“What do you think about church planting?” Chestnut said.
“I don’t,” Ennes responded bluntly.
Ennes realized new churches needed to be started. Like many seminary students, he had taken a class on church planting and read some books on the subject, but—as Ennes saw it—that was years earlier and he knew little else about it. Although it needed to be done, it didn’t need to be done by him.
But when Chestnut invited him to a free lunch at a training event where church planting experts Ed Stetzer and Bob Roberts would be speaking, Ennes couldn’t pass it up. “I’ll go to anything that’s free and comes with a lunch!” Ennes says.
After the training, Ennes simply thought church planting in Cleveland was crazy. It wouldn’t just be hard. It would be next to impossible. Yet he kept praying. Then Alex and his wife, Shari, did a NAMB church-planting assessment. He was asked to consider planting a church in Downtown Cleveland. Still skeptical, he went downtown to look around.
“I thought they were even crazier,” Ennes says. “How do you reach these people? They’re walking into apartments with full security. In downtown, you don’t approach someone to talk to them. They think you’re a panhandler, nuts—or both. I said, ‘I’m just not doing this.’”
But God had other ideas, leading the couple to start a church in Downtown Cleveland. And, eventually, they gave in.
It didn’t take long for Ennes to get bogged down in the minutiae of church planting—like putting together a team, finding a meeting location and securing funds. Fortunately, the church had the help of what Ennes calls a “terrific mother church,” in First Baptist Church of Fort Smith, Ark.
It was clear church planting among young urban professionals in Cleveland wouldn’t be easy. It was during this time that Ennes started getting a broader vision for church planting—and how he could help others who were coming to the city. Ennes didn’t just want to start a single church but to be a part of a multiplying movement.
CUTTING DOWN ON THE BURDEN, NOT THE WORK
As Ennes started Gateway Church Downtown, his friend and fellow church staff member Dan Ghramm was a little confused.
“When Alex left to plant a church, I thought this guy was nuts,” says Ghramm, who lived in West Cleveland. But when Ennes suggested Ghramm consider church planting, he agreed to pray about it.
It wasn’t until he was in the associational office and saw a map of Southern Baptist churches in Cleveland that God confirmed his call and told Ghramm where to go.
“It was almost as if God spoke to me audibly and said, ‘You have to plant a church in your own neighborhood,’” Ghramm recalls. “There were some SBC churches in Cleveland, but none in West Cleveland.”
Ghramm was in. Soon he and Ennes began to brainstorm ways they could work together. The typical cooperative arrangements didn’t seem to fit. They considered having Ghramm start a Gateway campus in West Cleveland, but the urban professionals of the downtown area and the blue-collar, highly diverse people of West Cleveland had much different needs and church expectations. Plus, while the two were good friends and had been co-workers for several years, they had different ministry styles, too.
Yet it seemed like a waste of much-needed and scarce resources to minister completely separate of one another. Instead, the two decided to share everything. Ennes calls it a “Cooperative Program on steroids.” They’d even share a name, as the new West Cleveland church would become Gateway Church West. Sharing a name meant things like logos, websites—even health insurance—could be shared by the two churches.
24 Winter 2012 •
onmission.com
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