Alabama Baptist plants church in Maine; entrusts ministry to New Englander

Alabama Baptist plants church in Maine; entrusts ministry to New Englander

Twelve years ago, Augusta, Maine, was the only capital city in America without a Southern Baptist church.

That’s why Chris Johnson and his family left where he was serving as youth minister at First Baptist Church, Albertville, to become a North American Mission Board (NAMB) church planter there in 2005.

“It’s a very secular, unchurched area of the nation,” Johnson said. “We expected to find people cold and hard to the gospel, but instead what we found were people who were open, just nobody was telling them.”

So as God moved in hearts, Johnson planted Kennebec Community Church (KCC), Augusta.

“Mission teams from all over Alabama from Birmingham to Boaz came to help us get the church started,” he said, noting that a group of area residents led by Roger Ferrell had started working to get the church off the ground before Johnson and his family arrived. “Over the course of the seven years we were there, three families from churches in Alabama moved up there to help us.”

And funds from NAMB and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering provided half of the finances needed to keep Johnson’s ministry going.

“We had story after story of people coming to Christ who had never walked through the door of a church before,” Johnson said.

And several years in, someone else walked through the door who would become a major part of God’s continuing story for the church — Dan Coleman.

A New Englander and preacher’s kid, he had grown up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and come to know Christ there.

In college he had taken a summer ministry internship working with youth, but he returned to Boston feeling guilty that he was pointing people to a God with whom he had no relational depth. Because he was attending a Bible college the assumption of vocational ministry surrounded him. Coleman’s assumption was that something drastically needed to change.

“I’ve had all the understanding, none of the relationship, and I’m finally ready to be done with just playing this game,” he concluded.

One night he wandered to the school’s soccer field where he played for the school’s team, looked up at the heavens and decided to live as if God were real.

For reasons he didn’t understand during his sophomore and junior years of college, Coleman kept going back to Maine. He did an internship with a church that sent one of their coeds, Amanda, to the Boston Bible College.

Within weeks of her freshman year, they were dating. The next September they married and lived at first with her parents in Maine.

“I was drawn to Dan because he is very funny,” Amanda Coleman said. “He was a follower of Jesus and that is where he was going to take his life. I really wanted to be a part of that.”

They accepted a ministry opportunity in Winslow, Maine, that didn’t gel for them. They tried to leave Maine but God kept them there.

When they left Winslow they looked for a church to attend and found KCC. Within a year, Dan Coleman was an associate pastor responsible for helping plant other churches.

“We could sense that God was calling them to come in and serve with us,” Johnson said. “And he was from Massachusetts which was a huge plus in the eyes of ministry here.”

A year later Johnson returned to Alabama to take the pastorate of First, Albertville, and handed the keys of KCC to Coleman. Five years later KCC averages more than 900 participants in its three Sunday services and baptizes more than 100 annually.

“After we left and handed things off, they have built upon the ministry and taken it to a whole other level,” Johnson said.

And Dan Coleman’s vision isn’t just for Augusta. He wants KCC to lead in reaching not just central Maine but New England too.

But he had plenty of fear when he assumed the pastorate six years ago. He wasn’t sure it would work and he was afraid of preaching every week. He has since developed a personable preaching style he describes as having a “depth of simplicity” and that style clearly resonates with people. Though not intentionally seeker friendly, Coleman knows many are hearing Bible stories for the first time.

Fostering a network

Another significant ministry role Coleman fills is that of church planting catalyst for NAMB in the region.

Coleman assists churches in discovering places to plant churches and helps recruit church planters. The goal is to foster a network of church planting churches.

For a time the church met in small venues while conducting up to three services per Sunday. When a former Catholic church came on the market NAMB assisted with funds for renovation and the down payment and now carries the mortgage on the building. (TAB, NAMB)