Concord Fellowship Baptist Church hosted the first annual Church Revived conference from Jan. 31-Feb. 1 to help churches in the greater Columbia area better meet the needs of their congregations and community. Pastor Andre Rogers organized the weekend event with pastors and church leaders in mind. He strategically invited a panel of guest speakers to encourage church health and challenge attendees to revive their church’s day-to-day operations and vision casting. According to Rogers, the experience was to provide a “playbook” to churches as they manifest God’s glory in every part of Columbia.
“The purpose was to help pastors and church leaders with system design, think through how to reach the unseen in the community, and to pastor the community and entire city well, not just focusing on those within the walls,” Rogers says, reminding pastors that “your church is strategically placed by God to be a city of refuge and a help for everyone in the community, not just to those attending your church.”
Church Revived session speakers included Bishop Michael Blue, Dr. Napoleon Bradford, Dr. Valerie Carter-Smith, Pastor Paul Little, and Pastor Stephen Splawn. They spoke on shepherding and engaging the whole city, ways that churches self-sabotage, seeing the ‘unseen,’ rethinking church growth and health, and how correct systems within the church translate into doing ministry with excellence.
According to Rogers, many churches operate with less than 60 people in attendance on Sundays, and he wanted to help them learn how to reconnect and raise numbers from the community. He reports that people “walked away saying, ‘I never thought about that before.’ As a church leader, I can put my hands on the pulse of what’s going on in churches and address those issues through Church Revived. I saw pastors connecting with pastors with a great spirit of camaraderie, and that was exciting to see.”
Splawn saw Church Revived provide a time of reflection and refreshment for pastors to gain practical skills to improve ministry while recharging them to serve others. He said it also offered like-minded pastors the opportunity to align and gain success in Kingdom work through resources that directly applied to their contexts. He was glad that deacons and the executive leadership team from his church, First Northeast Baptist, attended and benefitted from the experience.
“Church Revived is not just a revival. You’re getting technical advice, systems awareness advice, and gospel share tactics. It was beneficial to every level of leader of my church,” Splawn says. “If you’re really wanting to improve yourself and your ministry outlook and capacities, you can’t afford to miss it.”
Ethan Brown, pastor of Stephen Greene Baptist Church, took something away from each of the session speakers that had “a direct missions focus on the theme of fulfilling the Great Commission and how we do that in our context.” Brown was challenged about ways his church can naturally find connections within communities and identify correct church systems that might be functioning in the wrong ways.
“Something else really spoke to me – the idea that if our children and grandchildren don’t want to go to church, maybe that’s less about the larger culture and more about how the Church is less and less a place they want to go to. It stung, but very much speaks about the purpose of church which is for our children, families, and communities to know Christ. If we aren’t offering a place for them to discover this then we’ve failed.”
Separate breakout sessions were offered for pastors and their wives during the conference and included a Sisters Who Care luncheon sponsored by SC Woman’s Missionary Union. Rev. Ralphetta Davis, an associate pastor at Concord Fellowship and director of WMU for CMBA, introduced Sisters Who Care resources to participants and described how the Holy Spirit moved during the luncheon.
“Women began testifying about ministry experiences and personal stories and testimonies. You could see God at work,” says Davis, who shared her own testimony of God’s faithfulness and was able to encourage another woman with a similar testimony. Davis’s daughter Courtney Foxe led in worship during the luncheon and noted how much she gained from the conference as a church member, including recognizing how churches should become involved in government, schools, and neighborhoods to actively share God’s love.
“We all have a role. I have a role in discipleship, reaching the ‘unseen,’ and inviting people to church. I can do these things and not just feel like it’s my pastor’s role to be involved in them. There is so much work to do, and there is so much that can be done to reach people for Christ. It’s encouraging to know that we have a community of people who are passionate about doing this,” Foxe says.
CMBA will share details as they are made available about the next Church Revived, which is scheduled for Jan. 30-31, 2026. Rogers reports that session videos from this first Church Revived conference will be shared through Concord Fellowship’s YouTube channel.