The Church at Brook Hills

Dr. David Platt

Last Sunday we attended a fast-growing church in Birmingham called The Church at Brook Hills. Located at the southeastern edge of the city, the church attracts 5,000 people each Sunday in three identical services. They come in large part because of the earnest preaching of the senior pastor, Dr. David Platt. Although he is only 30 years old, he has already gained national fame as one of the rising young pastors in America. Each week he preaches 45-55 minutes of straightforward Bible exposition. Sometimes he speaks for an hour. When Brook Hills sponsors an occasional gathering called Secret Church, he preaches for four hours in four separate sessions. And 2500 people (most of them 30 and under) pack the sanctuary to hear him.

Obviously David Platt sets the vision and the tone. That’s a given. But beyond that, I was struck by the simplicity of the whole church. If you read their website, it’s clear that they ask their people to commit to three things:

Weekly worship
Attendance in a small group
Participation in “global outreach”

That’s it. Worship . . . small groups . . . global outreach.

For the last one, they challenge each member to devote 2% of their year (roughly a week) to serving on a missions team that ministers outside of the church itself. And “missions” for them includes ministering to the homeless, the sick, the poor, the malnourished, and reaching out to orphans and widows. At the end of the service the pastor asked everyone who had taken training to become foster parents to come forward for prayer. It was deeply moving to watch several hundred people being prayed for. “We want to care for every child in Shelby County that needs a home,” he said.

The church is Southern Baptist, but it doesn’t look or feel like a traditional SBC church. There is no regular choir, no adult Sunday School classes, and many of the usual programs are missing. You don’t join the church by walking an aisle. And David Platt preaches long sermons with strong Bible doctrine. 

It’s not the typical SBC approach but clearly they are doing something right. For 2010 the pastor challenged the church to make a Radical Experiment in which they heavily reduced discretionary spending so they could spend more in targeted outreach in Birmingham and overseas (especially in India). Their bottom-line number is essentially the same for both years ($8.4 million), but by cutting expenses they were able to free up $1.5 million that they had been spending on programs inside the church.

All across the Southern Baptist Convention younger pastors are trying to find new ways to do church. That’s critically important because the SBC is trying to plant new churches in urban areas like Pittsburgh and Cleveland and New York City that have no history of the traditional Southern Baptist approach. The younger leaders know that the typical way of doing things won’t work in every setting. I think we encountered one of those “new ways” last Sunday, and we enjoyed it immensely. Brook Hills offers an exciting glimpse into the church of the future.