March 1, 2016 | By LYNDA STRINGER

Contributed photo/CENTER CHURCH

Center Church celebrated its 1st anniversary with balloons during the worship service Sunday night. 

Tuesday marks one year since Center Church held its first worship service.

Led by Pastor Jeremy Thomas, the unique congregation has grown steadily over the past year and is only looking for that growth to continue.

Unlike most churches, the nondenominational flock doesn’t meet on Sunday mornings. Instead, members and visitors gather on comfy chairs, couches, and white-painted pews in the space above Jo’s Coffee Shop at 5 p.m. on Sunday evenings to soak in the contemporary music and Thomas’ message.

Baptisms are held on the patio behind the building; new believers are submerged in water in a horse trough colorfully airbrushed with the words, “Made New.” The public professions of faith are followed by a church-wide celebration with a meal they call “Community Night.”

“When we launched that first Sunday night, it was packed. It was a fun time and throughout this past year, we’ve seen close to 30 people come to know Christ,” said Thomas, who was part of Trinity Baptist Church’s ministry team and involved in Ark Ministries before the new church was planted.

Center Church and Jo’s Coffee Shop are both under the nonprofit umbrella of Ark Ministries, which hosts concerts and other events in the area.

“We had been doing Ark Ministries for a couple of years at that point and we realized that we weren’t great at getting people from this initial experience of God to being engaged and going further into a relationship with Christ,” Thomas said.

The Ark Ministries team purchased the building where Jo’s Antiques had stood on the corner of North Jefferson and 1st Street after its owner, Jo Campbell, passed away in 2013. Used as a meeting venue for the community on a limited schedule, the ministry then launched the coffee shop with Heather Kimball at the helm in early 2015, and then Thomas, Jeffery and Leah Crabb, Sara and Danny Muskrat, Kyle and Cheryl Shovan and Jesus Garcia decided to follow a calling to found the church.

“It was on my heart for sure and on their hearts, too, that we saw a need for it and thought that this could be an incredible thing,” Thomas said.

The partnership between Jo’s and the church makes it even more unusual, with proceeds from the coffee shop benefiting the church.

“We see it as an incredible way to be available to the city in more ways than an hour on Sunday,” Thomas said. “We can provide a place that is safe and fun that teens and college students and adults, too, can come and hang out. We’ve seen God do a lot of cool things through those times and, sometimes, even cooler than what we’ve seen on a Sunday night.”

Contributed photo/CENTER CHURCH

Pastor Jeremy Thomas finds a horse trough works fine for baptisms at Center Church, which meets on Sunday evenings above Jo’s Coffee Shop.

The mantra of the church is #gospelpeoplemovement, a hashtag you’ll find frequently on its social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and a philosophy that encourages members to take the church into the community.

With about 100 active members and 40 kids filling the small space, Thomas said eventually they will have to consider a different location or add another service. But even with that decision, they are looking at it from a nontraditional perspective.

“One of our founding things is we don’t necessarily want to put up a building that sits empty 90 percent of the week. Whenever we do something, we want it to be like Jo’s Coffee Shop, an incredible community place where people can gather, have meetings, study or whatever that looks like. So that’s in our planning, but we are still seeking God’s will in that area.”

As the church leadership team looks ahead to its second year, avenues of ministry are ever widening. Thomas said the church will launch a partnership with Titus County Cares on April 1 for a ministry they will call Life STEP, which stands for Skills Training Empowering People.

“We’ll offer weekly classes in different topics such as personal financial management, cooking, health and wellness, job skills, resumes, applications, things like that,” he said.

In conjunction with those classes, they will offer activities for the children of the parents involved in the classes. That vision also includes afterschool programs offering sports, tutoring and mentoring for kids.

“Life STEP will be a step for us to see what’s out there and to really begin to invest in our city,” Thomas said.  “One of our big goals for this year is to make inroads into uniting multiple organizations throughout our city to accomplish some very big goals.”

Titus County Cares was a natural avenue for starters, but they want to reach out to the school districts, the police department, and other organizations in the city to form partnerships for social initiatives, he said.

Several community groups meet for Bible study and fellowship during the week and they have recently started a college ministry called CenterCrew for young adults 18 to 25 that will begin having events on Friday nights. Part of that ministry is reaching out to students at Northeast Texas Community College.

“We go out to the college every Sunday and provide lunch. We saw a need there because there are students who don’t have transportation and there was a lack of food services on the weekends, so it’s been a cool thing,” Thomas said.

The ministry team feeds about 30 to 40 students Sunday lunch and plans to add activities for them.

“We don’t want it to just be a meal and move on. We really want to build those relationships because our thing is we really feel like we can change the world. It’s crazy. There are kids at the college from Ireland and South Africa and all over the United States,” he said.

Members of the church are providing rides to the students to get to Center’s Sunday night services and several have started to attend.

“It’s fun to help them have a better college experience, make friends and find people they know they can count on when they’ve had a tough day,” he said.

Thomas, a self-avowed introvert, says he felt the call to ministry when he was a senior in high school. He had taught Bible studies for years, but stepped onto the stage in front of an enthusiastic crowd one year ago, a little uncertain about his public speaking abilities.

But he forged ahead, faithful to God’s leading. And today, looking back, he says he is amazed at how God has used him to change people’s lives.

“It’s pretty much 100 percent consistent that on days I think I haven’t performed or didn’t have my stuff together, things came out wrong or didn’t come out at all, that I see God working most,” he said. “So for me, it’s this humbling, beautiful thing to know that God is in such control that he’s moving things forward with or without me and changing people lives.”

Still, he hopes he can help them change lives. “I want them to see where God is working and join him to bring justice to social and economic needs while bringing the light of Jesus into some dark parts of our city,” Thomas says.

He wants the next generation not to say they “went to church,” but instead to say, “we are the church.”

Lynda Stringer is a Mount Pleasant, TX-based freelance writer and owner of Stringer Media. Contact her at Lynda.Stringer@outlook.com.