Baptists set sights on Vegas ‘frontier’

Stacy J. Willis

Sunday, June 11, 2000 | 9:39 a.m.

About a mile from the Strip, the lilt of Southern accents slips out of an office door marked "Loving Las Vegas."

Inside, a half-dozen Southern Baptists are sitting around a table talking up plans to blanket Sin City with invitations to come to Christ -- preferably through the doors of a Southern Baptist church -- in 2001.

The nearly $2 million campaign is led by a recent Louisiana transplant, aided by missionaries from Mississippi, and predominantly funded by the church's mission board in Georgia.

Their agenda includes hosting block parties and marriage seminars, establishing a lay-minister training center and advertising the be-a-Baptist message on radio, TV and billboards across the Las Vegas Valley. It also includes unprecedented interdenominational cooperation -- they plan to work with other local evangelical churches "to impact and transform Southern Nevada."

"Southern Baptist work of this caliber has never been done here," said Carra Purvis, a missionary from Mississippi who serves as a Loving Las Vegas volunteer coordinator. "This is frontier land."

But the Southern Baptist Convention's selection of Las Vegas as one of two missionary focus cities in 2001 may be more about a transformation of the nation's largest Protestant denomination than of a spiritually independent city.

Across the nation, Southern Baptists are having a bit of an identity crisis -- wrestling with talk of schism and rattled by questions of public image.

Known in recent years for taking an anti-gay stance that manifested itself in a boycott of Walt Disney Co., issuing statements about a wife's subservient role to her husband and questioning the validity of female pastors, the bastion of conservatism has birthed dissenters.

Frustration among church moderates has risen to a level that prompted Southern Baptist Convention President Paige Patterson to tell the New York Times last week that "a denomination within the denomination" had been formed. Patterson said he wouldn't be surprised if 1,500 or more moderate congregations broke off to form a new denomination in coming years.

Enter the evangelism project in Las Vegas: A city where the largest Southern Baptist Church, Shadow Hills Baptist, counts itself among those moderates and regularly opts not to follow the doctrinal lead of the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention.

"We don't buy into everything," the Rev. Michael Rochelle, Shadow Hills pastor, said. "We didn't support the Disney boycott. We don't support the idea that a woman is second to a man ... For the first time in a long time, I'm not even going to the convention this year."

The annual Southern Baptist Convention will be held this month in Orlando, Fla., despite it being the home of Disney World.

"I would definitely say there that there is a schism -- an attitude of discontent on both sides -- moderates say the conservatives are becoming too fundamentalist and restrictive, conservatives are bothered by the attitudes of the moderates," Rochelle, whose Summerlin church counts more than 2,500 members, said. "(The Southern Baptist Convention) know(s) that in order to have a real effect in Western cities, places like Las Vegas, you have to recognize that people out here are independent," Rochelle said.

There are about 100 Southern Baptist churches in Southern Nevada and about 40,000 Southern Baptist congregations nationwide.

"I pretty much cut my teeth on the back of a Baptist pew in Las Vegas," Rochelle said. "But we're in a whole different world than the Southeast."

Accordingly, the message of this campaign is more subtle than it might be in the South.

For example, although the Southern Baptists have actively lobbied against gambling nationwide, they are bowing to Las Vegas's different brand of Southern Baptist.

"We won't picket casinos in Las Vegas," Purvis said.

"We're not here to say this lifestyle is bad. We want to meet people wherever they are in their lives, and build relationships between Las Vegas' people and the out-of-state volunteers so that they can keep in touch and grow."

Purvis said Baptists in five states -- Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kansas and Nebraska have been tapped to send volunteers to Las Vegas in 2001.

Another chief aim of the Loving Las Vegas campaign will be improving the Southern Baptist image, according to the Rev. Tommy Starkes, Southern Baptist pastor of Tropicana Christian Fellowship in Las Vegas, and co-chairman of the Loving Las Vegas evangelism committee.

"What will be different, after this effort, is that Baptists will be understood as a ministering people, not people who are only interested in taking negative ethical stands," Starkes said. "People know us now either as neutral or negative. By the end of the year 2001, we hope to have a more positive image."

"We're really making an effort to be beneficial to families and individuals here," said Loving Las Vegas coordinator Tim Robinson, 37, who moved to Nevada from Louisiana in September.

"Like St. Francis of Assisi said, we're going to preach the gospel and only when necessary use words."

Additionally, in attempt to ease into a Christian community that has in recent years widely embraced nondenominationalism, the Southern Baptists are planning to pitch a more general Christian message.

"Their effort is much broader than just Baptists, and I think that's a credible approach," Rochelle said.

Rochelle's church "will not buy in wholesale to everything done in Loving Las Vegas -- but we do support it."

Robinson is not deterred by the differences between the Las Vegas and the Southeastern Southern Baptist communities.

"In Louisiana, the church is certainly more financially well-off, and there is a foundation, a tradition," Robinson said. "But here it has been refreshing for me to experience the spirit of cooperation. I have discovered that we have an interfaith family that is friendlier.

"By the end of (2001), we'll have an even more positive, unified Southern Baptist community in Las Vegas."

Stacy J. Willis

covers religious issues for the Sun. She can be reached at (702) 259-4011 or by e-mail at willis@lasvegassun.com