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Leap of faith
By Taylor Messick
Last Updated: September 22, 2016

Valley Center native leading Park City church

After the death of Pastor James P. McQuery last July, many wondered if Randall Road Baptist Church would ever re-open.

Since then, members of the Park City church have unanimously elected Pastor Ben Crow as the new steward of their congregation. The church has now opened its doors again under the name Orchard Community Church.

Crow spent his entire childhood living just outside of Valley Center. His parents moved to the community before he was born and he and his four siblings completed their schooling in Valley Center.

After high school, Crow accepted a scholarship to Wichita State University and began studying economics. It was there that he joined a campus ministry called Christian Challenge and began to develop a desire to pursue ministry.

"The most impactful part of college was the friendships and relationships I made there," said Crow. "A lot of those were through Christian Challenge. I've been going to church my whole life and became a follower of Jesus at an early age. In college, God got ahold of my heart in a new way. Those people I met not only taught me about what it meant to follow God in a deeper way, they demonstrated it."

This is where Crow developed the idea that part of his faith meant sharing his beliefs and ideas with other people. He felt he needed to move into the dorms, which provided even more opportunities to meet people and establish relationships through God.

Crow quickly became a leader in the Christian Challenge group and was drawn to the idea of going into ministry. However, after completing his degree, he began to feel that the wise and right thing to do was to get real-world experience by getting a job. He said this gave him the experience he needed to learn how to walk with God in everyday life.

He took a full-time position at Koch Industries and got married. He said he enjoyed the experience of working at Koch, but knew in his heart that it wouldn't be permanent; what he really wanted to do was ministry.

After two years at Koch, Crow began attending Midwestern Baptist Theological Ministry in North Kansas City. He continued to work at Koch part-time while driving to Kansas City two days a week because he and his wife wanted to remain in the Wichita area. Eventually, he took an internship with River Community Church under Pastor Terry Williams, a church he found through Christian Challenge.

"It was the right kind of training for me," Crow said. "The classroom provides academic and theoretical training but that mentoring and internship provided hands-on, practical leadership experience."

After McQuery's death, Crow filled in as a pastor at Randall Road Baptist, which was part of a requirement for his internship. That was his first experience with the people of that church. Three months after he completed seminary, he took over the vacant position. That's much quicker than things normally move, but Crow said he has kept an open heart and open mind through the process, taking it one day at a time.

So far, Crow has seen a mixture of two different communities coming together to form one congregation at Orchard Community Church. Many of the people he connected with during his internship at River Community have come to join the members of the former Randall Road Baptist Church.

Crow wants to continue his own experience that walking with God together with other people is the best way to walk with him. He said the goal of the church is to offer people a relationship with God. From there, he says the development of those relationships and the spreading of that type of faith happen naturally.

The way his church accomplishes this is by offering different types of worship. The congregation meets on Sunday mornings at 10:30, but also holds a number of small group meetings throughout the week. The groups are diverse in age and gender and most nights there are opportunities for those interested to gather at a member's home. These groups are way of demonstrating the communal style of worship that Crow has learned and demonstrated in his journey into ministry.

"We're Orchard Community Church for a reason," he said. "An orchard is a community of fruit-bearing trees. Jesus described his followers as the branch and him as the vine. So we need to stay connected in order to bear fruit. If you cut off a branch, it will wither and die. If we stay connected, we'll have the potential to bear fruit. That's John, chapter 15. Don't quote me; quote Jesus."

For more information about Orchard Community Church, visit orchardccwichita.org.





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