PICKERINGTON, Ohio (BP) — A year’s planning had gone into Change City Church in central Ohio before launch day on what was initially a rainy Feb. 16. That’s when the texts started arriving on Pastor Darryl Baker’s phone.

“Are you still launching? We are shut down. There’s a snow emergency here,” a Cincinnati pastor texted Baker. But that was 120 miles away. In Pickerington, it was only raining and freezing cold.

“Hey, are you still launching today?” a friend from Columbus called. “We’re online only. It’s a snow emergency. You can’t even drive around here. It’s terrible.” Columbus is much closer, 17 miles northwest.

“And literally, as he said that to me, I looked out the window — and it was just raining here — and instantly it turned from rain into huge snowflakes,” Baker told Baptist Press. “Oh my goodness. And within a few minutes after that, we started getting bombarded with text messages, ‘Are you still launching today?’”

Baker and his core team had held pre-launch events since the summer in Pickerington, a well-to-do Columbus suburb of about 25,000 people, and they had secured a year’s lease on a church site in a building owned by Learning Never Ends, just across the street from Ridgeville Junior High School. The team had already made connections in the community.

Baker contacted his core team. The launch was a go. He encouraged them to use wisdom and attend only if they could safely do so. Having grown up in Chicago, he was accustomed to driving in icy conditions.

“I told my wife, ‘It may just be me and you,’” Baker said. “And I said, ‘If it’s just me and you, guess what, it’ll just be me and you.’”

Baker and his wife Patrice have been married 39 years, and while Change City Church is a new plant for them, its location is not new on their radar. Baker eyed it as a potential church site long before he heard the call to the pastorate, he said. He pointed it out to his wife as they were driving home, having recently moved to the area.

“I literally told my wife. I said, ‘Man, that’s a great location for a church,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘If God ever allowed me to pastor out here, I would want to meet in that building right there.’ That was 20 years ago. Twenty years ago I said that.”

Baker was in pharmaceutical sales at the time, but he describes himself as having always had a heart for ministry.

“The first person I led to faith was my friend Eddie, in second grade, at lunch time, sitting on the bench,” Baker said. “And I shared the gospel, and he received the Lord. And I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go to heaven.’”

As a young couple, Baker and his wife started a Good News Bible Club with their children in their home, inviting their children’s friends who were unchurched. As a family, they visited shelters and assisted living facilities.

“My wife would sing, my kids would do a dance and I would do a teaching,” Baker said.

Before Change City Church, Baker planted a church independently that met in a nursing home, but the COVID-19 pandemic put the facility on lockdown, which left the church homeless, and many drifted away. But he retained a core group of 45 members with hopes of planting anew.

Enter the North American Mission Board’s Send Network. After the pandemic Rick Williams, central region state catalyst for the State Convention of Baptists in Ohio (SCBO), and Reginald Hayes, SCBO community convention relations leader, introduced Baker to the Southern Baptist Convention system of church planting, which seemed to gel with what he and his core team had in mind. Baker agreed to go through the process, watching for God’s direction.

Baker met pastors in the Ohio African American Fellowship, completed a church planting assessment and was encouraged by the available network of pastors and resources.

“This is what I was looking for, because the first time I planted a church, I didn’t know anything about a church planting network or anything,” Baker said. “Because me and my wife, and a couple of the ladies, we said we’d rent a space and run some radio ads and see who shows up.”

He considers Send Network a godsend.

“God just really gave me an affirmative,” Baker said. “He said the cities are where change happens. Culture happens in the cities, and that’s how we came up with the name.”

Send Network President Vance Pitman describes the Bakers as faithful church-planting missionaries, “engaging their city, making disciples and planting a church despite the obstacles.”

“We are thrilled about God’s activity in and through Change City Church in Pickerington, Ohio, and their sending church, United Faith International Church,” Pitman told Baptist Press. “We trust God to raise up thousands of new missionaries like the Bakers who will follow God’s call and trust in His promises.”

On launch day, Baker and his wife, now an SCBO ministry assistant, arrived at church to 200 seats and about 15 people. They began the service. But something started to change.

“I could just feel it,” Baker said. “I’m sitting on the front row. And I can see the reaction from our praise team on the stage.”

He stepped on stage. People had come.

“It was people everywhere,” Baker said. 

Nearly 130 people braved the slick roads and the 1.8 inches of snow the local CBS station reported that day, most of it falling midday. An ethnically diverse group of Anglos, African Americans, Africans, Caribbeans and others came, Baker said, some driving 30 miles or more.

“We had the best launch day,” Baker said. “We had 128 people come out in a snow emergency. And the feedback we got from first-time guests was like, ‘We are so glad we came.’”

The launch was extended to a second weekend, with 200 arriving the following week. But launch day, with a windchill of 14 degrees, was made complete with ice cream after worship.

“Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches from Sam’s Club,” Baker said.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer. Sunday, March 16, is Church Planting Sunday in the Southern Baptist Convention.)