Contact: Ron Keener, Church Executive, 800-541-2670 ext 204

MEDIA ADVISORY, Aug. 4 /Christian Newswire/ -- On Sunday, March 8, 2009 a shooter walked into the sanctuary of First Baptist Church of Maryville, IL, during services and fired at pastor Fred Winters, putting a bullet through his heart. The assailant had no apparent connection with the church or with Winters, press reports said.

An account of that day is given in the August issue of Church Executive, a business magazine on leadership and management for larger and megachurches. Telling the story in a riveting account is John Harris, who on that day was being voted on by the congregation to take a new position as adult pastor.

"It was all over quickly," Harris recounts. "There were no security staff on campus (we didn't have any), but several church members subdued the assailant after he had fired four shots, one of which went right through Pastor Fred's heart.

"Security was an issue that the church had recognized as a need to be addressed, but it never made its way to the top of the list; there was always too much going on," Harris writes.

Harris says that Winters "was a young leader who had taken this small church of 30 people and guided them to grow into a congregation of more than 1,200 in attendance every week" in the middle of the central Illinois corn fields.

His story is as much about a church that is recovering and moving forward since the incident. "Pastor Fred envisioned a church that continued to grow. In fact, the Thursday before the shooting the staff put down on paper a seven-year plan of development relating to people and facilities.... Even though he [Winters] is gone, we knew exactly what to do, and we've had to move-up the plan."

"We baptized more than 100 people in 2009 and are on pace to exceed that this year. We continue to have more attending our services and we increased our operating budget by 10 percent from 2009 to 2010. Our giving receipts exceed our budget almost every week and we have begun a $3 million building expansion to handle the growth that God continues to provide," Harris writes for Church Executive.

"It is very easy to allow our circumstances to dictate our actions, but we cannot permit events in our lives to distract us from the goal of reaching the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ," he says.

Go to:
http://churchexecutive.com/archives/in-view-of-a-call-leadership-and-martyrdom-in-the-midwest