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Southwood Baptist Church An archive · Fort Worth, Texas

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The Ministries of Southwood Baptist Church

Empty church fellowship hall and gymnasium with a hardwood court and stacked folding chairs

Southwood Baptist Church stood in southwest Fort Worth, Texas, and no longer exists as a congregation. This page records the ministries it ran, as the church itself listed them, and describes what several of them would have involved in a congregation of its size.

The church introduced its own list with a single sentence: it was, it said, "extremely active in ministering to its own members and the surrounding community". The inventory that followed is short on detail and long on entries, and it is the length that is informative. A congregation that maintains this many distinct efforts at once is not being run by its staff. It is being run by a large number of volunteers doing one thing each, most of them on a weeknight.

The list as the church published it

Music: a choir, an orchestra, a band and an ensemble

Four separate musical bodies is a great deal for one congregation, and their coexistence describes a specific moment. A sanctuary choir with an orchestra is the older arrangement: robed voices, hymnody and arranged anthems, with instrumentalists reading from published scores. A praise band is the newer one, drawn from the contemporary worship movement that reshaped American evangelical services from the 1980s onward. Many churches replaced the first with the second and lost people in the process. Southwood ran both, alongside a teen ensemble that gave younger singers somewhere to be that was not the adult choir. The church's music ministry page describes how it thought about worship in its own words.

An orchestra deserves a note of its own. Church orchestras were a notable feature of Texas Baptist life in this period, sustained by school band programmes that turned out competent adult amateurs in large numbers, and they required real infrastructure — parts to buy or arrange, a rehearsal night, stands, storage and someone to conduct.

Drama

The Southwood Players carried a company name rather than a description, which suggests a standing group rather than an occasional Christmas cast. Drama ministry in congregations of this kind generally meant two things at once: short sketches used inside a service to set up a sermon, and larger seasonal productions at Easter and Christmas that could absorb dozens of volunteers, including many who would never sing or teach. Youth drama was listed separately among the church's outreach programmes, which suggests the two ran in parallel.

Audio, video and the projection team

Three of the twelve entries are technical. Somebody ran the sound desk, somebody ran the cameras and recording, and somebody advanced the lyrics and sermon points on the screen. Listing these as ministries rather than as chores is a deliberate move — it treats the volunteer at the back of the auditorium as doing the same kind of work as the volunteer at the front — and in this congregation the technical teams were unusually load-bearing, because their output fed two other ministries. Recordings became the CDs and DVDs described on the audio and video page, and those recordings were what reached the members who could no longer attend.

Deaf ministry

Of everything on the list, the deaf ministry is the most distinctive, and the one most often misunderstood as simply providing an interpreter.

Interpreting a service is skilled and demanding work. A sermon is unscripted, moves quickly, and is dense with proper nouns and specialist vocabulary — book names, place names, doctrinal terms — much of which has to be fingerspelled or rendered through an agreed local sign. Interpreters generally work in pairs and rotate, because sustained simultaneous interpretation is physically tiring. Hymns and congregational singing present a further problem, since they are rhythmic and repetitive in ways that do not map onto signed language at all, and interpreting them well is closer to performance than to translation.

But a deaf ministry in the American sense usually meant considerably more than access to the pulpit. American Sign Language is a full language with its own grammar and its own community, and Deaf congregants have historically formed a distinct culture within hearing churches rather than a set of individuals needing accommodation. A church running a deaf ministry would typically have provided Bible study conducted in sign rather than interpreted, pastoral visiting by someone who could sign, transport, and a social life that did not depend on lip-reading a room. Deaf churches and deaf departments within hearing congregations have a long institutional history in the United States, closely connected to the growth of Deaf education and the institutions that shaped it, among them Gallaudet University. For a congregation of Southwood's size to maintain one at all indicates a deliberate and sustained commitment, since it cannot be done occasionally.

Senior Saints, shut-ins and nursing homes

The last entries on the list are the least visible and, in day-to-day terms, probably the largest.

Senior Saints was the senior adults' fellowship — the daytime programme of a congregation, meeting when the building is otherwise empty, built around a shared meal, a devotional and outings. Groups of this kind matter disproportionately in a church with an ageing membership, because they are frequently the only structured social contact in a member's week.

The shut-in and nursing home ministries went where the members could no longer come. That work is unglamorous and relentless: regular home and facility visits, keeping track of who is in hospital and who has moved, delivering recordings of services, and remaining in contact with people whose participation in congregational life is now entirely one-directional. It is also the ministry that most clearly links back to the technical teams, since the audio and video ministry existed in part to serve exactly these members. A church that records its services and then delivers them to people who cannot attend has joined two ministries into one, and Southwood's list quietly shows both halves.

Young people and young adults

The list allows itself an unquantified entry — "a plethora of opportunities for teenagers" — which is set out properly on the church's page for teenagers. Alongside it the archive records a group for young adults past school age and not yet married, meeting on Sunday mornings, and a fully graded Sunday School running from the nursery upward. Together with the ministries above, they describe a congregation that had made a place for people at every stage of a life, which is what the plain list on this page was really claiming.