‘You are the church of right now’
EDMOND, Okla. — Less than an hour into the Heritage…
Planting churches, two by two
While congregations decline across the U.S., an Oklahoma church celebrates new life.
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EDMOND, Okla. — Chris McKeever knows how to franchise.
He’s director of guest experience for Oklahoma-based Sonic, which has 3,540 drive-in restaurants across the U.S.
Chris McKeever
But he had no desire to franchise his church, opening up satellite campuses across Oklahoma City.
Neither did his 23 fellow elders of the Memorial Road Church of Christ, a 60-year-old congregation with 2,500 members and weekly attendance of about 1,900.
“We never wanted to be a megachurch. That’s not us,” McKeever said as he stood in the auditorium of the Heritage Church of Christ. Moments earlier, minister Travis Akins presided over a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the congregation’s brand-new meeting place.
Memorial Road members planted the Heritage church six years ago to reach north Edmond, abrim with new homes, a new Braum’s ice cream shop and a giant new Crest Foods supermarket.
Although it meant losing a core group of their active and financially supportive members — including Akins, a former Memorial Road minister — the church’s leaders had few reservations about launching the new congregation, McKeever said.
Related: ‘You are the church of right now’
“The only hesitation we had,” he said, “was doing two at once.”
Travis Akins preaches during the grand opening service of the Heritage Church of Christ.
Memorial Road was itself a church plant. Members of the Edmond Church of Christ launched the congregation, originally named the College Church of Christ, in 1963 to reach the students at nearby Oklahoma Christian University.
Since then, the church has adapted to serve university graduates and their families. In the past two decades, Memorial Road has remodeled its two-level nursery school wing and added a youth building, the Summit, complete with a full-size kitchen and basketball courts.
In the early 2000s, members heard story after story of declining membership among Churches of Christ. Young adults learned that the rural churches they grew up in were closing their doors. Downtown congregations in big cities were dying, too. And some members, their talents not fully utilized by the church, were slipping through the cracks.
Related: Special project: Where have all the churches gone?
Memorial Road’s leaders invited Joe Bright to speak. Bright, then minister for the Sunset Church of Christ in Springfield, Mo., talked passionately about the church’s need to reproduce itself. The Sunset church, whose attendance was less than half of Memorial Road’s, had nonetheless launched two new congregations in a five-year period.
Inspired by Bright’s words, Memorial Road sent 70 of its members to plant a church in Oakdale in October 2010. The community, about six miles southeast of Memorial Road’s building, was home to the first Church of Christ in Oklahoma, a congregation that had long since moved away.
Related: Dialogue: A Conversation with Joe Bright
“We wanted to have a presence east of I-35,” said Darrel Sears, who moved from Kansas to serve as preacher for the Church of Christ at Oakdale. “There weren’t really any churches over in this area — at least Churches of Christ.”
‘Not a lot of it happened the way we thought it would’
The new church met in the middle school commons of Oakdale Public School, across the street from Oakdale Baptist. That meant a weekly ritual of setting up chairs and audio/visual equipment and taking it back down.
“One thing we tried to do from the very beginning is be an autonomous congregation financially,” Sears said.
Members of the Oakdale Church of Christ stand on stage while members of the Memorial Road Church of Christ pray for them during the church’s sendoff ceremony in 2010.
The church purchased property but prayed for nine long years as members struggled to raise enough money to start construction. Their prayers were answered in 2019 when Oakdale school superintendent Kim Lanier told them that his congregation, Oakdale Baptist, was preparing to move. Would they like to buy the building?
They would. The Oakdale Church of Christ sold its property and moved across the street.
“Though we were not nearly where we needed to be financially to build, we had enough money in the bank to buy Oakdale Baptist’s building outright,” Sears said. “It’s been a true blessing to not have a mortgage payment.
Darrel Sears
“We had a lot of ideas of how we thought a church plant would go,” he said. “Not a lot of it happened the way we thought it would, but everything happened the way that God wanted it to.”
The church averages 300 or so on Sundays during the school year.
“We see Memorial Road as a big part of our beginning,” Sears said, “but we’re kind of our own identity now.”
Oakdale has, however, inherited its parent’s desire to replicate. It seeks to be “a church plant that plants churches,” Sears said. “We said that when we got to 300 to 500 we would start thinking about that.”
“We had a lot of ideas of how we thought a church plant would go. Not a lot of it happened the way we thought it would, but everything happened the way that God wanted it to.”
A ‘true plant,’ not a transplant
Five years after the Oakdale launch, Memorial Road formed a team to ponder sites for a second church plant. The team identified two locales: burgeoning north Edmond and historic Midtown Oklahoma City. The latter, just north of the city’s business district, is a center of urban renewal with walkable neighborhoods of art galleries, gastropubs and upscale apartments for young couples.
Both seemed like ideal locales for a church, said Akins, then Memorial Road’s young adults minister. They presented both to the elders.
Despite some reservations, Akins recalled, the elders “came back and said, ‘That’s a great idea. Let’s do it.’”
Both of the new congregations met as small groups in the Memorial Road building — just as Oakdale had — and prepared for their inaugural services. While the Heritage church headed north to worship in the cafeteria of Heritage Elementary School, the Serve Midtown Church of Christ headed 12 miles south to Brown’s Bakery, an iconic Oklahoma City eatery owned by Memorial Road members.
Worshiping while surrounded by the scent of pastries was delightful, said Bob Carpenter, a Memorial Road elder who works with the Midtown church, “but there was no place for a classroom. Our children’s class met on the floor near the women’s bathroom.”
Members of the Serve Midtown Church of Christ gather for fellowship and games at the church’s meeting place, Cross and Crown, in Oklahoma City.
The church found space for growth one mile west at Cross and Crown, a nonprofit that operates a food pantry, legal clinic and other services for the disadvantaged. Members continued to bring in donuts and pastries from Brown’s, however, until the bakery closed in late 2023.
The current venue fits with the church’s mission, Carpenter said. On the third Sunday of the month, members conduct “Serve Sundays,” distributing meals to those in need in their community. Then they go to Cross and Crown for worship.
Members of the Serve Midtown Church of Christ participate in a community giveaway project called “Feed His Sheep.”
Corey Baird, preaching minister for Serve Midtown, described the congregation as “less a transplant and more a true plant” of Memorial Road.
“It’s a seed from Memorial Road,” Baird said, “but it’s not necessarily the same type of energy or structure you would get at Memorial Road in any capacity.”
The Gospel ‘right where we are’
In addition to the three church plants, Memorial Road launched an inner-city work in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Oklahoma City, including a free medical clinic and a predominantly Spanish-speaking Church of Christ. The church also supports multiple mission points in locales including Austria, Honduras, Brazil, Kenya and New Zealand.
“Samaria and the ends of the earth do not replace Jerusalem. The best way to counter churches closing their doors is to open new ones. Every new congregation is a kingdom outpost, regardless of its location.”
Terry Fischer, Memorial Road’s community outreach minister, said that, with each church plant, the number of members who came into the church from outside of Memorial Road grew to outnumber those who came from the planting church within three to five years.
Phil Brookman
And each time it has planted, Memorial Road has grown back “slowly and steadily” in terms of members, contribution and volunteers, said Phil Brookman, Memorial Road’s preaching minister.
“Certainly, large congregations need to think about strategic plants elsewhere in the U.S. and the world,” Brookman said, “but this does not preclude our role to spread the Gospel right where we are.”
He cited Jesus’ message to his disciples in Acts 1:8 that they would be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
“Samaria and the ends of the earth do not replace Jerusalem,” Brookman said. “The best way to counter churches closing their doors is to open new ones. Every new congregation is a kingdom outpost, regardless of its location.”
Members of the Heritage Church of Christ and visitors gather before the church’s grand opening worship service in Edmond, Okla.
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is a deacon of the Memorial Road Church of Christ. Tiane Davis provided additional reporting.
