14 | April 2025
Snowstorm Doesn’t Deter Church Launch in Central Ohio for Send Network Planter By Diana Chandler, Baptist Press senior writer
128 people weathered a snow storm for the launch of Change City Church in central Ohio on Feb. 16. Change City photo
PICKERINGTON, Ohio (BP) – A year’s planning had gone into Change City Church in central Ohio before launch day on what was initially a rainy Feb. 16. That’s when the texts started arriving on Pastor Darryl Baker’s phone. “Are you still launching? We are shut down. There’s a snow emergency here,” a Cincinnati pastor texted Baker. But that was 120 miles away. In Pickerington, it was only raining and freezing cold. “Hey, are you still launching today?” a friend from Colum- bus called. “We’re online only. It’s a snow emergency. You can’t even drive around here. It’s terrible.” Columbus is much closer, 17 miles northwest. “And literally, as he said that to me,” Baker told Baptist Press, “I looked out the window – and it was just raining here – and instantly it turned from rain into huge snow- flakes. Oh my goodness. And within a few minutes after that, we started getting bombarded with text messages, ‘Are you still launching today?’” Baker and his core team had held pre-launch events since the summer in Pickerington, a well-to-do Columbus sub- urb of about 25,000 people, and had secured a year’s lease on a church site in a building owned by Learning Never Ends, just across the street from Ridgeville Junior High School. The team had already made connections in the community. Baker contacted his core team. The launch was a go. He encouraged them to use wisdom and attend only if they could safely do so. Having grown up in Chicago, he was accustomed to driving in icy conditions. “I told my wife, ‘It may just be me and you,’” Baker shared
the conversation with Baptist Press. “And I said, ‘If it’s just me and you, guess what, it’ll just be me and you.’” Baker and his wife Patrice have been married 39 years and while Change City Church is a new plant for them, its location is not new on their radar. Baker eyed it as a potential church site long before he heard the call to the pastorate, he said. He pointed it out to his wife as they were driving home, having recently moved to the area. “I literally told my wife. I said man, that’s a great location for a church,” he recalled the conversation. “I said if God ever allowed me to pastor out here, I would want to meet in that building right there. That was 20 years ago. Twenty years ago I said that.” Baker was in pharmaceutical sales at the time, but de- scribes himself as having always had a heart for ministry. “The first person I led to faith was my friend Eddie, in second grade,” Baker told Baptist Press, “at lunch time, sitting on the bench. And I shared the Gospel and he re- ceived the Lord. And I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go to heaven.’” As a young couple, he and his wife started a Good News Bible Club with their children in their home, inviting their children’s friends who were unchurched. As a family, they visited shelters and assisted living facilities. “My wife would sing, my kids would do a dance and I would do a teaching,” Baker recalled. Before Change City Church, Baker planted a church inde- pendently that met in a nursing home, but the COVID-19 pandemic put the facility on lockdown, which left the
Story continues on the next page...
Made with FlippingBook Converter PDF to HTML5