How Lone Oak First Baptist Is Reaching the Unchurched Through Everyday Evangelism

Senior Pastor Scott Thomas still recalls the day when, during a prayer service, a man walked to the stage at Lone Oak First Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky, with his young son in tow. The boy then announced that he received salvation.

“He said, ‘We were just praying that we needed to reach lost people and praying for the people that we need to reach. And the Lord told me, I’m trying to reach you. And so, I looked at my dad and said, ‘I need to get saved.’

“It was so powerful,” recalls Thomas. “We weren’t preaching the gospel in that moment. We were just praying to be faithful to the gospel, and the Lord was working.”

At Lone Oak, Thomas encourages his flock to build relationships, engage communities and share the good news through personal conversations.

This past year was the first time in the church’s history that it surpassed 100 baptisms in a single year. And in 2024, the church “had a month-long initiative called Reach where we sought 500 individual, personal evangelism conversations in one month,” Thomas explains. They reached their goal in just under two weeks.

Many people in Paducah are unchurched. When giving away Bibles to visitors , staffers often hear the recipients say it is their first Bible ever.

“People here tend to be very receptive to gospel conversations,” Thomas says. “We don’t have an organized program for door-to-door visitations, but we encourage our people to regularly hold personal evangelism conversations. We try to teach them that our responsibility is not to save people—our responsibility is to be a witness to Jesus, and God does the saving.”

In addition, Lone Oak assigns all members to a life group, and asks group leaders to be intentional about knowing members’ names and how they are doing. “That has made a big difference in not only reaching people, but retaining those we hope to make disciples,” Thomas observes.

For Jeff Garner, Lone Oak First Baptist was a church he admired while growing up. He didn’t attend, but his best friend did.

“I would go to vacation Bible school and youth events with him,” Garner remembers. “I saw the church as a whole and the impact it had on the community.”

Those early experiences influenced his decision to join Lone Oak in the early ’90s. Soon afterward, Garner and his wife both became active members and volunteered for several ministries.

“We’ve taught in the children’s ministry. We’ve taught in the youth ministry for 15 or 20 years, and we’ve taught life groups and Sunday school. We’re now teaching a young adult class with another couple that we met when we started at the church 32 years ago,” Garner outlines.

He has seen many changes over the years. “Our church has been blessed with periods of spiritual maturity and growth and periods of numerical growth. But all along, it’s been about developing relationships, loving others, and finding places for them to serve.”

Thomas says the church is now working on several initiatives, one being to boost Bible literacy by making sure members own a Bible and know what it says. The second is building and maintaining relationships within the church.

“With growth comes the uncomfortable challenge of longtime members being displaced and newcomers being overlooked, and we want to make sure that we care for the longtime member and also make sure that we’re doing a good job of assimilating and bringing in the newcomers,” Thomas says.

To help further this goal, Lone Oak hosts a midweek meal at the church, and once a quarter holds a special church-wide fellowship event featuring food as well as plenty of games.

“We’ll have some conversation starters around the tables,” Thomas says. “We invite our life group leaders and our deacons to find people that they’ve never met before and start meaningful conversations.”

The social events often attract people from the community. “We see people come in who are interested in the church, but are unsure,” he shares. “So, those relationship events are very meaningful.”

One lesson Thomas learned since taking the helm as pastor in 2023 is remembering that their call is to walk with Jesus personally and to always remain faithful to him.

“It’s so tempting to jump in with programs, but just staying faithful to walking with the Lord, to sharing the gospel and making disciples really simplifies what so often gets complicated,” he reflects. “We don’t have to build big churches. We just have to be faithful with the people the Lord gives us and to share the gospel with them.”

LONE OAK FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
Paducah, Kentucky
Pastor: Scott Thomas II
Website: LoneOakFBC.org
Denomination: Southern Baptist
Founded: 1880
Fastest-Growing: 62

Gail Allyn Short