The Shift
Geyer Springs First Baptist Church wanted to plant a new church in Little Rock. They had building plans. They were raising funds. For a church like Geyer Springs, it’s what you do. You build a new building and fill it with people. For 50 years, that strategy had worked.
But then something started to shift.
Dave Hughey, Lead Pastor at Geyer Springs, sensed it. “We realized that’s not a good strategy anymore. We can’t ask them to come to us. We have to go where they are. We’ve got to enable more people in our church body to go out and do the work of ministry in small ways. It sounds foolish to even say it out loud because Jesus said, ‘Go.’ He didn’t say, ‘Invite them to come.’ But that’s what we had done for years.”
Dave wasn’t alone. Others felt a change coming. One Sunday, Dave stood before his congregation and offered a different way of seeing missions in their community. He pulled up a map showing a five-mile radius around their church. There were four Walmart Supercenters and more than 20 Dollar Generals. “We’re doing Dollar General,” he told them. “We’re going to send people out to different parts of the city where they have a heart and let them develop and see what happens.”
Instead of planting another church, Geyer Springs would create small, scattered mission points across their community. To do this, they’d need to fundamentally change their approach to training and equipping their people. For a large church, adopting a “scatter instead of gather” approach was an enormous paradigm shift.
They needed someone who could walk everyone through the shift.
Called to Live Missionally
Around the same time, Adam Miller was praying about where God was leading his family next. He grew up at Geyer Springs. His first ministry position was there, serving under Dave’s leadership. Years later, Adam moved to Northwest Arkansas and served on the pastoral staff at Cross Church. He and his wife, Abigail, served there for 7 years and loved it. His family felt comfortable and content there. But something started to stir in him.
“The Lord started calling me to church revitalization, church planting, and then really seeing the church expand all over the world.” When Dave heard Adam had watched the “Dollar General” message online, he reached out. They talked for 45 minutes as Adam shared his heart for missions. After the call, Dave went directly to the church’s Executive Pastor and told him, “You need to hire him. He’s the guy we need to lead this thing.”
Adam was hired as the Mission Mobilization Pastor, an entirely new role at the church. His job wasn’t just to organize overseas mission trips. It was to train Geyer Springs’ people to understand that living missionally is the call of every believer.
“One of the things that we are trying to instill within our body is a disciple’s obedience to Christ by understanding where they’re at on the Disciple’s Pathway,” Adam says. It starts with salvation and baptism, but it doesn’t end there. Believers join a biblical community, grow spiritually with accountability, and are equipped to live on mission. “Once you’re trained and equipped to live on mission, your heart and soul will long for the kingdom of God to expand.”
Geyer Springs was going back to the model established by the early church, one that focused on equipping the saints for ministry. Adam understood that what was happening at the church was bigger than Geyer Springs. “When I got here, I didn’t want to do this as just Geyer Springs,” Adam says. “I wanted to be able to do this in unison with other churches in the area.”
The Kingdom Cooperation Network
Adam believes that when God is working somewhere, the Holy Spirit draws people toward the same movement. Over time, he started to wonder, “Who else is thinking this way?”
That’s when God started putting pieces of the puzzle together.
Conversations led to more conversations. Pastors began to realize they weren’t the only ones who wanted to see God’s people living on mission. “We started connecting,” Adam says. “Ultimately, we said, ‘Hey, let’s talk about what it would look like to train and equip our believers in the same way so that we can expand the kingdom together.’”
The first meeting included pastors from four very different churches—Geyer Springs, The Way Church Network, Impact Inner City, and South City. This first meeting was critical because they had to answer one fundamental question: “Can we work together?”
Despite their differences, these pastors could agree on one thing. “When the church’s primary function is what Jesus wants it to be, the form can take many different shapes,” Adam says. They didn’t have to agree on every single thing to work together. They concluded that, yes, they could do this together. The next question was how.
If they were going to train together, they needed to get their people in the same room. Geyer Springs had a space called The Station located four miles from the church. The four churches started meeting there on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings.
With a large church like Geyer Springs involved, Adam and Dave knew it could pose problems. Egos can get in the way—or at least the perception of ego. “I didn’t want this to live or die on the shoulders of Geyer Springs,” Adam says.
That’s when CityChurch Network entered the story. Dave knew CityChurch Network through Lauren Linz, who leads the organization’s Equipped Leaders initiative. “It made perfect sense to work with and through CityChurch Network because none of the other churches would feel threatened,” Dave says. “We weren’t the principal drivers. They were. That made it a lot easier to bring them all together.”
“CityChurch Network was crucial in this piece because it became the mediator,” Adam says. “It doesn’t have any ego behind it because their mission is to see churches unified and working together. What a blessing it was to have CityChurch Network being the one that’s leading and mediating between all of our hearts.”
They called themselves the Kingdom Cooperation Network, and the training began. They focused on two essential questions during a year-long program for participants: “What is a disciple?” and “What is the Church?”
The goal wasn’t to make churches look more like Geyer Springs, a house church, or an urban church. It was to return to a biblical understanding of what it means to make disciples and be the Church. To do this, they used resources from BILD International—Expanding the Great Commission and Teaching the First Principles—that address the early church’s approach to establishing believers in the faith.
One of the most important things the training focuses on is relationship-building. “What we tend to do in our evangelism and discipleship is tell people the answers or tell them what is right and wrong,” Adam says. “The problem is that we’re not engaging relationally. In a post-Christian world, relationships are key, and people want to belong to a community before they’ll believe.”
The Kingdom Cooperation Network is training people to develop relationships and bring scripture into them as a way to expose truth. “We’re finding out there are a lot of people in this Bible Belt area who don’t know who Jesus is,” Adam says. “They have religious backgrounds. They’ve attended church. But they couldn’t tell you anything about what the Bible says or who Jesus is. Our people have to move religious jargon out of their conversations. One of the greatest things our resources help with is training our people to think critically, think biblically, and ask really good questions.”
Exercising Your Faith
Ed and Cynthia came to Geyer Springs from Woodson, a small community outside Little Rock. They connected with Dave on a trip to Israel. That’s when Ed pulled Dave aside and told him, “We’re not growing. We’re not being discipled.”
They ended up at Geyer Springs and went through the Kingdom Cooperation Network training. Then they realized something: “We need to go back to our community.” So, they returned to Woodson, determined to live on mission there.
“They started with prayer and found out there are a lot of people in their community who don’t know each other. There’s a spirit of isolation and depression,” Adam says. “They’re bringing hope and light to their community. That all started from their understanding that, biblically, they were ambassadors for Christ in their community. They didn’t have to wait on some pastor to do it for them.”
Then there’s Rick and Robin Miller, Adam’s parents. “I’ve known them for years,” Dave says. “Robin’s been on mission trips with me, and they were solid people, but boy, they have grown exponentially through this process.”
Rick, a retired fireman, is called to be an ambassador for Christ in the fire department. Robin recently started a real estate company and wants it to be more about expanding the kingdom than selling real estate.
“It’s pretty exciting to watch them, especially since it’s Adam’s parents, and he’s leading that process and seeing them come through that,” Dave says.
“My dad has shared the gospel more in the last year than he’s done in his 62 years of life,” Adam says. “He was just another guy caught up in cultural Christianity, showing up, sitting in a pew or chair, and just listening to a sermon, but never applying it. He is so active in his faith now, and he exercises it. His understanding of his relationship with Christ is so important to him now.”
“Rick sharing his faith is so natural. It just flows out of him,” Dave says. “I look at Rick and think, ‘How many people through the years have we sat in seminars on how to share your faith, giving them all these verses, and they never get it. For Rick, it’s just very natural.”
Equipped and Sent Out
The Kingdom Cooperation Network celebrates through commissioning services at Geyer Springs, where all the churches come together to pray over and send out those who’ve completed the training. These aren’t pastors or church staff. Just everyday people being released to live on mission where they are.
At the first commissioning service, Lauren Linz stood on stage with pastors and leaders from all four churches. “These churches saw the need to train their people in the essentials of the faith and offer something more than just another class,” Lauren says. “They wanted their training to equip them to live on mission as disciple-makers in everyday life. My face beamed with joy as I thought about how much God had done through these churches.”
Neal Scoggins, pastor at Impact Inner City, remembers what led to that day. “The initial conversations about bringing multiple churches together to focus on one goal seemed insurmountable,” he says. “However, after getting involved and going down the road, this journey has been one of the sweetest I’ve had in my thirty years in ministry!”
“There have been at least three commissioning services,” Adam says. “It’s been such a great celebration. Light bulbs are going off, and our people are asking, ‘Why are they doing that?’ And then they realize, ‘Oh yeah, that’s not the job of the pastoral team. That’s us!’”
More churches are asking to join the Kingdom Cooperation Network. Adam is excited about what’s ahead—more commissionings and more believers equipped to do the work of ministry in their families, neighborhoods, and workplaces.
The journey has taught Dave an important lesson: “We’re better together. We all have different resources. We all have different strengths. And clearly, a unified church is going to have a lot more strength, a lot more effect on a city than a bunch of little churches scattered everywhere.”
What started with one question—“Who else is thinking this way?”—has become a movement of churches training together, serving together, and reaching Central Arkansas together.
We are grateful for the exceptional work of Geyer Springs First Baptist Church and other churches in our cities that are equipping everyday believers to live on mission. 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
