Thirty-five years ago a group of 30 adults and children got together as a start-up church, meeting in a room at Mansfield Christian Schools. All these years later, Senior Pastor Dave Pound is retiring and a new senior pastor will take his place.
Pastor Dave, as everyone calls him, was working in Jamestown, New York when he got a call from Mansfield that a group of people wanted his help in starting up a new church. “We heard about this church that was just beginning in Mansfield, Ohio and as an associate pastor at the time I was asked if I would come down and preach on a Sunday for them,” stated Pound.
Pound and his wife of just one-year, Sharon, were then asked if they would consider moving to Mansfield and helping them get their church up and running and that’s how it began in August of 1979.
“I’d had no experience in starting a new church,” Pound said. “We met in the band room at first and then we graduated to the multi-purpose room. Then we went to the stage and then a new chapel they built at the schools.”
The name Berean was decided on about a year after Pound joined them. They were taking suggested names for the church and wanted to liken themselves to the Church of Berea in the Bible. “But when I’d go around introducing myself to people, they would say, ‘Berea? But you’re not even in Berea, Ohio.’”
After five years at the school, they finally moved to their current property, which was a corn field and barn when they purchased it and built a chapel. “Our first service was Christmas of 1985.”
They met in the new chapel for four years when in 1989 they had grown enough they needed to add to their building site and that’s when the current sanctuary was built. Since then they’ve added more to their buildings and a balcony in the sanctuary.
In June of 2011 at the age of 64, Pound realized he needed to look at being replaced as senior pastor and he wanted to make it a smooth and positive process. “The longer a pastor has been with a church, the harder the change is,” Pound said of what he’d been told and heard from other churches and pastors.
A book called, “Transition,” written by a pastor down in Louisville, Kentucky, was an inspiration to Pound on how a church needs to go through such a major change as their founding pastor leaving.
Though Berean has seven pastors on staff, all but one is in their fifties and above. “With six of our pastors all near retirement age, this could become a leadership vacuum all at one time,” said Pound, so we knew we needed to start acting on it now. The one pastor in his forties is Nate Meiers, who’s been the Children’s Minister for the past 18 years.”
The deacons and pastors considered Pastor Nate a perfect candidate for senior pastor. “A lot of people? How is he prepared to be a senior pastor?”
To show the congregation just how gifted a pastor Meiers is, Pound started having him preach on a regular basis to let them decide. In November he preached on the importance of church membership and not just taking up a seat in the pew. At the annual meeting, there were more than 70 new members sworn in when last year had only 12. Pound credits Meiers with this increase.
Pound said there were some people who wanted to do the traditional pooling of candidates from all over the country and then narrow them down to a few select ones.
“What we learned is that we already have someone perfectly suited as senior pastor, and he’s already part of our family. We’ve had 18 years to watch him. We’ve watched his marriage; we’ve watched him raise two kids. You either know this guy or you don’t,” said Pound.
This year’s annual meeting proved Pound and the deacons had made a good choice with the congregation voting 95 percent in favor of Nate Meiers becoming the new senior pastor.
Berean Baptist Church embraces new pastor, new vision
In 1995, Nate Meiers and his wife, Laura, joined Berean’s family with him serving as the children’s minister. “This is my first job out of seminary,” Meiers explained. “And it still is.”
Meiers said he was “blessed with the ability to define” his position at Berean when he came on board and has spent the last nearly two decades growing their children’s ministry.
Meiers never saw being the children’s pastor as a stepping stone to something bigger. “I always thought being a children’s pastor was my calling.” It wasn’t until about five years ago he started wondering more about preaching and leading.
“Although I very much enjoy and am able to relate scripture to children, I’ve always been a bit of a theologian in light of the deeper things and the academic side of theology. I enjoyed preaching when I got the chance, which was usually about twice a year,” said Meiers.
Four years ago Meiers and the other pastors went on a retreat where Senior Pastor Dave Pound asked each of them where they thought they might be in five years. The pastors each wrote about a paragraph but Meiers wrote an entire page that started with, “In five years I see myself as the senior pastor at Berean Baptist Church.”
Since Meiers had never talked about this with anybody but his wife, this came as news to Pound. It was also during the time that Pound was reading and studying extensively on how to transition a church from a founding pastor.
“The biggest concern is maintaining the ethos…the heart of the place,” said Meiers of finding a new pastor.
Pound and Meiers discussed the possibilities for nearly a year before going to the other pastors with the idea. They knew it was important to know what they would think of him becoming the senior pastor.
“I was especially concerned about what Pastor Bill [Heaton] thought, because – besides Dave – he was the guy who knew Berean and had a heart for it and understood what it needed.”
At each step of the way, things continued to point to Meiers pursuing the senior pastor position, but the big steps came when they asked the congregation to vote on his candidacy in December of 2012. Once that vote came in, the church formed a Pulpit Search Committee. This group evaluated Meiers based on his vision for the future, his theology, and ideas he had in regards to being a senior pastor.
In August of 2013, Meiers started preaching once every month where he could share with the congregation his vision going forward for Berean. Once the search committee shared their findings and the congregation was given a chance to hear Meiers preach and share his vision, on Dec. 8 the congregation members made their decision with a 95 percent approval of having Nate Meiers become their new senior pastor beginning in Sept. of 2014.
“What we learned is that we already have someone perfectly suited as senior pastor, and he’s already part of our family,” said Pastor Dave Pound.
