How and why did Fellowship Church get started?
A church planting team from Houston came to College Station in 1977. They began with a month-long evangelistic outreach with help from friends in other cities. Many of the team members rented homes in the Northgate area where they had daily fellowship along with weekly meetings for worship, prayer and Bible study.
Pastor Herschel Martindale commissioned the team a few years after he had made radical changes in his own life and ministry. He had been a Plymouth Brethren pastor and well known Bible conference speaker, but was challenged at a meeting with Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright to consider if the church as he knew it might actually fulfill the Great Commission in his generation.
Herschel established close relationships with zealous young Christian leaders in Colorado and parts of the Midwest who also had backgrounds with Plymouth Bretheren, Campus Crusade, Navigators and Operation Mobilization. He worked with them in evangelistic and church planting campaigns in the mid 1970s.
Herschel and those with him saw the strategic importance of reaching students at major universities in Texas to carry out the Great Commission in this state. After the team came to College Station, others were sent to Austin and Lubbock.
Ron Tewson, a young man with significant leadership experience in the Continental Singers Christian music evangelism ministry joined Herschel in Houston. He was ordained as a pastor and led the 1977 team that established Fellowship Church. God used Ron to reach hundreds of Aggies with the Gospel and to establish some of the core values we hold today.
He left Fellowship Church in 1987 to help with the organizing work of Great Commission International, which became the Great Commission Association of Churches in 1989. Today Ron is pastor of Horizon Community Church in Orlando, Florida.
How has God used Fellowship Church since it was established?
Since its beginning, Fellowship Church has emphasized winning people to Jesus rather than recruiting members from other churches. This is called conversion growth as opposed to transfer growth, and remains one of our priorities.
Every church has a philosophy of ministry that guides what it does to reach and serve people. Fellowship Church's main philosophy of ministry centers on homegroups, which are similar to what many other churches today call cell groups. A result is that Fellowship Church never has had a lot of other ongoing programs or specialized ministries.
Reaching university students and discipling them for lifelong service to Christ wherever they go was the major factor in establishing FCC, and it has always been a high priority. We see the 44,000 students as our primary mission field.
As the church and some longtime members have matured, God has led Fellowship Church into increased outreach in the community, so that we have about an equal number of student homegroups and non-student community homegroups.
An exciting part of Fellowship’s growth in recent years has been International student outreach. We thank God for putting us at a place where there are thousands of international students and their families, with so many open to the love of Christ.
How did the three Fellowship Church outreach ministries develop or change?
The primary outreach of Fellowship Church for the first ten years was to A&M students. The church met on Sundays in campus buildings.
AMCF was known for many bold evangelistic efforts on campus such as passing out gospel tracts in the form of football rosters before home games, many days of outdoor preaching each semester, door-to-door evangelism in dorms and apartments, and a giant watermelon feast on the main drill field.
In those times people of all ages, students and nonstudents, were together in the large homegroups which were often led by deacons. About 1988 a shift was made to distinguish student from community homegroups. Later, the concept of smaller homegroups with student homegroup leaders coached by a pastor or deacon was adopted. This shift was a key one in the way Fellowship Church expanded its focus on leadership development, especially among students.
The community homegroups and Fellowship Church outreach to nonstudents were affected in 1989 when a large group of members moved to the Dallas area to be involved in planting churches in Plano, Arlington, and especially in Richardson. Fellowship Church pastor Lee Jarrell went with the group to Richardson. Soon after, many of the older Fellowship Church members with children transferred to other local churches which had well developed children’s ministries.
There were just a few families and single non-students in Fellowship Church at that time, but God used them to provide essential leadership, continuity and financial support for the church. With encouragement from Pastor Ray Muenich, however, over the next ten years the community homegroups continued to grow so that the non-student membership of Fellowship Church is usually about equal to the student membership.
The community outreach ministry has had many significant evangelistic projects. They worked for months in 1997 to share the gospel and a free copy of the Jesus movie with every home in a section of western Bryan. Each year thousands of gospel tracts have been hand delivered along with invitations to Fellowship Church Easter and Christmas celebrations. Some years the church had a "float" in the annual Christmas parade and members walked along the crowd handing out tracts with a theme matching the float theme. From 1999 to 2001 they undertook a coordinated tv ad campaign and tract distribution called What If It’s True?
Sometime in the mid 1980s AMCF and Fellowship Church began holding a welcome picnic for international students just before the beginning of the fall semester. The turnout was usually about 100 people. Some international students became part of the student homegroups.
Following the 1995 picnic with a turnout of 180 people, two Fellowship Church members began a Bible study for the internationals at Hensel Park, then at the MSC. It was the beginning of a ministry that God would grow dramatically. One GCM staff member changed from working with American students to entirely with internationals.
The international welcome picnic grew by about 100 people each year to an attendance over 500 in August of 2000. The Friday Bible study at the MSC now averages 20 Asian students and is being organized and promoted by international students. Many Asian students have become Christians, with at least 20 who have finished their TAMU studies and moved on to serve God elsewhere.
AMCF also reaches out to international students with an English conversation class each Monday night. This began about 1998 and has grown to average about 20 per week.
The outreach to internationals took another step in August 2000 as a team of Fellowship Church workers joined Pastor Rodger Lewis and his wife Cheri in a new outreach to students from Latin America. Their Friday night "Lugar de buenos amigos" programs have been attended by more than 60 Latin American students. At least six have prayed to receive Christ, and some have begun the Fellowship Church equipping classes.
How has Fellowship Church been involved in outreach in other countries?
In 1993 Great Commission joined with about 50 evangelical church organizations to send teams into the former Soviet Union. Fellowship Church member Ben Morris was part of a team that was in Kiev, Ukraine, for a year teaching Christian ethics in public schools and reaching out to neighbors there.
Also in 1994 two GCM staff members from Texas A&M participated in an intensive summer short term mission in Kiev, Ukraine. This led to the establishment of the GCM church there.
A team of seven Fellowship Church members went to Kiev for two weeks in the summer of 1998 for an evangelistic mission. In 2000 another team of six Fellowship Church members went to Poznan, Poland, to begin work to establish a new church there. Incidentally, they were working with Herschel Martindale, now the GCM director for Europe.
A TAMU graduate, Mindy Grammer, became the first full time missionary from Fellowship Church in 2000. She is working with the GCM church in Kiev.
Fellowship Church short term mission teams of about 20 people going to Latin America annually began in 1998. That year in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, they helped the GCM church there with door-to-door evangelism. In 1997 a team returned to Honduras and helped victims of hurricane Mitch build houses, along with sharing the gospel. The 1999 team worked to establish a new church in Comayagua, Honduras, and to strengthen the GCM university ministry on a huge campus in Tegucigalpa. The 2001 team went to El Salvador to help earthquake victims and share the gospel in a school and neighborhoods of a small town.
A new GCM initiative in Asia began in 2001. A team including six from Fellowship Church provided English classes, sports activities and other services to a public school and community. They had opportunity to talk about religion in America including their personal testimonies and plant many seeds for the gospel.
How has Fellowship Church helped plant new churches?
Working with other Great Commission churches in 1985 Fellowship Church sent small teams to Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia. The church in the Atlanta, Georgia, area is still functioning.
Pastor Lee Jarrell and about 20 other Fellowship Church members moved to the Dallas area in 1989 to join with others from GCM to start three new churches.
A GCM staff member (now pastor) and his wife led a team to plant a new church in Orlando, Florida, in May 1997 near the University of Central Florida campus. The church grew steadily, and jumped way up in member ship in summer 2001 when the GCM national headquarters moved to Orlando.
Pastor Jatin Patel and his wife JoAnn led an Fellowship Church team to plant a new church in Denton, Texas, in May 2000 near the University of North Texas campus. Susan Bullinger, GCM staff member at TAMU joined that team, as did other GCM staff members from UT Austin.