions are asked in every interview. Then if I'm wanting to probe a little deeper, I may say, tell me more about that. That's the structure and my goal is to get you off the phone in about half an hour, so you can go to your (inaudible) and activities.
Aaron Colyer: First, give me some more context. How long you've been there at Fellowship Baptist. Your pastoral tenure there, but then your overall pastoral tenure, as well. How old are you? And then how are things going in this revitalization process? Your church was identified, saw a
questions.
Scott Flynt: I'm 58 years old. When I came here, the church was, we had gone through a hurricane back in 2005 and it was about seven years later that I came here. Six years later, the building needed some major renovation.
We actually tore down our old sanctuary building. We have built a new one, modernized it a little bit. During that particular time we had to move out it. The old building was condemned and we had to get out.
Taylorsville is a small town of 1500 people. Not a lot of reason to come to Taylorsville. we're about 40 miles north of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. If you get a map out you can find us on the map. Not a lot of industry, in fact, there's only one paper mill here, a pulp wood type place. The power company has a big substation here and also the main office for Southern Pine. But there's not a lot of reasons for people to come to Taylorsville.
Scott Flynt: The ones who graduate high school from the local school, they typically leave and they don't come back. So, it's really hard for a church in this environment to see growth. And during that time we met in our Fellowship Hall for a year and a half while we were going through the rebuilding. There are some legalities. It was an insurance claim there was damage in the hurricane, Hurricane Katrina. It took a while to get
everything in order. We met in our Fellowship Hall and during that time we actually saw some growth. Yeah, meeting in the Fellowship Hall.
That was quite exciting. We, on Sunday evenings after church, would convert the Fellowship Hall back into a Fellowship Hall so we could have our activities in there after Wednesday night supper. After that we would convert it back into a Sunday worship activity place. We put a piano, an organ, set up a little choir loft. That was really exciting during that time.
Scott Flynt: We got into the new building. We've seen a lot of people come back into the church. Former members or members that had just quit coming to church for whatever reason. During that time, my goal has always been outreach evangelism, sharing the gospel.
Scott Flynt: In the last year, year and a half, several of our church members have started riding motorcycles with an outfit called Hellfighters, located in Laurel, Mississippi, which is about 15 miles from here. That's the nondenominational motorcycle outreach. They also have a recovery center and our Church financially supports that. I go there on Monday nights and help with the Bible study for men.
Scott Flynt: I'm just saying that to say this, that has transformed, our involvement with it, has transformed a number of people in our church wanting to reach out more. In the last year we have talked about starting our own motorcycle ministry. A lot of people ride motorcycles around here.
We've got good weather year round for that. So, we started with what we call the Faith Riders, a motorcycle ministry based just outside of
Jacksonville, Florida. We commissioned a chapter back in July. We had been busy on a monthly basis even before that having . . . how to share your testimony, how to reach out to people. The motorcycle ministry has actually drawn even more people into that and we meet once a month for a training during our monthly meeting.
Scott Flynt: And then also we have just monthly, like I said, with Taylorsville being a small community, you don't have to visit, go out and look for new people every week to get everybody covered. You can just about do that in a week. We're going in once a month on the third Tuesday of each month and we have about 10, 12, maybe 13, 14 people show up to go out and visit. We visit church members and prospects in the community. I get information from our Baptist Convention Board, the demographics around our area, and we just concentrate within about a mile and a half, two miles of where our church is. We go to see people, Church members naturally, that need to be visited, but also non-church goers in that area, because we can do that. That's pretty good for what we do. But we keep teaching people in our church to see the importance of that.
Scott Flynt: And also they're learning. I don't believe Pastor, and I am going to tone it down just a little bit, but I don't think anybody in this church, up until about four months ago, had really shared their testimony outside of the church itself. And I say that regrettably, but I believe that's the actual truth. But we have done a lot of sharing since school got out, back in May, over here. We have gone out and we have shared the gospel. Even this Friday, we're going over to the high school, the local high school, feeding the football team their pregame meal and sharing the gospel with the football team.
Aaron Colyer: I get the privilege of having interviewed these pastors. You're my 13th interview. Guys all over the country, all of them have experienced revitalization in their churches and all of them have indicated evangelism as a priority. Everyone has a story like that, just God has caused a fresh fire in our church and it's fun. It's just, I get to be on the part of hearing that. I mean, of course there's an academic reason, but it's personally, it's fun to hear that,
Scott Flynt: We just went through our nominating committee process for our new church here and we saw people wanting to work in some classes and do some things like that and that was a first. People volunteering. If you need me, I'll do that. If you need me in the nursery, I'll be happy to do that. You know, those kinds of things.
Scott Flynt: A lot of times after seven years, I've known a lot of my friends who have pastored after five, six, seven years, they started thinking, well, I'm fixing to go find me another church. They've pretty much had a gut full. I'm 58 years old. I'm in pretty good health. I like to do a lot of stuff. This could be my last church. It may not be. I don't know what God has in store for me. But if it is, things are going in a direction where a pastor would love to see it go. Now we've got 200 members. I've got a list we're going through to see if on that list of members who is still in the community who is still around and who's not. Some may have moved off. If there somewhere else we're going to ask them, to send a letter to them, and go through that process of sort of cleaning up our church roles so we know who is and who's not in the area. The church has never done that before.
Scott Flynt: I'm a little bit of a renegade or rebel in doing things. I don't mind taking chances and doing things differently and trying new things to get people.
One of the next things that we're going to do, and I don't know if this
implementing some differences in our worship service, in our worship style. We're getting a lot of younger people coming into our church. I think we need to address that. It is not going to be well received by a lot of people, because we are an old church, 148 years old. We were talking about that Sunday, but there's a way to get through that moving slowly and diligently with it but not giving up. I think we can cross that bridge and and see even greater growth in our church.
Aaron Colyer: One thing I missed, how many total years of ministry experience do you have?
Scott Flynt: Oh, 12.
Aaron Colyer: 12 years. That's one of the things that I'm finding is a lot of the themes that are coming out of these interviews is God's been doing this in our church. It's consistent whether you've been in ministry for 30 years or some guys have only been in ministry for five years and that says
something about the research we're doing. So, you pretty much answered my first question, what was being done to develop a culture of
evangelism? And you talked about the outreach. You talked about that, the motorcycle riders, people sharing their testimony going out on Tuesday nights. You talked about some people for the first time in the last four months have been sharing their testimonies. All of those things are amazing. So let me ask you the second question. Were there specific strategies and methods for training members and what tools are you using right now to share the gospel?
Scott Flynt: As far as training? Of course, you can find all kinds of stuff from Lifeway. Before we started the Faith Riders ministry, motorcycle
ministry, and you don't want to be a motorcycle rider to be a part of Faith Riders, that's the neat thing about it. For the last year, year and a half, I have been looking at it their plan, their mission. They have training tools, how to share your testimony, how to witness to people. We use that.
They've got videos and we use that in our monthly training, where you can share your testimony in three minutes and not have to bog somebody down for a half hour or an hour like you've got to preach to them, you know?
Aaron Colyer: That's good. If I was to come to you right now as a church member and I've not seen those videos and say, Pastor Scott, there's a guy at work, I've been trying to talk to about Jesus and I'm having a hard time knowing what to say. What tools would you put in my hand aside from those videos? If you just said, here's something, here's a way I would engage him.
Scott Flynt: Well first off, that three minute testimony that we use, the first 45 seconds is just tell what your life was like before Jesus Christ came into your life. You don't have to tell a big, big story or anything like that. The next 45 seconds tell what it was like when Jesus was dealing with you.
The Holy Spirit was convicting you of your lostness and your need for salvation. Then the last minute, minute and a half, tell what life has been like since you trusted Jesus Christ. You don't have the perfect life, right?
That faith, that trust that what Jesus Christ did for you on the cross and what he's doing for you now, getting eternity ready for you, your home in
heaven. I believe that to be the truth, and it's all about faith. That's why we call it Faith Riders.
Scott Flynt: We use that and we've got what we call hand-to-hand evangelism. We use our hand to go through, once they say, well, I want to know more about the plan of salvation. We teach our people the first thing is that God has always had a plan for everybody to go to heaven. We use our thumb on our hand to point to point to heaven. But there's one thing that prevents us from going to heaven and that's sin. There can be no sin in heaven. So the next thing I put three fingers up that represents Jesus in the middle. He's on the cross.
Scott Flynt: We put our other hand across these three fingers to make like a t. It says Jesus died on the cross and he hung with thieves. And you know, Jesus was perfect. There was no sin in him. There was none, he was not a criminal. One of those men on one side admitted that he was perfect, not a criminal and did not deserve to be there. The other man cursed him and we go through that. You know that picture, using our hands, to help us go through the plan of salvation. Then we use our ring finger and I'm pointing to my right ring finger, we make a commitment. We use that.
You have to make a commitment to Jesus Christ. As little as our little finger is, when go to the mustard seed, the grain of a mustard seed and how small our faith can be to enter into that salvation experience with Jesus Christ.
Scott Flynt: We have to make that commitment by faith. And once we make that commitment to Jesus Christ, we hold our hand out and say we're in the palm of his hand. We can't jump out of it. We can't be pulled out. The wind can't blow us out of it or anything like that. We're secure in his hands once we make that commitment. Of course, that's all in the video.
That is what we share in our testimonies is that hand-to-hand evangelism.
We go through in all of our monthly meetings. We tell them, you don't have to have a bunch of Bible verses. You don't have to preach to them or anything like that. Always have a few, you know, like John 3:16, the most famous verse in the Bible, Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23, Romans 10:13, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved". Just a few verses that you have to have that you can help somebody
experience the salvation of Jesus Christ. We try to keep it just as simple as possible.
Aaron Colyer: I love it. Let me ask you this next question. How do you and others in the church leadership team develop a system of celebrating victories when it comes to having evangelism as a priority?
Scott Flynt: Explain a little more.
Aaron Colyer: So, when I say celebrating victories, I'm saying opportunities for the church to hear positive examples of people sharing their faith. How is that done? Is it done regularly? Are there modes like testimony times or video times?
Scott Flynt: A lot of times on Sunday nights, we're relaxed on Sunday nights, during