Back to the future
Acrowd of people from a prominent Southern Baptist church recently gathered for a time of worship at a high school football stadium.
Some families sat in the stands while others worshiped from their lawn chairs spread out across the stadium.
The scene was May 10 as members of First Southern Baptist Church of Del City returned to church for the first time since early March.
It was a nod to the church's Starlight Crusades, which drew huge crowds for 40 years. It also provided a way to safely comply with social distancing guidelines in the era of COVID-19.
The Starlight Crusades began in 1965, started by First Southern Baptist's renowned senior pastor at the time, Bailey Smith. The popular summer evening services were typically held for two-weeks at Del City High School's Eagle Stadium. The recent worship service was held at the Christian Heritage Academy football stadium adjacent to the First Southern Baptist's property at 6400 S
Sooner Road.
The Rev. Keith Burkhart, the church's current pastor, said the stadium was the perfect site to bring the congregation back together and allow people to worship together at a safe distance from one another.
He said the outdoor service was a nice way to pay homage to the Starlight Crusades that are an important part of First Southern Baptist's history. The annual evening worship services continued on into the early 2000s. Burkhart was baptized by Smith (who died in 2019) and spent much of his teen and early adulthood at the church. He said he remembers that the Starlight Crusades were so popular one year and so many people came to know Christ that the event was extended for a third year.
To host a modern-day version of those worship gatherings of yesteryear was special indeed, Burkhart said. “We did it as kind of as an ice breaker, getting our people back together again,” he said of the May 10 service. “It was so exciting. I totally underestimated how starved people are for community. They missed the interaction even though we had Connection Groups and services online, they missed it.”
Perfect venue
Burkhart said just as the church had a perfect place for its reopening service, so it has a great venue for its first service to be held in its church building since in-person worship was suspended. The pastor said First Southern Baptist averages about 800 people for Sunday worship. He said the congregation had been holding two Sunday services in a sanctuary that seats about 660 people, and they were about to add a third service before the coronavirus outbreak. However, the church will now be able to host one service and still comply with social distancing guidelines. Burkhart said they will do this on Sunday by holding the worship service in the church's larger Event Center, which seats up to 4,200.
He said he's expecting God to do great things as people gather in the church building for worship. “We're trying not to go `back to normal' but a new normal,” Burkhart said. “We're really trusting God for an outpouring in and around our church.”