Written by: Brendan Heidner
Published in the Ranger-Review
After an entire year of prayer and planning, a group from a church in Boones Mill, Va. recently made a cross-country trip to Glendive to serve and get to know the community as much as possible in a week’s time.
Daniel Naff, lead pastor at Ridgeview Church in Boones Mill, led a group of 24 adults and children from his congregation on a mission trip to Glendive last week to both help out around Church in the Heights and experience life in an eastern Montana community. Ridgeview Church is a newer congregation planted in Boones Mill only a year and a half ago, Naff noted.
“Our goal and our mission mission has always been kingdom expansion and reaching communities not only where we’re at, but also across the world,” Naff said. “So doing missions, we felt like it was important to do them relationally, not just go and drop in a place and do some cool work and then roll out. We see in scripture that it’s all based on relationships.”
While Naff was getting to know other pastors during the 2023 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting and Pastors Conference in New Orleans, La. last summer, he was introduced to Miles City Valley Community Church Pastor Jeff Cahill and learned about the Glendive church.
“We don’t believe in coincidences. We believe that God has directed all of those things,” Naff said, adding his interest in bringing a group to Glendive grew the more he talked with Cahill about rural eastern Montana. “This has been our mission for a year. Our church has been praying for it, our church has been praying for this town, this church.”
While many mission trips are often deliberately planned to accomplish a specific task, this one was different. According to Naff, he simply believed it was important for his group to show up in Glendive and love on the people within the community in any way they could.
“It’s a bunch of families and our kids and we’re all serving together doing that. So we’ve been out here … not doing anything specific other than just loving on this community,” he said. “This community has been pretty amazing to be a part of in all reality.”
“Part of being in the Southern Baptist Convention is we do mission together, that’s the main reason the convention exists,” Cahill said. “We partner with other churches to accomplish what we can’t do by ourselves.”
Though not in Glendive for any specific purpose, Cahill added the Ridgeview Church group did come to lift a burden from the congregation at Church in the Heights after Pastor John Corder passed away in January this year. Cahill has been more involved with Church in the Heights since then.
“We still felt like God was still saying that there was plenty of work to be done, and didn’t want the work that (John) had started to stop, and so we were still committed to being here,” Naff said.
Over the course of one week, Naff’s group accomplished some grounds and building work at Church in the Heights; visited residents at The Heritage and Eastern Montana Veterans Home; asked local businesses if they could clean for them; and put on a one-day vacation Bible school at a local park, to name a few.
The visiting group even had the opportunity to check out all that the Dawson County Fair has to offer and much more when they were taking time away from working on projects.
“Fellowship has been big,” David Stanphill, one of the visiting group’s members, said.
“Every person is friendly,” James Munson added. “Obviously we’re not from here, but anytime we drive by somebody or if you’re in the yard and they drive by, they wave, they say hi on the street to you, smile at you. Every single person it seems like.”
Overall, the group enjoyed their one-week stay in Glendive and found themselves encouraged by the people in the community as they left for home on Sunday, July 28.
“We just wanted to be a part and love on this community, to share the love of Jesus and show that even from Virginia, we are for you guys, loving you guys and praying for you guys,” Naff said.