WAKE FOREST, N.C. (BP)–Twenty-one years ago, Johnny Hunt preached a sermon shortly after surrendering to God’s call to the ministry titled, “The Blessing of Being Saved.”
Armed with the same sermon, Hunt, a 1983 graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, returned to the Wake Forest, N.C., campus March 11 as the seminary announced the formation of the Johnny Hunt Chair of Church Growth.
“God has greatly honored this message and I just thought that it was right, on this particular and special day in my life, that I preach a message that has meant as much to me as any single message God has ever given me,” Hunt told the near-capacity Binkley Chapel audience.
The Johnny Hunt Chair of Church Growth is aimed at securing a $1 million endowment fund to provide the financial resources for a professor of church growth.
In addition to honoring Hunt, Southeastern recognized David and Delaine Carroll, members of First Baptist Church, Woodstock, Ga., where Hunt is pastor, for donating $200,000 to the newly created chair.
Hunt preached passionately from the familiar Psalm 126 passage, raising his voice and lifting his Bible heavenward.
“I pray to God that this side of eternity I will never get a cold heart and lose my burden to see people set free from Babylon,” Hunt said, comparing Babylon in the Psalm 126 passage to the unsaved now enslaved to sin. “Every church that I’ve ever served, I believe the key to its growth and to its joy was people getting saved.”
During Hunt’s first pastorate in South Carolina, the church grew from 40 people to 80 people in three and a half years. As pastor of his second church in Wake Forest, N.C., within 10 months Sunday school attendance grew from 35 to 280. Attendance at his third church in Wilmington, N.C., skyrocketed from 90 people to 600 during a five-and-a-half year stint as pastor.
When Hunt went to First Baptist, Woodstock, as pastor in 1986, the average Sunday school attendance was 275. Eleven years later nearly 3,400 people meet weekly for Bible study at the suburban church northwest of Atlanta.
The church, which moved into a new 3,200-seat auditorium in 1991, averages 4,400 people during two morning worship services each Sunday. Plans for a third morning service are being considered. Under Hunt’s leadership, more than 4,190 people have been baptized at there, including more than 500 in 1996. The church has recorded phenomenal growth in membership as well. In 1986 church membership numbered slightly more than 1,000. Current membership exceeds 7,880 people.
“One of the major problems in the pulpit and the pew across the Southern Baptist Convention is we’ve got too many people that have forgotten what it was like to be lost and they’ve forgotten what it was like to be gloriously changed by the power of almighty God,” Hunt exclaimed. “I believe it’s a travesty against the Holy Ghost of God that there be dead churches with people that ought to be glad. I’ve never known a church that ever got concerned about lost people that was not first of all glad and happy to be saved and glad and happy to be set free.”
Hunt, who refers often to his own salvation experience when preaching, said he has never gotten over the Lord saving him from a life wrecked by alcohol.
“I can say that after 24 years of knowing Jesus Christ, God’s Son, as my personal Lord and Savior, I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.”
Hunt credited the music program at the Woodstock church for creating a joyful worship experience that keeps people returning for more.
“We don’t just sing any old music,” he said. “We sing heart music. We sing songs that lift up the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Hunt warned pastors not to be distracted by the “problems” of the church. “God (has) not even taught me how to deal with problems in a church,” he boldly stated. “If I stand behind the sacred desk with Jesus Christ in my heart, full of the Holy Spirit of God, with the touch and breath of God on my life and stand with this Bible and exalt the Lord Jesus, and he doesn’t change that church, I don’t know anything that can change it. God didn’t call me to be a problem-solver. God called me to be a preacher of the Savior.”
Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern, said he was amazed at what he witnessed two weeks earlier when he visited the 9:30 a.m. Sunday service at First Baptist, Woodstock, and saw 27 people make professions of faith in Christ.
“He violated all the laws of modern-day church growth,” Patterson reported. “I think he had been studying the manual so he could figure out how to violate them. He preached hard, but yet full of love. He told the truth and didn’t pull any punches, expounded the Word of God, preaching the next-to-the-last sermon in a series he’s been doing in the Book of James. As you know, if you do that, people won’t come,” Patterson said in jest.
Hunt said the only manual he has ever used in building a church is the Word of God. “This is the manual to build a great church,” he said, waving his black leather Bible above his head. “You can leave seminary with all of the principles and all of the programs, but if you don’t have passion it won’t go far.”
At the end of the chapel service, several people responded to an invitation making decisions for Christ.
Dan Byrd, a seminary student from Pensacola, Fla., who has worked in youth ministry for six years confessed publicly that a decision he made for Christ as a 13-year-old had been coerced and wasn’t genuine. Byrd, 25, stood behind the wide wooden pulpit in front of the chapel audience and proclaimed: “I just got saved for the first time in my life.” As the audience erupted in shouts of “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord,” Byrd continued, “I stand before you today and know that I am free.”
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