15,000 Baptisms. One Church. · Ministry Unlocked

15,000 Baptisms. One Church.

A note to our ministry family before you read this.

I shared the article below because the story behind it has been sitting on my heart, and I want us to sit with it together. Hillvue did not reach 15,000 people because of a clever program.

They reached them because ordinary believers refused to stay quiet, year after year, for thirty-five years.

That is the part I cannot get past. The fruit came from faithful people and a holy expectation, not from resources.

So here is what I have been praying about, and I want to put it in front of you. Some of us may have thirty-five years ahead of us, and some of us may have five or ten. But every one of us has the next season, and we are standing at the start of it.

And for the first time, we have a tool in our hands that those before us never had. Used wrongly, AI is just noise. But used in a biblical way, submitted to the Spirit and never set above Him, it could become to our generation what the printing press was to the Reformation, a way for ordinary people to carry the unchanging gospel further and faster than they ever could alone.

Picture it with me. Imagine every believer in this room able to answer a friend's hard question about the faith at midnight, gently and truthfully, instead of going silent. Imagine reaching people in their own language, following up with every new believer so not one of them slips through the cracks, and freeing our teachers from busywork so they can do what only a human shepherd can do, which is love people face to face.

AI will never be born again. It will never weep with the grieving or hold a hand at a hospital bed. It cannot replace a single one of us, and it must never try.

But it can hand the ordinary believer more time, more reach, and fewer excuses for staying silent.

Now run that forward, however many years the Lord gives you, whether it is five or thirty-five. If we start today, faithfully and humbly, what might He do through a people who paired the oldest message in the world with the newest tool, and who expected Him to save?

I do not know the number. But I know we will not drift into it. We will either pick up the tool and reach, or we will set it down and wonder. Let's be the people who reached.

With you in the work,

Todd

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--- Article posted on my personal Facebook page for Church Members/Ministry Leaders--

Today I sat in a service in Bowling Green, Kentucky where the 15,000th person was baptized at Hillvue Heights Church over the past thirty-five years that Steve Ayers has been its pastor.

Fifteen thousand. And if I am being honest with you, it was heartbreaking for me to witness.

Let me explain that, because it is not the reason you might expect. It did not break my heart because of anything wrong at Hillvue. Just the opposite. It broke my heart because today I saw, in one room, exactly what is possible.

And I have spent this year on a project I call 52 churches in 52 weeks, visiting congregations across our region, and what I have learned is how painfully few churches ever reach at all.

I do not want to get bogged down in numbers, and I want to be fair about them, because building a church is never a straight line. There are lean years and full years, and no one who loves the church pretends otherwise.

But to give you some context, this year alone Hillvue will see roughly 166 times the number of baptisms that a normal church in America sees in a year. Not double. Not ten times. Around 166 times the norm, coming out of one church in a mid-sized Kentucky town.

Here is what has stayed with me from my own visits. On more than half of them, no one was baptized.

And on more than half, baptism was not even mentioned. Not in a sermon, not in an invitation, not in a single sentence from the front. An entire service would come and go, and the central act that Jesus commanded his followers to practice simply never came up.

The most sobering part was not that those churches had tried to reach people and failed. It was that, in so many of them, reaching people did not seem to be the point anymore.

The service was for the people already in the room. And somewhere along the way, we have all quietly made our peace with that.

We have a long list of reasons to be comfortable with it. We tell ourselves:

The culture has changed, and people just are not interested anymore.
Our town is different.
Our building is too small, our budget too thin.
They must be an exception, a special pastor or a unique set of circumstances.

And when none of those quite satisfy us, we reach for the sharpest excuse of all. We question whether the fruit is even real. They do not preach the real gospel, we say. They just put on a show. It is the most comforting accusation a church can make, because it lets us feel faithful and even superior while we do nothing.

But I have learned to be suspicious of any explanation that conveniently lets me off the hook, and I want to challenge that instinct directly, because I think it is the very thing holding us back.

By every account, there is no secret at Hillvue.

Ayers himself pushes the credit away from any program or system and points to ordinary people who simply do not want their friends to be lost, and so they share the gospel. That is not a strategy you have to be a megachurch to copy.

So I am not asking your church to go produce a thousand baptisms. A congregation of eighty is not Hillvue, and it is not supposed to be. But here is the question that has followed me out of every parking lot this year, and it starts with me, not with any pastor.

When was the last time I told someone about Jesus, the way those Hillvue folks tell their friends? And when was the last time my church reached more people than the year before, for a church its size?

The difference between people who reach others and people who do not is almost never talent, money, or geography. It is expectation. The call is not to match Hillvue's number. It is to stop accepting zero.

That word, expectation, is the heart of it. Hillvue expects people to come to faith, and they set goals for it. I know that goal-setting around baptism makes some people uneasy, and that there is an objection that a goal somehow infringes on the sovereignty of God. Ayers has given one of the most honest answers to that I have ever read.

The goal, he says, is not there to box in God, who wants far more than any goal could hold. The goal is there to keep his own flesh accountable, to fight his own pull toward comfort. The target is not for God. It is for us.

That is the quiet truth behind every empty baptistry I sat in front of this year. There was no expectation, no urgency, and so, predictably, no fruit. You do not drift into 15,000 baptisms. You also do not drift into zero. Both are the result of what a church decides to expect of itself.

So let me make this concrete, because conviction without a next step is just guilt. This week, name one person. One friend, one coworker, one family member you would genuinely grieve to see lost, and decide to actually say something to them about Jesus before next Sunday.

That is the whole engine at Hillvue, just one person caring enough about one other person to open their mouth. It is not a program, and it does not require a building or a budget. Because here is the hard arithmetic of it.

If we do nothing different, we have no business expecting anything different.

Zero is not bad luck. It is a forecast, and we are the ones writing it.

Hillvue Heights celebrated number 15,000 today.

The real question is not how they got there. We know how.

The real question is what the rest of us are waiting for.

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