Growing Grace
Editor’s note: This is the first story in “How the West was Won,” an ongoing series about houses of worship in the fast-growing western segment of the Oklahoma City metro area.
Rectors Tim and Kirsten Baer met in college, went to seminary together and were ordained together in 2011.
Now, together, they are growing Grace Church, an Episcopal house of worship in this Canadian County city.
The Rt. Rev. Ed Konieczny, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma, appointed the couple to lead the church at 720 S Yukon Parkway in 2013.
The pair was asked to restart Church of the Savior, which was the name of the house of worship at that time. They were joined by 12 people who served as the launch team for the reinvigorated congregation.
Kirsten Baer said about a dozen people out of 35 from Church of Savior stayed to be part of the new church.
“We were interested in becoming and growing into a new and vibrant church,” she said.
The new congregation met in the Baers’ living room while their church building was remodeled. The newly renovated building opened in 2014 as a worship center for the congregation.
Both Baers said the launch was a bit like walking out into the unknown. “It was exciting,”
Kirsten Baer said.
Her husband called it “an adventure.”
“You don’t really know what that’s going to look like. You really are relying on the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” Tim Baer said.
He said Konieczny chose Grace as the church’s new name from options that the couple and their congregation recommended.
It fit.
“It is just like the Bible when God gives someone a new name — from
Saul to Paul, from Abram to Abraham,” Kirsten Baer said.
Since that new beginning, the church has grown from the initial 24 members to about 300 members.
For the Baers, the growth at Grace has been amazing — yes, amazing Grace.
Called to ministry
Tim Baer grew in the Episcopal Church, and Kirsten Baer grew up in the Presbyterian Church, but neither of them thought they would become ministers. Instead, both of them started at the University of Oklahoma with a plan to become doctors.
“I was pre-med all the way to junior year in college,” said Kirsten Baer, 33, a native of Duncan.
Tim Baer, 32, who grew up in northwest Oklahoma City, said he heard the call to the ministry during his senior year of college.
“In college, the dream of planting a church began to grow in me,” he said.
After graduating from OU in 2007, the couple married and went to Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, where they graduated in 2011. Konieczny ordained the two in 2011.
Kirsten Baer was appointed assistant pastor at St. Patrick Episcopal Church in Broken Arrow while Tim Baer was appointed assistant pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Tulsa. When the bishop came to them two years later with plans for the small Episcopal church in Yukon, they were both excited.
They moved to Yukon with their children, Hannah, 6, and Andrew, 2.
“We wanted to help create a church that was an inclusive church and a very generous church,” Tim Baer said.
“Somewhere,” his wife said, “where people can have questions and not have uniformity.”
Church grows with Yukon
The Grace Church leaders are proud of the multigenerational congregation that includes many families (about 35 percent of the congregation is made up of children) but also some older people. The average age of church members is 30.
“Sometimes, it’s the grandparents that find us, sometimes, it’s the kids,” Kirsten Baer said.
Kirsten Baer said some of the church’s growth can be attributed to the fact that the city of Yukon is growing.
She and her husband said church members inviting people to worship has helped fill the pews, as well as the church’s blend of the traditional with “a fresh approach.”
Tim Baer said “We sing a lot of old hymns done in new ways” led by a talented music minister Kyle Gossett, of Duncan. Gossett, he said, writes a lot of the music himself and recently had a jazz-themed Sunday that church members seemed to enjoy.
“There are some different ways to blend the new and the old. We try to do that authentically,” he said.
The couple said part of the church’s growth also may be attributed to their intentional effort to be inclusive and to encourage their congregation to welcome all people, something they said the Episcopal Church USA generally does nationwide.
They said some houses of worship may exclude gays and the divorced or prohibit women from ministry leadership but theirs isn’t one of them.
“We try hard not to judge but to see the best in people. We start off trying to love everybody,” Kirsten Baer said.
Tim Baer said Grace Church tries to strike a certain balance.
“We value Scripture as the inspired Word of God. We value our God-given capacity for reason,” he said. “There are adults who have been told that it wasn’t OK to think about their reasoning and questioning the Bible. We want to help make the Episcopalian and Anglican tradition more accessible to people — to balance out their faith.”
Outreach set
Meanwhile, the Baers and their congregation are preparing for the church’s annual Chili Cook-off and Trunk-orTreat event, which will be held in a few weeks.
They said church members and members of the community are encouraged to decorate their car trunks to dazzle children and to win a prize for the most creative decorations.
A homemade chili contest will help raise money for the Manna Pantry. People who attend the cook-off may purchase tickets to vote on their favorite chili.
The outreach is held every year, but the church reaches out to the community on a regular basis in other ways. In addition to the Manna food pantry, they partner with Compassionate Hands, where Kirsten Baer serves as chairman and Tim Baer is a member of the Yukon Rotary Club.
The church also has a Laundry Love program in which church members go to a local laundromat on the last Thursday of each month to pay laundry costs for individuals and families there. “We feel like God has got a lot more for us to do here in this community,” Tim Baer said.
“There are still people out there who think that God doesn’t love them, that He doesn’t want them. These are the people we want to reach.”
We try hard not to judge but to see the best in people. We start off trying to love everybody.”
The Rev. Kirsten Baer, rector at Grace Episcopal Church