In recent years, the Midwest Presbytery of the RPCNA has extended its southern border into the great state of Texas. The Living Way Reformed Presbyterian Mission Church was organized in Bryan, Tex., in Sept. 2012, and the Dallas Reformed Presbyterian Mission Church was organized in Lewisville, Tex., in Nov. 2013. I am excited to be a part of this southern growth and I hope that our story encourages you to pray and support the works in Bryan and Dallas in the years ahead.

Many of us growing up in certain regions of the South have had very little exposure to any kind of Reformed church at all, much less to a church as unique as the RPCNA with its emphasis on singing the Psalms and the mediatorial kingship of Jesus Christ. Being from Arkansas, I grew up in a part of the country that was heavily influenced by Baptist and Methodist congregations and most of us knew very little, if anything, about the Reformation. There were no Reformed churches of any kind in my hometown, and I didn’t know what a Calvinist was until I was 26. The Lord brought my wife, Amy, and me to the Reformed faith in 1996. It was then that we started to study the doctrines that brought us to the RPCNA.

We are very encouraged that the RPCNA is making inroads once again into the southern United States. Historically, the RP Church has been primarily a northern church, with some outposts in the South prior to the Civil War. After those dark days the RP Church launched some southern missionary efforts, but without much success. It is our hope that the new church plants on the southern frontier will help to advance the gospel and the cause of biblical worship into every corner of the lower United States. Our southern culture is certainly unique, but we hope to demonstrate just how desperately we are in need of that which the RPCNA has an abundance to give: a healthy dose of Reformed gospel preaching, the strong heritage of the Covenanters, biblical worship with the singing of the inspired Psalms and that powerful but lovely emphasis on the mediatorial King. If the Lord is pleased to bless our work here in Dallas, we are happy to be a southern voice for the RPCNA! For this great challenge we covet your prayers and support.

The story of the Dallas RP Mission Church started in February 2013. We were blessed to host a gathering of pastors from Oklahoma and Kansas who generously gave of their time to travel and meet with us in Lewisville, Tex. Pastors Bob McFarland, Bruce Parnell and Noah Bailey traveled south to visit with us about the possibility of planting a church in the greater Dallas area. That night was a very special time of getting to know one another. We enjoyed a time of singing psalms and asking many questions of our guests about moving forward with a church plant. From that time, our group started to meet weekly for Bible studies that dealt with the distinctives of the RPCNA. We were able to find a hotel meeting room in Plano that served us well for the next five months. In May we were given permission to start a morning worship service.

Our situation was unique for a church plant, I suppose, in that we had an ordained minister on site who could preach on a weekly basis. I was ordained to preach about 10 years ago. Until 2013 I had been a bivocational pastor in several Reformed churches. About five years ago, while doing a study of the regulative principle of worship, I became convinced about the exclusive singing of the Psalms. Further study led me to the Covenanters and to the doctrine of mediatorial kingship. Eventually, our family found the RPCNA, but the nearest churches were 285 miles to the north (Stillwater, Okla.) and 200 miles to the south (Bryan, Tex.). God had providentially brought us to the Dallas area in 2010 to help with a church in a different denomination, but we found ourselves in desperate need of a church that held to our new distinctives. In November 2012, we traveled to the Stillwater RP Church and joined them with the hope of eventually moving somewhere else in the denomination to seek a call. We had no idea that the Lord was raising up other families in the area with the same desire to plant a church in Dallas.

Our family was excited to be a part of the initial meeting in February and also the process of planning and meeting new families in Lewisville and the nearby cities of Flower Mound, McKinney and Carrolton. It was amazing to meet other families in the Dallas area who also shared a strong love for the RPCNA. Though we had much to learn about our new denomination, we knew that we wanted the support and oversight of the Midwest Presbytery. From the very beginning of our worship services in May, it seemed like we were blessed with an abundance of visitors who were either traveling through the area or who had some kind of connection to the RPCNA. In our short existence, we have been excited to meet other RP families from Canada, Rhode Island, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Kansas. Truly, Texas is now a part of the RP world!

Another phase of our story began in September 2013. After months of meeting in a noisy hotel and not being able to find another meeting location, we found a Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) School that was unused on the Lord’s Day. Their library was just big enough to seat up to 70 people in worship, and we now had a kitchen and a place for our weekly fellowship meals. The first RPCNA address in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) was inked in September of 2013 as we signed a one-year contract to use the SDA School.

In November, the Midwest Presbytery met for its fall meeting. Several items on the agenda pertained to the new fellowship in Dallas. Since our beginning we were under the authority of the Stillwater session and a committee that had been setup by the presbytery. All of the elders involved were in favor of the Dallas Reformed Presbyterian Fellowship moving on to the next step, so on Nov. 6 we became a mission church. A new commission of Midwest Presbytery was formed to oversee the new church. We were also approved to receive some funding, which will allow me to cut back on my full-time job to spend more time in the ministry work in Dallas. These past few months have been a tremendous encouragement to our small group. Of course, our story is not one of continual progress. Initially, we had around 8 families interested in helping with the new church plant. Our numbers dropped a little in March and then again in July. The summer months brought us some times of discouragement and trial, but out of those difficult days the Lord was pleased to send us 3 new families who were happy to find a small group of like-minded believers. We were also able to make some very positive contacts with other churches in our area with similar beliefs.

We hope that our story encourages you to pray for the work here in Texas. Please pray for Bryan and Dallas in the coming months as we both move forward in the training of elders, the calling of pastors and organizing into particular churches. We also want to encourage you to consider Texas as a place to find work or attend college. DFW is the home of Southern Methodist University and Texas Christian University, and Texas A&M is in Bryan. North Texas is one of the fastest-growing economic regions in the country. Dallas is a powerhouse among the top cities for jobs, tech development and business. We encourage you to think of Texas when you make your next move.

Not only is Texas a wonderful place to live or to find a job, it is an amazing mission field. DFW has a population of over seven million souls, the largest city in Midwest Presbytery. Truly the harvest is plenty but the laborers are few! Please pray for the many missionary opportunities available to us here, and pray that we might worthily represent the RPCNA in the highways and byways of Dallas. Perhaps the Lord is calling you to come and help us in Bryan or in Dallas.

Our hope is that the Dallas and Bryan mission churches can serve as a hub to help with other church plants in Texas and perhaps Arkansas and southern Oklahoma. Our own area in DFW/North Texas is spread over many miles and could easily help to launch new works in the cities of McKinney, Denton, Plano and Fort Worth. Furthermore, the cities of Tyler, Waco, Austin, San Antonio and Houston are now within reach of the two tiny RPCNA churches in Texas. Surely the Lord has brought us here for such a time as this. Please join us in prayer as we labor for the kingdom of our great King Jesus Christ.

If you would like to learn more about the Dallas RP Mission Church, please visit the web site at dallasrpc.org, go to our Facebook page or listen to sermons on ReformedVoice.org.

—Mark Koller is pastor of Dallas RP Mission Church. An RPCNA Home Mission Board feature appears semiannually in the Witness.