CapFed Best News: New church aims to reach unchurched in North Topeka

A new church is being planted in North Topeka in hopes of connecting with thousands of people who currently don’t attend church.

Capital City Church will open to the public Saturday evening after months of small group meetings and planning sessions. The Rev. Timm Collins and a core group of about 40 people will welcome others to join them in the church’s first corporate worship service. For the time being, the group will use the Faith Family Life Centre, 3710 N.W. Topeka Blvd., for its 5 p.m. Saturday services.

Collins said the idea of planting a church in North Topeka was derived from a study of the location of churches relative to the communities north of the Kansas River.

“When we started thinking about planting a church, I started digging into the data,” Collins said. “People who live here think there are a lot of churches, but when you look at the population statistics, there aren’t a lot of churches here.”

Collins said that according to 2010 census data, depending on where you draw the boundaries, as many as 60,000 people live in the area considered North Topeka. He said anywhere from 54% to 80% of those people do not regularly attend church.

“Capital City Church is not being planted because we think there is something wrong with the way people are doing church currently,” Collins said. “We’re planting this church because we like what the other churches are doing. We want to work alongside them.”

Collins said statistics show that new churches reach unchurched people much more effectively than do existing churches.

“We’re not saying there aren’t great churches north of the river,” Collins said. “It’s just the number of churches there. There need to be more.”

Collins is known in the Topeka community as the former chief operating officer of Trash Mountain Project, as well as for his work as founder of Momentum Leadership Consulting. But before moving to Topeka in 2013, Collins was a full-time pastor in Florida. He is excited to resume that role.

“When I left the pastorate to go to work for Trash Mountain, I saw it as a continuation of my pastoral ministry, because I was working with international pastors,” Collins said. “So I never stopped being a pastor at heart.”

Collins said about 40 people have been meeting in three Bible study groups in which they discuss the vision and values of the nascent Capital City Church. They have had Aug. 8 circled on their calendars for months, anticipating the day they would gather together for the first time. From the first evening, the church will offer children’s programs, small groups and youth ministry meetings.

The church will emphasize not just gathering a group for corporate worship but enrolling as many as possible in small group meetings, as well as connecting them in mentoring relationships.

Collins said that, contrary to what some might expect, the pandemic hasn’t turned out to be a bad time to launch a church.

“We didn’t really have any expectations for what Capital City Church would be or how fast it would take shape,” Collins said. “So when the pandemic hit in March, we didn’t really panic, because it didn’t affect our plans at all.

“None of our plans involve size, number of people, attendance. We really believe that’s God’s business. Our goals are really about the percentage of our people that are in a Bible study or a mentorship relationship.”

Collins said the church’s small groups have met unaffected by health guidelines throughout most of the pandemic. And even now, the facility where they will meet will allow for 100 to 150 people to socially distance.

“We may have been surprised by COVID, but God wasn’t,” Collins said. “Which is one of the reasons we’ve moved forward with our timeline, because we believe when God led us in January to set our start date as August, he knew COVID was coming.

“It may be less than ideal, but at this point, everyone is operating in less than ideal circumstances.”

Collins said the church will offer children’s programs during the Saturday evening service. Overseeing the children’s ministry is Collins’ wife, Miranda, who has 18 years of experience in education and is grammar school principal at Cair Paravel Latin School.

“She is fully abreast of all the health department guidelines because she’s trying to open a school for the fall,” Collins said. “We’re going to conduct our children’s ministry according to those guidelines.”

While the mission of Capital City Church is to reach people not currently attending church, Collins said a handful of the founding members of the church plant were friends who believed in him, as well as in the mission.

“But I will say I’ve been surprised by the number of people who are attending the core group of Capital City Church that I don’t know,” Collins said. “They’ve found out through word of mouth that there’s going to be another church up north, and even during the season of COVID, people have sought us out and joined one of our small groups.”

Church planting isn’t a science, and it isn’t for everyone, Collins said.

“Even though we want to do things with excellence from the beginning, the truth is the nature of church plants, at least in the beginning, things are somewhat unpolished as you figure it out as you go along,” he said. “You don’t have all the volunteers, you don’t have all the programming of an established church. Church plants tend to attract people who are service-minded and mission-minded.”