Only God
Mitch Tapson didn’t want to go. He’d worked all day, and a Tuesday night association meeting on the other side of Arkansas didn’t seem worth the effort. But his church secretary was the clerk for the association and needed a ride. So Mitch went.
During the meeting, Mitch stared at the catfish on his plate and tried to pay attention. He was beyond tired. “I was like a zombie.” Just a few routine reports and catching up with friends. Nothing remarkable—until Jordan Bowen spoke.
As it turns out, Jordan didn’t feel like going to the meeting either. He only went because he was one of three pastors scheduled to speak about their church plants. When Jordan started sharing, Mitch leaned in. “Jordan’s a very exciting preacher to watch. Very animated,” Mitch says. “That caught my attention. But what really caught my attention was when he said: ‘We’re in the Hillcrest area.’”
After the meeting, Mitch introduced himself. He discovered Jordan’s church was two blocks from his. “You could throw a rock and hit it. They were meeting in a school. The church was just Jordan, his family, and a few others from Oasis Church in Maumelle. He was one of four pastors sent out to plant an Oasis church in Little Rock.” Later, the two men got to know each other over coffee. “In those early moments, I heard his story and he heard mine. It just clicked.”
A Friendship That Changed Everything
When Mitch arrived at Woodlawn Baptist Church in 2011, the congregation consisted mainly of senior adults. “It was a good little church, but people get older. As they get older, they go into nursing homes or assisted living or die. And since we had no one coming in, every person that left was one less person there. Over the years, we got down to 25. Some Sundays we would have 15. There were a couple of Sundays when I not only preached but also played the piano and led music. You just can’t grow a church like that.”
Down the street, a small group started meeting in Jordan’s home. Within five weeks, they had run out of space. Pranay Borde, another pastor sent out with Jordan, recalls, “Through that group, there was a teacher at a special ed school down the road. They had a small indoor playroom. They let us use that for a little while. A few chairs, two mics, and a rug for a stage. That was it.”
“I have a friend who says history is changed through friendships,” Jordan says. “Every move of God, every great awakening, every revival, all of it is connected through friendships. I feel like that’s so much of our story. When I met Mitch, I knew this was a man I wanted to do life with. He’s going to be a friend. I called my dad after we met and said, ‘God’s about to do something.’”
“It was the idea that he needs what I’ve got and I need what he’s got,” Mitch says. “We never said that out loud, but it was a mutual understanding. Going into the fall of 2019, we began to talk about having two churches in one space. It’d be two distinct churches with two different services. Everybody thought that would work.”
Then one phone call changed everything.
A Season of Pain
“The week we moved into Woodlawn was the week that Oasis started the process of dissolving,” Jordan says. “It was painful for Pranay and me to be planting a church and, through a phone call, realize our sending church is no more. I was in a lot of pain, trying to lead people who were in pain. All of us were operating in that. But we had such a dear friend in Mitch in that season.”
Jordan reached out to another friend and pastor, Bill Elliff. “Bill was my mentor during that painful season. I told him, ‘I need help. I don’t know what to do.’ I asked, ‘Can you teach me how to pray?’ because I had no other option. Honestly, it was the best thing that could have happened. Through the pain, God birthed a praying church. All of us became a family of friends who had nothing else to do but pray.”
Pranay remembers the prayer of one lady from Woodlawn, Miss Becky. “She told me, ‘I’ve been praying for something different at this church.’ I asked how long. She said, ‘Sixty years.’ I said, ‘Sixteen, that’s cool.’ That’s what I heard. And she told me, ‘No. Sixty years.’” Pranay was stunned. “No one prays that long anymore. People move churches if they’re uncomfortable for sixty minutes. But she had been faithfully praying, and the answer to her prayers had come.”
In early 2020, the two churches still had separate services. When the pandemic hit, both shut down. “By May, we said, ‘We cannot not be the Church. We’ve got to start meeting again,’” Mitch says. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we just have one service for everyone?’ That’s when the floodgate opened. That was the inspiration to become one church. Looking back, COVID-19 was a blessing to us because it expedited everything in one fell swoop.”
“There was a lot of heartburn with a few guys from Woodlawn. They had such a strong attachment to the church,” Mitch says. “They didn’t want it to disappear. One of them was going to sue us. But, in the end, it worked out. I mean, it had been working all along as far as our friendships. Jordan and I had developed a rhythm together. So in August, we officially became Hillcrest Community Church.”
Never Stop
As a new church, the focus of their prayers was ‘only God.’ “We want our story to be something that only God could write,” Jordan says. “We came to the point where we said, ‘The best place we can be is desperately depending on the Lord.’ We’ve asked Him to keep us in that place.”
Jordan recalls one Sunday that made that prayer feel real. “You could just sense God’s presence during the service. Later, he found out Miss Donna, another Woodlawn member, had been praying through the entire service in the library, which was being repurposed as a prayer room. The room wasn’t finished yet. No announcements were made about it. “When we realized she had been in there the whole time, we said, ‘Never stop.’ Since then, she and many others have been praying for every person in the service.” Today, despite health challenges, Miss Donna still shows up every week to pray.
“This is a group of men and women who just keep saying, ‘We will desperately depend on the Lord.’ Again, it’s just friendships. We were praying for grandmas and grandpas in the faith. We were young and people from other countries. We knew we needed friends. They needed friends.”
Through friendships and prayer, a culture began to emerge at the church. And that culture shaped the church’s desire to be on mission in their neighborhood—and beyond.
In the City for the Nations
Today, Hillcrest Community Church lives out its mission to be a church in the city for the nations. “Our mission is more than a tagline. It’s what we’re about,” Mitch says. “We have twenty different nationalities that worship with us. We have a Burmese congregation that comes in on Sunday nights. My church was a group of 25 aging people. Jordan’s church was a young group with no place to meet. And through a catfish dinner, God brought us all together.”
One of the most powerful expressions of the church’s mission happens in worship. “We have people from other countries who worship here,” says Leslie Harper, Hillcrest’s worship leader. “So I want our worship to look a lot like heaven.” Leslie incorporates worship songs in different languages, such as Hindi, Ebo, Telugu, and Spanish. She often has international members lead worship. “I want them to be able to worship in their heart language. It’s beautiful to see their love for Him on their faces. It’s made my love for Jesus and His Church grow.”
Many who attend Hillcrest come from UALR, a university near the church. “We want to reach the nations that have come to Little Rock. Primarily families, but also international students,” Jordan says. Pranay works with the university’s Dean and their master’s students. The Vice Chancellor has asked him to oversee the onboarding of all international students. “We’re working with other churches to make sure every international student is hosted by a believer and loved by a believer so that they can experience and then hear the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Jordan says.
“We had a worship service at UALR last fall. We baptized eight students in the swimming pool there,” Mitch says. “It was several churches and on-campus ministries like the BCM and Chi Alpha—all working together,” Jordan says. “It all began with a girl from Italy, who came to Christ at the Unite Us event at UALR. She got baptized here and said, ‘I think God wants to do something on my campus.’ It’s all been student-led, a lot of track-and-field people. It’s beautiful to see God put all the pieces together so that only He gets the glory.”
“We’re a transient church. Many of our church members are foreign passport holders, including students and contract employees,” Pranay says. “We might have someone for the summer. Or an undergraduate for four years. God has entrusted His sheep to us for a time before they’re on their way to another people or untouched soil. For us, it’s a question of, ‘Are we making the most use of that time?’”
That time, though brief, can have an eternal impact. “Rosita, an Indonesian, led a young woman from Iraq to the Lord and baptized her,” Jordan says. “Last year, Pranay and Rosita were working with another young woman, Conctia, a Brahman from the priestly caste in India. A couple of months ago, she accepted Christ and was baptized on campus in front of hundreds of students, including her Hindu roommate. To see the nations be able to reach the nations and say in front of the entire school, ‘I used to think Jesus was a God I could add, but He’s the only God.’ It’s the Lord, a hundred percent.”
“We’re looking forward to August, when we’ll have new international students,” Pranay says. “Despite the political chaos, God is still opening doors. How are we being faithful, from picking them up at the airport to bringing them into Christian families, knowing that God may lead them elsewhere? We have to value our link in the chain.”
A Shared Story
As Hillcrest Community Church approaches its fifth anniversary, and Woodlawn its hundredth, Jordan reflects on the friendships that made their shared story possible. “We want our story to honor Oasis and their value and impact in our lives. We want it to honor Brother Ray Williams and CityChurch Network. They helped us realize that we should unite others in prayer. Now, churches are praying every Monday for revival and awakening. I want to honor Bill Elliff, who taught me to pray and kept me from giving up. And I want to honor Mitch. He’s my best friend.”
But a story only God could write is not confined to the borders of Little Rock. The church’s international leaders are taking the gospel back to their home countries. One leader, Benny, went back to India last year with Pranay. Another leader, Rosita, recently returned from leading a team to Indonesia.
“God is the great Author,” Jordan says. “We pray that God would take every part of our lives and write a story that fully glorifies Him. That expands His kingdom in the city for the nations. That He would be the main character of our story—as individuals, as families, as a faith family.”
We are grateful for the exceptional work of Hillcrest Community Church and other churches in our cities that are desperately depending on the Lord through prayer. They are helping the whole Church grow.
Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him, the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
Ephesians 4:15-16
