BOSTON — Ten years ago, Warner Robins, Georgia, native and church planter John David “JD” Mangrum, 49, and his wife Natalie accepted God’s call to plant a church in Boston, and with support from Georgia Baptists, they are thriving in a largely unchurched city.
Mangrum is lead pastor of Christ Church Charlestown, a vibrant church in the Bunker Hill/Charlestown area of Boston.
“We want every man, woman, boy, and girl to have a chance to say yes to Jesus. That requires that we be out meeting and engaging our neighbors,” said Mangrum. “This year, our 100-person church will log over 2000 hours serving our community and will make hundreds and hundreds of gospel contacts.”
The church partners with 12 different community organizations to serve and share the gospel, or try to earn the right to do so. These include teachers at four schools in the community, the police and fire department, men’s recovery house, community clothes closet, food pantry, and a group that picks up trash in our neighborhood. The church also volunteers for the annual Bunker Hill parade.
Cross Point Church in Perry, Georgia, is a monthly partner of Christ Church and has been since its beginning. Mangrum’s brother Jason and Jeremy Morton, who's now the pastor of First Baptist Woodstock, started Cross Point 25 years ago.
Current Cross Point Lead Pastor Michael Stovall said the landscape of Boston is spiritual dryness, and church planters need legacy churches to provide resources. “In the five years that I've been around, there's a revival happening. Churches are growing, and people are being reached,” Stovall said.
Cross Point sponsors three churches in Boston. “Just the physical, literal presence of the Kingdom of God in Charlestown through Christ Church is significant. Lives are being changed, and ministry is being done,” he added.
One trip to visit Christ Church gave Stoval a new perspective on ministry. He described a cork board map of Massachusetts and Boston with red, yellow, and green push pins. The green represents church plants. The yellow represents someone in the pipeline to plant. And the red represents places that have been identified as needing and desiring a church plant, but no one is there yet." JD started talking about how many churches they were hoping to plant by 2030 and 2040. JD's very much kind of a professor. He's hilarious, but he's extremely smart. His mind has an ability to see vision and strategy and then communicate it,” Stovall said.
Art Fulks, Southside Baptist Network associational mission strategist, has known the Mangrums since he was a youth pastor from Hartwell, Georgia, considering planting in Greenville, S.C. Fulks previously served at Connection Fellowship in Piedmont, South Carolina, which became the local sponsor church for the Mangrums in 2009. After the Mangrums moved to Boston, his church in Lancaster, Ohio, became a partner with Christ Church.
In 2023, after arriving at Southside Baptist Network, Fulks found that there were several Georgia church planters in Boston (in addition to Mangrum) and began to pursue potential partnerships there. When he spoke to JD about potentially supporting Christ Church, Mangrum pointed him to another Georgia planter (Jonathan Moseley at King's Hill Church) who more urgently needed assistance. The SBN, from time to time, still provides resources, such as a replacement computer, for the church, and Mangrum has partnered to teach SBN pastors how to better communicate in an increasingly secular culture.
Mangrum understands the value of partnerships and is selfless when he feels someone in the city needs the help more. “The one thing he says is if you're not for the city, you won't make it here as a planter," Fulks said. "If you're just about planting your church, you probably won't make it here because you gotta be for the city.” Fulks said if SBN wants to be a network of sending churches, it needs to model supporting those who are being sent.
Mangrum's journey to Boston started after answering God’s ministry call at 14 at his home church, the former Mable White Memorial Baptist Church in Macon.
“I knew from the time I was 14, I wanted to be in ministry,” Mangrum said.
After graduation from Warner Robins High School in 1996, he earned an English degree from the University of Georgia. He met Natalie in Athens. They married in 2004 and have two sons, Owen and Noah.
After stops as a youth pastor at Colbert Baptist Church outside Athens and Cornerstone Baptist in Hartwell, God called Mangrum's family to plant churches after a meeting with church planter Chris Adams. “At the time, church planting was like new information to us. When that became a possibility for us, it was like Dorothy kind of stepping out of Kansas into Oz," Mangrum described. "Everything was in Technicolor. We were like, 'Wow, this is amazing!' I had no idea this existed. So that was the beginning of our love for and call to church planting.”
Georgia, Canada, and western Massachusetts were considered, but downtown Greenville, S.C., was chosen because there was very little Baptist church presence there. Origins Greenville was born in 2009.
In subsequent years, the North American Mission Board was establishing Send Network cities and had missionary strategists placed in cities around North America, including Boston. Origins was supporting a church in Boston, and Mangrum had visited the city several times. Send Network strategist David Butler, a ministry partner of Mangrum, asked the family to plant a church in Boston in 2016. Mangrum has had a love for Boston since discovering it on a family trip at age 15, agreed. “Honestly, I just loved it. I went home and traded my Braves hat for a Red Sox hat,” he said. “God just kind of put love in my heart for that place.”
With financial support from Send Network, the Mangrum family moved to Boston.
After losing their meeting space due to COVID-19, God provided their new home for Christchurch. The pastor of the struggling First Church in Charlestown, which was founded in 1632 and is one of the oldest continuously operating churches in the United States, was a family friend. He told Mangrum he was going to leave Boston, and that Christ Church could have its building if it would care for his remaining people. On Feb. 1, 2022, the two churches merged.”For the past four years, we went from being a church plant to what kind of became like a revitalization, essentially trying to revitalize this very, very historic church,” Mangrum said.
Send Network funding ended in 2023. “What we feel like God's put us in the middle of right now is bigger than my wallet or my contact list. So we just ask all the time, 'God, we need You to give us favor and put before us the people that are going to help us get where we believe You're calling us to go,'" Mangrum said.
Mangrum said cultivating partnerships takes a year or longer, and every Kingdom dollar helps.
Stovall believes the partnership helps to keep a kingdom mindset. "We don't exist just for ourselves nor just for our town. Cross Point exists to help people find and follow Jesus. That's wherever we are. And so this partnership gives us an opportunity to help leverage that for the kingdom and to be a partner with these church plants,” he said. “Missional living should be normative in a Christian's life and should be normative in the life of a church. It helps us keep our eyes on the outside. We sense and feel that we're a part of something way bigger than ourselves.”
Christ Church is the 13th oldest continuously operating church in the United States. Founded in November 1632 by the Puritans who got off the boat off the Arbela to found Boston. John Harvard, after whom the university is named, was a teaching pastor in our church in 1637 and 1638. The church is a work in progress, and Mangrum is hoping the 404-year-old church is booming for the next 400 years. Georgia Baptists are helping that happen.
Mangrum is grateful for the help from Georgia Baptists. “We tell them that God is building his church in Boston. But these Georgia churches and other places, they're the scaffolding, and the building can only go so high without scaffolding. The scaffolding doesn't stay forever. We don't want to be forever dependent on churches from Georgia. But we're grateful for them right now because they serve as scaffolding as God's rebuilding his church,” Mangrum said.
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