Christine Stride is Executive Assistant to the Baptist National Leader and works at the Baptist National Support Centre in Auckland. She is part of Titirangi Baptist Church.
With its lofty steepled roof and busy main street location, Tauranga Central Baptist Church is hard to miss. On Sundays, the carpark is full, and a steady stream of children and adults, old and young, head through the building’s front doors for the various services happening that day. The 40 or so members who helped establish Central more than a century ago would be proud. It wasn’t always like this though.
Until recently, Central had an ageing population of around 100 people who regularly attended the Sunday morning service. The average age was just under 80 years old. Pastor Brian Cochran and his leadership team had tried numerous initiatives to help transform the church over the years but to no avail. Nothing seemed to stick, and Brian and the team were starting to feel the pinch.
“We knew if we didn’t do something in five years, the church would, almost literally, be dead,” he said.
Brian and Central’s leadership approached Craig Vernall, senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church (BBC), which is just a 10-minute drive from Central.
One of New Zealand’s biggest Baptist churches, BBC was established in 1988 as a small church plant. It now hosts three services each Sunday to cater for the 1200-plus people who regularly attend. BBC helped set up Papamoa’s Golden Sands Baptist Church, which opened its doors in 2018. Approaching BBC made sense as the two pastors had a good relationship, and Brian considered BBC to be strong and growing.
BBC was open to the idea.
Central’s leadership team talked to other churches who’d tried some sort of partnership, asking questions and for advice. One thing stood out, says Brian.
“The churches that went with a shared leadership structure ended up butting heads after a while and often went back to square one. I concluded that for us, there needed to be one church leading – and I thought, ‘it’s not going to be Central’.”
The Central team began referring to the initiative as a ‘handover’ of leadership to BBC. After 10 months of discussing and exploring the idea as a church, they put the motion forward: did the church agree to the idea of Central handing over its leadership to BBC?
“The answer was a unanimous ‘yes’,” says Brian. “Unbelievable!”
A word from God
Meanwhile, early in the process, Craig had a word from God about BBC’s involvement.
“At the time I was reading the early chapters of Joshua… In it, Joshua says to the members of the tribes of Israel, ‘Remember the command Moses gave to you?’ Basically, Joshua says, ‘You guys have already got your land on this side of the Jordan; now you need to come over and help us conquer the Promised Land. Then, when that’s done, you go back and carry on with your own work. I said to Brian, ‘Maybe that’s our word from the Lord. We go out and help you conquer something, then we go back.’ The idea was to see Central return to autonomy rather than remaining a BBC campus. Brian agreed, and we started to explore what that would look like.”
Getting to know each other
Over the next 10 months, the two church elderships met regularly to find out more about the other church. “It was a bit like dating really,” jokes Craig. BBC elders also visited Central every Sunday to answer questions from the people, and as time went on, BBC preachers spoke there.
Craig emphasises that the success of the initiative hinged on the grace, courage and humility exhibited by Central, in particular pastor Brian and his wife Gay.
“Central voted in me as a senior leader, and they voted in our elders as their elders – that’s a real laying down of their rights. They had a posture of real humility. And this whole thing wouldn’t have happened without the graciousness of Brian and Gay.”
Photo: Craig Vernall (from left, in yellow) Gay Cochran, and Brian Cochran (right, in blue) at one of the early combined Tauranga Central Baptist Church and Bethlehem Baptist Church services in 2024.
Questions and doubts
So, what did BBC’s people think about it all?
“All we could do was paint a vision – the rest was up to God,” says Craig. “The last thing we wanted was for people to feel they were being manipulated into going to Central. We said, ‘If you feel this is for you, then take your family for a Sunday and check it out’.
Some people said, ‘But we have goals and aspirations for our own church and doing this could take away the best people’. And I said ‘Yes. That’s how it works.’
We see Central as our grandparent church. They carry the DNA of all the churches in the Bay of Plenty, and we want to honour that history. They’re a fantastic mission-giving and sending church, and we want to honour that.
In everything we did, we asked ourselves, ‘How can we breathe in our changes but still make it the best experience for them?’”
Challenges
One of the challenges was around music. All of Central’s worship team stood down, including one member who had been playing drums for Central for 50 years.
“That was probably the hardest thing for our lot to swallow,” Brian says. “Our leaders showed a lot of courage. Initially, there were lots of questions and uncertainty as the congregation thought through the implications, and there was grief for what was going to be lost, but hope for the future came through the strongest.”
Other challenges for Central included giving up their tradition of gifting chocolates to people for their birthday and other celebrations and the wearing of name tags – little things which meant a lot to people, says Craig.
“Then people started asking things like, ‘Could we have some more hymns?’ But Brian was able to hold the course when people came to him with doubts. He just said, ‘We have agreed’.”
Both pastors agree that the lead-up to the partnership went remarkably smoothly, mainly because of the trust built by both leadership teams during that time. The BBC elders who’d been voted in as Central elders attended as many services as they could, building relationships and allowing people to ask questions.
‘The greatest joy’
On a Sunday before the handover, between 80 and 90 people attended Tauranga Central to hear the vision. The Sunday after Easter, about 200 people turned up for the first combined service.
“When this change process began, I thought it’d be great if we got 20 people from BBC,” says Brian. “I thought the whole transition could end up taking five to ten years, and by that time, I could depart to let some young whippersnapper lead the church back into autonomy. But we did the first five years in about eight weeks.”
And Brian is fine with that.
“People have asked me how I feel about that, and I’m very happy. As far as I’m concerned, that is success, and I can go off and do something else exciting now.”
So, how is it all panning out? About 180 people regularly attend Central services now. BBC provided the children’s ministry team for Central (because it had one and Central didn’t), and one of the BBC Sunday morning worship teams serves Central each Sunday. BBC pastor Rob Stacey is now Central’s permanent pastor, and he and the other preach from the same passages, so they’re all on the same topic any given Sunday.
However, the greatest joy comes from “seeing loads of children running around the aisles squealing with delight”, says Brian.
Something more exciting…
The overall success of this venture has been Brian and Gay Cochran’s humility throughout the entire process, says Craig. “Brian continued to encourage the Central folks that this was a healthy process to go through. He’s been the hero in our journey together.”
And Brian praises BBC for their part.
“I want to acknowledge the hard work of the leaders, but also the attitude of the BBC people in general. It’s been heaven on earth.”
And as for that ‘something more exciting’ Brian had planned? He’s now Bangladesh Team Leader for Arotahi, helping steward a new season of partnership in that country. Brian and Gay will be leading, supporting, and mentoring short term mission experiences (3-9 months) for Kiwis in Bangladesh, as well as overseeing other short-term teams.
Read more here on the Cochran’s new roles in Bangladesh
Photos: By Charl Louw, Bethlehem Baptist Church
