Written by Ben Cox – Southside Church is a smaller, appropriately-named church of the Baptist denomination located on the southern end of town. Comprised of a pair of buildings, it sits just across the street from Woodland Heights Elementary.
Southside Church’s pastor, David Bryant, has been in the pulpit for over two years, after the church was in a search for new leadership for almost the same amount of time. The departure of much of its pastoral staff gave the congregation an opportunity to decide what its mission was, and who it needed to have as a leader.
“Southside was created in ’84 from a merger of with Woodland Heights Baptist Church, that was on this campus, and Melwood Baptist Church which was on the north side of town,” Pastor Bryant explained of the church’s history. As many churches in the past have done, they took the pastor from one church and the location from another and made a larger congregation.
Bryant grew up in Midland with a passion for the ministry carried in his heart from an early age. He began his ministry in college, accepting a youth minister position at the Baptist church in Lawn while he was at Hardin Simmons in the mid 90’s. Bryant and his wife of 20 year’s Alison, met while at Hardin Simmons in Abilene.
“I have parents that are christians, and one of my first memories was they were volunteering to make the bulletins on a Saturday night,” Bryant shared a memory of his parents serving in a church in Montana. “We would go up to the church and do the thermal printer.”
His parents grew up Lutheran and Baptist, and “checked them both out” and decided on the Baptist denomination. Bryant recalls his faith taking shape during his middle school years.
“I was just beginning to understand what being a Christian really meant. I always thought it was about you to go to church and do all that. I was beginning to understand it’s about the relationship with God that you have,” he said.
Reading about Pentecost in the book of Acts as a youth, Bryant thought that he could never do something like the disciples, preaching in the streets and leading people to Christ.
“I remember going ‘God, I could NEVER do that!’ then hearing God say ‘that’s funny, because that’s your future’,” he said.
Bryant accepted what he considered to be God’s vision for his life after wrestling with the notion for a few weeks. It has been his life’s work ever since.
“I just knew, so sure,” he said. “Even as an eighth-grader, I knew that was the path God had for me.”
He began talking openly about his beliefs with everyone he met, with one distinct exception that still impacts him to this day.
While talking with a group of classmates in high school one day, he found himself reluctant to share his calling. One girl in the group was kidnapped her senior year, her body was discovered a year later.
“She was the only person I ever lied to about it,” Bryant remembered. He decided he would never hide his calling to share the Gospel again, making sure to use every opportunity given to him to share the story of Christ.
Bryant continues to use the lessons of his formative years to mold his preaching style today.
“I’m more of a conversationalist type of preacher. I tend to do what the big fancy church term is exegetical preaching, which means I’ll take a passage and I’ll preach from that passage, go through it, look at it in depth,” he said. “I’m not one of those guys that’s gonna raise my voice and cover the first three rows in spit. I’m not much of a ‘tell a bunch of stories as part of my sermon’ kind of preacher either. I want the scripture to speak for itself.”
Southside Baptist Church is at 1219 Indian Creek, and has service at 10:45 every Sunday morning after Bible Study classes at 9:30 a.m. The church also offers bible studies during the week, a list of which can be found on their website.
