Pastor John Scally walks through a remodeled church building in Grand Blanc, Michigan, explaining the challenges of church renewal. He recently led Emmanuel Church in Flint, Michigan, to help this nearby church, but with such complicated problems, what should Emmanuel fix first?

The roof, John says. You walk into projects like this with big plans for vibrant worship and stirring sermons and community outreach. But the roof leaks.

“My first job was emptying the rain buckets,” says Brandon Robertson, describing his internship at the Grand Blanc site, which became a campus of Emmanuel Church. Now Brandon is campus director for the Grand Blanc site, and we’re standing in a freshly painted nursery.

“It’s incredible to think about what the nursery looked like at one time,” John says. “There was water falling through the ceiling. And now look at what God has done. It’s just incredible.” In two years the Grand Blanc campus has grown from 25 people (and no children) to an average attendance of 150.

“But God’s been doing other things, not just attendance,” John says, then launches into their story.

Several years ago John cast a vision at Emmanuel Church—a plan to help struggling churches in their area. When talks with a possible site fell through, a church member alerted John to the building in Grand Blanc.

“She had grown up in this church,” John says. “She left because there was nothing for young people her age, and she started attending our Flint campus.” The Grand Blanc deacons welcomed Emmanuel’s proposal, and most members of the previous church became active in the new church.

Though Emmanuel had budgeted some money for the project, the roof problems were a rude surprise. John solicited help from Clare Jewell, director of Generate. Clare, as it turned out, grew up in nearby Swartz Creek.

“We got to know each other pretty well,” John says. “I went to the GARBC Conference almost every year, and that’s how I learned about Baptist Builders Club, which is now called Generate.” Generate offers grants, consultation, and coaching for church planting and renewal.

“They were willing to help us in the planning—which we’re very grateful for—and also funding. I would say the money has been well spent because we’re really committed to this.”

The next step was to recruit a launch team from the Flint campus, about 25 people, including Brandon and his wife, Sarah. “We brought those 25 people to inject life into the ministry here,” John says. More importantly, they would help the Grand Blanc campus focus on the most important task: outreach.

“My style of ministry is to go after unreached and unchurched people. We’ve reached people who were religious but not in a relationship with Christ. Or people that have some sort of a religious background but are not grounded in truth.”

John understood that many churches expend a lot of energy on service planning, worship, and preparation for preaching. All good. But for church renewal teams, these efforts often leave little time for outreach and relationship building in the community. So Emmanuel Church supplied the worship team and preacher for each service and organized the children’s ministry. This freed up everyone’s time for outreach.

“We had several younger families that started coming who were not technically families. They weren’t married—they were living together,” John says, noting that he recently married one of the couples. “They felt convicted to get right with God.” And the campus has now baptized many people, “which is incredible,” John says.

John estimates that Emmanuel Church has spent about $200,000 on the Grand Blanc venture. “Our goal is to do a third campus, then a fourth,” he says. And the church is already saving for the next project.