Mark Custalow sows the seeds of Christianity

By Steven G. Vegh

The Virginian-Pilot

MARK CUSTALOW is convinced Hampton Roads doesn't have enough churches.

It's a remarkable view, given the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of local churches that range from tiny storefront congregations to megachurches big as small towns.

Nonetheless, Custalow is seeding new congregations across Hampton Roads as a church-planting strategist for the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia.

In his two years here, he's deployed 15 planters, individuals who do the grass-roots organizing of new churches. Two congregations are on the Peninsula, the rest on the Southside.

"My role is to be a cheerleader for these guys, to help them stay on the front line and take the gospel to the communities where God has called them," he said.

As coach and visionary, the 6-foot-4-inch Custalow is driven by a conviction that Hampton Roads shares a problem he calls rampant across North America.

"Christianity is not growing relative to the population," he says, urgently. "We're not keeping up with population growth, much less reaching further into the existing population we already have - even in Tidewater, absolutely."

Church planting is common in many denominations, but the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention is likely the most methodical and aggressive. In 2007 alone, the SBC started more than 1,455 congregations, while its seminaries churned out 741 students as long-term church planters, according to the North American Mission Board. The board is the convention's domestic evangelism and missionary arm.

The SBCV, representing conservative Southern Baptists, has launched 142 churches since it became a free-standing group in 1997. About 84 of its 511 member congregations have helped sponsor new plants.

Custalow, 43, lives in Chesapeake with his wife, Ann, and their two teen daughters. He grew up in Richmond. At 9, he became a born-again Christian and thought about becoming a minister.

However, he got the urge to become a missionary when he attended a Maryland Bible college, and that urge crystallized when he was at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tenn. He applied to become an overseas missionary after his 1991 graduation with a master's degree in divinity.

Instead, the mission board sent him to revive a faltering church plant in the vast Crow Indian reservation in Montana. Custalow, who is part Mattaponi on his father's side, embraced the assignment.

The board later made him its church-planting strategist for all American Indians, first across Montana and then all of North America.

Two years ago Custalow was working for the mission board, developing mentoring approaches for planters, when a heart attack felled him on an exercise treadmill. After triple bypass surgery, he gave up his national-level executive job to get back into the field as a strategist, "making sure the name of Christ is known far and wide."

Custalow's days now include scrutinizing demographic data to pinpoint local "people groups" - identified by shared ethnicity, language, neighborhood, profession or special interests - who could be evangelized.

"I'm looking for peoples that are being left out of the hearing of the gospel" and are not being reached by any local church, he said.

Custalow also enlists planters. He favors self-starters who share their Christian faith naturally, are optimistic visionaries and have strong family lives.

Among his proteges is Jeremy Nairn, 27, who last year started River of Life Baptist Church, which meets at the YMCA in Franklin. A former car salesman, Nairn's training included a weeklong SBCV church-planter boot camp in Richmond.

Nairn said his target group is every "unchurched" person within a five-mile radius of Franklin. The new congregation is supported by the congregation Nairn used to attend, Southside Baptist Church in Suffolk. Custalow's counsel and planting experience have bucked him up when times were hard and naysayers seemed loud, Nairn said.

"He taught me to expect things to be said about me that weren't true. He taught me that Jesus was ridiculed the same way, but God is faithful."

Like a good coach after a tough game, Custalow often contacts his planters after their Sunday services.

"Many church planters want to resign on Mondays, so I check in on Mondays. Every church planter I know will tell you, 'This is harder than I thought it would be.' "

Custalow pulled a dozen planters together earlier this year at Symphonic, a church plant in a former warehouse in Norfolk's Ghent district, for a combination pep talk, support group and tutorial session.

"Lord, the fields are all around us. Send us forth as laborers to harvest thirsting souls," crooned one planter, a former pharmacist, onstage before Custalow weighed in.

"I don't think church planting is rocket science," Custalow said good-naturedly. "God gave us a great church-planting manual - someone wave your Bible at me!"

Planters, he said, need to be truthful in their "heart relationship" with God. They need to spread the gospel via teamwork - not "as Lone Rangers, or Tonto, for those of us who are Indian," Custalow said, raising guffaws.

Planters also will be attacked by the devil, as Custalow said he was.

"We're raising teenagers in our home - it's different, golly, it's different," he said, candid and enigmatic. "I want to tell you, Satan is attacking our home."

Later, he sat with a handful of planters for prayer and sharing personal concerns.

"People are having good times and hard times in our group. How can I be there for them?" said Steve Byrum, who founded Mosaic, a church that meets in a Norfolk dance studio on Granby Street. "I'm just figuring it out as I'm going along."

Custalow listened sympathetically - a "pastor's pastor," as another planter dubbed him.

"It's hard to be a continual caregiver," he said.

Custalow's future planting targets may include the east end of Newport News, which he called poor and mostly black, and urban neighborhoods along Virginia Beach Boulevard in Norfolk. Those settings, he said, remind him of Indian reservations, "where you sometimes have three generations of people living in the same household."

It's evangelization that's done one conversation, one cup of coffee, one shared story at a time - and for which there's scarcely enough time left, Custalow believes.

"We know the return of Christ is imminent," he said. "It could be any day, any moment."

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417, steven.vegh@pilotonline.com