Reach Idaho

By Karen L. Willoughby

Cameron and Amanda Warner (and their four children) are probably the newest church planter family in Utah and Idaho.

With the help of ministry partners, the Warners are establishing Beacon Church, a Southern Baptist church plant in Southeast Boise.

“We relish your prayers for the people of Boise,” the couple said in an article in the Treasure Valley Baptist Association’s February newsletter. “Pray that the Beacon Church would be a guiding light toward Jesus Christ and that we would send out beacons of hope from Boise to the ends of the earth.”

The newsletter continues: “They’ve served faithfully in churches in Nevada and Idaho, even contributing to a church plant team in 2021. This cumulative experience has ignited a clear vision: to establish a vibrant spiritual community that not only illuminates Boise with the light of Jesus but also actively raises up and dispatches the next generation of Christian leaders and missionaries to the ends of the earth.”

With this new church planting family in Boise, and with March 21 being “Church Planting Sunday” on the Southern Baptist Convention’s calendar, it seems to be a good time to look at church planting in our two states.

“At the present, we have several church planters active in their [first] five-year windows,” Michael Cooper told UI Connections. Cooper is the lead church planting catalyst for the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention. “Some are pre-launch, some ongoing, others [potential planters] are not yet assessed.”

Twenty-five church plants are growing in Utah and Idaho, Cooper said. He gave one example from Idaho and one from Utah.

Calvary Fruitland is a replant started last spring by Calvary Nampa, which itself is a replant of Nampa First Southern Baptist, Cooper said. Anders Snyder was with Calvary Englewood, in a Denver suburb, when in 2017 he felt God’s call to start a church in Idaho.

Calvary Englewood itself was a revitalization, so it made sense to Snyder to start a replant, he told UI Connections last year. Five years after Calvary Nampa started regular weekly worship services, it started a replant of the former First Southern Baptist Church of Fruitland, with Justin Ridgway as planter.

“Sadly it’s common for churches to be in decline,” Ridgway told UI Connections. “But it’s not common to say, ‘We want help,’ and take a posture of humility. In a replant, the church lays everything at the feet of Jesus and surrenders their own preferences and agenda to follow whatever God’s plan is for them to make Jesus known.”

Calvary Fruitland “is going really well,” Cooper said.

“Whenever we’re starting churches that are starting churches, we see those churches as a significant success: a healthy new church starting a healthy even-newer church,” Cooper said. “I believe starting churches is then in their DNA from the beginning. They’re more likely to continue starting churches.”

Cooper spoke of King’s Cross Church as a good church planting story in Utah.

King’s Cross moved on its March 1 third-year anniversary into its own building in Fruit Heights, Davis County, which serves 351,000 people between Ogden and Salt Lake City.

“We see ourselves more as a regional church than just Fruit Heights,” Austin Glenn told UI Connections.

King’s Cross was planted in March 2023 – with Glenn as church planting pastor – by Church at the Cross in Grapevine, Texas.

After meeting in its early years at a charter school and growing a relationship with a Presbyterian church – joint men’s breakfasts, VBS, and more – King’s Cross was asked in December 2024 “if we would consider adopting them,” Glenn said, and the aging 13,000 square-foot building on four acres.

The building required about $1 million in renovations, about $700,000 of which came “from internal and external sources,” Glenn said.

Seven men are going for church planter assessment in Denver in March: a Hispanic, a Burmese, and five Anglos. A Portuguese church planter in St. George also is being processed.

“In this next year we could see as many as 12 to 13 new planters,” Cooper said. “This is the result of decades of work, good partnerships with churches outside of Utah and Idaho, and our local churches taking responsibility for starting new churches.

“The majority of our sending churches are local Utah Idaho churches,” Cooper continued. “Our established churches are getting stronger and taking responsibility to plant, and churches started in the last five to ten years are getting healthy enough to plant churches.

“It feels like we might be in the early stages of one of those significant movements of God,” the lead church planting catalyst said. “It’s hard to measure it until it’s past, but it looks and feels like we are in [the] beginnings of something that could get exciting.

“We are seeing churches started with more people, healthier plants than we’ve ever seen before. When I got here 11 years ago it was common to get to 100 people eventually, but now we’re seeing that within the first two years, especially in Utah. We’re sitting in a different spiritual environment these days. People are hungry for the gospel and hungry for gospel-preaching churches. We just don’t have enough churches.”