Kentucky church teams up with Utah congregation for gospel outreach
By Chip Hutcheson, content editor for Kentucky Today.
The following article is used by permission by Kentucky Today, the official state paper of Kentucky Baptists. The original article appeared in the September 8 edition of Kentucky Today
MIDVALE, Utah — A Kentucky Baptist Convention vision tour several years ago resulted in a connection for Grace Baptist Church in Somerset, Kentucky with a church planter in Utah — and that partnership has flourished. Grace Baptist takes annual mission trips to support the church’s work, and last month the Utah congregation bought a building that was formerly a Latter-day Saints meeting house.
The church plant formerly operated under the name Crossroads Church, located in Sandy, Utah, but the August move to Midvale, Utah, brought with it a name change. The Southern Baptist church now goes by the name Christ Covenant Church.
Todd Meadows, pastor of Grace Baptist and chairman of KBC’s Administrative Committee, shared a video of Christ Covenant “making it official that a former Mormon ward, where darkness prevailed, has been officially claimed and transformed into a church that will worship the one true living God and be an outpost for gospel advancement.”
Mike West, pastor of missions and discipleship at Grace, said he met Matt Emadi on that original vision trip.
Emadi earned his Ph.D. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and returned to his home state in 2014 as a church planter. He now serves as senior pastor of Christ Covenant.
As a result of connecting with Emadi, West now travels with a mission team once a year, usually in July, to assist the Utah congregation. “We have been going for six years, doing Vacation Bible School and different work projects, as well as street evangelism,” said West, who has been a member of Grace since 2009 and on staff for eight years.
The recent location change and new name are seen as major positives for the Utah church.
“The move to a new building is not far from where they were meeting, but it is a different community,” West observed. “The building that housed a Mormon ward had closed down. Several in the (Salt Lake) Valley are closing because not as many people are attending, so they are combining wards.”
In past years, the Grace mission team would travel to the former church location that was situated on a one-acre horse farm. “They met in an old house, which we helped remodel, both the interior and exterior. In the long run the work we did was beneficial because it helped them sell the property pretty quickly.”
The new location will provide “much more space” for the congregation now numbering about 200. “It is a massive upgrade in facilities,” said West. There is a gym, which will serve as a multi-purpose fellowship hall, and more rooms for small groups.
When Emadi went to Utah, he took the church and moved it from being independent Baptist to a Southern Baptist church. On its website, the church asks people to “pray for our church and for the Lord to provide evangelistic opportunities in our new neighborhood.”
A YouTube video shows the steeple on the newly purchased building being removed and replaced by a cross. One comment on that video stated, “To see this moved my heart so powerfully. I couldn’t hold back the tears of joy. When you come out of Mormonism and find the real Jesus and then watch this taking down the steeple of such a harmful and false religion, to be replaced by the cross has such significance.”
Emadi grew up in Layton, Utah, but moved to Louisville to earn degrees from Southern. He authored “How Can I Serve My Church” from 9 Marks. He and his wife, Brittany, have six children.
Other elders at the church are Andrew Jones and Paul Warburg.
Andrew Jones grew up in Louisville but moved to Utah about 11 years ago to help plant a church. He is an educator in the local school district and pursuing an M.Div. degree from Southern. He also currently serves as bivocational Executive Director of the Salt Lake Baptist Association. He and his wife Ashley have five children.
Paul Warburg is a California native who has earned degrees from Liberty University. He moved to Utah in 2021 after learning that the state had one of the smallest populations of evangelical Christians in the U.S. He works as a geopolitical analyst, covering current events around the globe. He and his wife, Vienna, have one child.