(Radio Iowa) – Two historic churches in Sioux City have finalized plans to merge into one. Central Baptist Church Senior Pastor Lloyd Grans says his congregation and the congregation at Morningside Bible Church voted overwhelmingly to combine. Grant says the conversation started last November when a Morningside elder told him their Pastor, Terry Embke was retiring.
“And one of the options would be a merger or as we chose to use the phrase, integration within another church. And so that day at lunch, I did not know that’s what we were going to talk about, But he asked, would we be interested or willing to have a conversation with them about their church joining us here at Central,” he says. The Morningside Bible Church was found in 1938 as the Billy Sunday Memorial Tabernacle and was renamed in 1953. Central Baptist was founded in 1874 as the first Swedish Baptist church with eight charter members. Leadership from both churches worked on the plan to come together.
“What is the leadership structure going to look like going forward? What about the support of the missionaries that both churches supported? What about staff? All of those kinds of pieces,” Grans says. “We’ve put an integration agreement together. Both elder groups from both congregations said yes, we support that.”
The two churches announced their plan to the congregations in early May and then things quickly moved forward. “We did an open house on June 2nd so that their folks could come and see our building, but also have all of our ministries were represented so they could learn about places they could serve and ways they could be involved. Then we did a joint service on June 7th so that everybody could kind of get a feel of what would it look like, what would it feel like,” he says.
The combined church will meet in the Central building and Morningside will sell its church and the proceeds will be invested in the local outreach and global missions of the new church. They will have a “Grand Launch Sunday” worship service and unity brunch on July 12th to celebrate the history of both congregations.
