Starting a new church often means welcoming congregants to an inaugural Sunday service. But Stormy Tuffield, who is preparing to launch a new Southern Baptist church in Boulder, is playing more of a long game despite the presence of an available space.
“A lot of people are like ‘Hey, there’s a building there. Are you gonna use that?’” he said in a recent interview, referring to the former Grace Church on Hauser Street, which shuttered a year ago. “I tell them, ‘I have no idea.’”
In the Bible, starting a new church was rarely a simple build-it-and-they’ll-come process, Tuffield points out. Generally, Christian leaders would enter a community to serve and share the gospel first, then slowly start to call locals to join the faith.
