Quintell Hill, left, lead pastor of Multiply Community Church in Monroe, N.C., poses with the eight-pointer he harvested alongside his friend, Tony Adcock, a Sunday School leader at First Baptist Church in Weddington, N.C.
It’s something Quintell Hill loves to do. His preparation is meticulous, his excitement causing him to lose sleep occasionally. He’s pursued it with reckless abandon and at other times learned the best way to proceed is with caution and patience.
Eleven years ago, Hill was leading the student ministry at First Baptist Church in Weddington, N.C., when Tony Adcock, a parent with two daughters in the ministry, wanted to get to know Hill better. He accomplished that by taking Hill on a deer hunting trip.
That experience became so much more than either could have expected.
“It was toward the end of the season so I only went once or twice, but I was hooked,” Hill said. “Man, I felt like I’d been saved again. I was thinking, ‘Where has this been my whole life?’
“The next year, I barely slept the night before bow season opened, I was so ready to go.”
That energy has always been a part of Hill’s personality while serving at several Southern Baptist churches. In addition to First Weddington, he was also a student ministry leader at New Hope Baptist in Fayetteville, Ga. and part of a revitalization team at First Baptist in Mableton, outside of Atlanta. In 2019, Hill planted Multiply Community Church in Monroe as lead pastor and earlier this month was re-elected first vice president of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.
Multiply Community Church, he said, is intentional about reflecting a diverse community in an area with a history marked by division. However, that is not the church’s focus.
“We want to be multi-ethnic, but we don’t worship it,” he said. “We want to reach people, period. God has blessed us with that. The power of the gospel – nothing else – has allowed people to come together here.”
“We need to be overwhelmed by lostness,” Quintell Hill tells pastors during the 2021 N.C. Baptist Pastors’ Conference
Months after launching, Multiply Community Church had no place to meet as COVID-19 made the school where it had been gathering unusable. At one point the church met on Hill’s front porch. Then, a woman who was a member at First Baptist in Hickory Grove, N.C., heard of the church’s plight and offered the front yard of her farm. By September of that year, Multiply Community Church had secured an old CVS that had also been a pet store.
Getting to that point took a while.
Hill admitted that he first felt the call to church planting while at First Weddington, but ran from it. That call became undeniable in Mableton, where he led the community outreach and discipleship program for First Baptist. The people there, he said, were understanding and supportive of him and his family leaving for North Carolina.
That relentless pursuit of others for the sake of the gospel came with him to Monroe, part of the rapidly growing area around Charlotte. Seeds sown in ‘20 brought fruit in ‘21, as Multiply Community Church recorded 21 salvations and 10 baptisms.
On Fill the Tank Sunday, the church baptized its second Hispanic member alongside Hill’s daughter, Moriah. He and his wife Christie’s other daughter, Kharis, had been baptized earlier in the year.
A white man’s idea to take a Black man 20 years his junior on a hunting trip to get to know each other better has never left Hill. Adcock reached out to Hill in that moment. Since then, Hill has helped counsel Adcock through some tough times in life. Adcock, a general contractor, helped Multiply Community Church get its new building ready for occupation. When Hill moved to Georgia, Adcock gave him a turkey call inscribed with: “Don’t forget about your brother Tony.”
The outdoors wasn’t exactly something new to Hill, who grew up fishing for bass, crappie, brim and catfish. “I’m a country dude at heart and would get deer meat from my neighbors, so I’ve been eating that my whole life,” he said. “But God used the outdoors to bring two guys together who looked nothing alike and build a common bond.”
That combination of different, yet something in common, is what he sees in Multiply Community Church.
“We all bleed the same and it’s the gospel that brings us together,” Hill said. He has recently launched his own outdoor ministry, One Way Outdoors, as a platform to point people to Jesus. Meanwhile, Multiply Community Church will continue to be about reaching its neighborhood and the nations for Christ.
Both, it’s clear, are things he loves to do.
(EDITOR’S NOTE – Scott Barkley is national correspondent for Baptist Press.)
