ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Like many churches across the United States, several churches in Liberal currently do not have a full-time pastor in the pulpit leading services and other activities.
New Beginnings Church, though, currently has three such pastors, in Lead Pastor Phillip Dow, Associate Pastor Bailey Norris and Children’s Pastor Cody Bernsten.
Both Dow and Bernsten grew up in Kansas, with Dow attending college in Texas at Nelson University, while Bernsten grew up in the Wichita area where he went through a program to get his Assemblies of God credentials.
Dow himself has a master’s degree in divinity and moved to Liberal about two and a half years ago when he was hired to replace former NBC Pastor Kevin Alexander. Dow comes to the job with experience as a lead pastor in Fort Worth, Texas.
As for Norris, she grew up in Illinois and followed a path similar to Dow’s.
“I attended Lincoln Christian University and was on staff at a small church in Illinois before moving to Fort Worth, Texas, and I’ve been in Liberal for about a year and a half now,” she said.
Dow felt the call to ministry as early as age 13, and he said his job at New Beginnings is slightly different than he originally had planned in his youth.
“My goal was I was going to go live overseas, be a missionary in the darkest jungles or most hidden villages, but I felt God speak to me several years ago that my call was to send missionaries and fund missionaries instead of necessarily going,” he said. “My job is to build the church here and send people overseas.”
Bernsten got saved at age 17, and he said as he neared high school graduation, he began getting involved more with church. For him, the momentum continued to build into what he does now at NBC.
“Through that, I started helping out with the children’s ministry at the church I was at,” he said. “Over time, that began to feel like the thing I was supposed to do and helping kids and families learn about God together and grow closer to Jesus.”
Norris too became involved with Christianity at a young age.
“I was in youth camp when I was 14, 15, and I felt really called to missions,” she said. “I got a degree in missions. I wanted to go live in a city and do youth ministry. That was my goal. Through spending some time overseas, the Lord revealed to be a stateside defender of people and do youth ministry wherever I was going to be doing it.”
Norris and Dow also had similar paths to Liberal.
“I was on staff at a church, and I really felt the Lord was saying it was time to do something new and time for a new season,” Norris said. “I actually had worked with Pastor Phillip before. I knew they were looking for a new pastor, so I called him. I asked him, ‘Hey can I just come visit?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ So I came to Liberal, and as soon as I came, I had the feeling, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’ It was abundantly clear.”
Dow, an avid hunter, had made a previous visit to New Beginnings in 2015, about seven years before he was hired as lead pastor for the local church.
“I came through Liberal during pheasant hunting season,” he said. “I’d come into town to go hunting for a week. One Wednesday night, it started snowing before sundown. I was freezing. The dog was cold. I put the dog in the dog box, and I started looking for a church to go to on Wednesday night and actually came to New Beginnings.”
Dow said at that time, the church had been looking for a pastor, and having only been a lead pastor for a year in Fort Worth, he turned down an offer at that time to lead NBC. However, that conversation stuck with him, and seven years later, New Beginnings was looking for a new pastor, when Dow said he felt a shift occurring.
“I actually called our district superintendent,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m looking for a church maybe in Kansas.’ He said, ‘Have you heard of New Beginnings Church in Liberal?’ I was like, ‘Yeah I know that church. I’ve talked to them. Let’s do it.’ It was just a God thing from then on. All the doors had opened up.”
Bernsten has been with the church the longest of the trio, and he had the shortest journey to Liberal.
“I was on staff at another church in Southwest Kansas,” he said. “I was already aware of Liberal, having been there for a number of years prior, and at a certain point, I realized it was time for me to move on.”
At that time, Bernsten said he felt God leading him in a different direction.
“The timing worked out to where I came here as the children’s pastor a little more than five years now,” he said. “It was a God thing, lining up the timing of different things and how He had set everything up.”
Dow said the goals for the NBC pastors are to simply see more people come to know Jesus and to see those who attend the church become involved in discipleship. He said this allows them to grow deeper in their faith, and he would also like to see those who are struggling come to know there are people who can help.
Dow likewise said the help New Beginnings provides can reach around the world to the lost, saved, compassionate ministries and missions of discipleship and evangelastic nature.
Recently, NBC went to two Sunday morning services, one at 9:30 a.m. and one at 11 a.m. Dow said this was done to deal with space constraint issues.
“Post-COVID, the reality is most people won’t attend a church if it’s more than 70 percent full, and we were well above 70 percent full every Sunday,” he said. “We decided the best way to do it was to offer two services, and we’ve seen a lot of growth since we went to two.”
Currently, New Beginnings is a dropoff site for Convoy of Hope, a faith-based nonprofit humanitarian and disaster relief organization that provides food, supplies and humanitarian services to impoverished or otherwise needy populations throughout the world. Deliveries are made to the Liberal church three to four times a year, and Dow said this could be expanded to continue to help bring food to locals in lack of food.
“In our community, there are a lot of places that are shutting down their food pantry services,” he said. “That’s a cost. We have to account for the money it’s going to take to run a compassionate service. On my list right now is to look at what can we do to be more compassionate to our community.”
Spring break for the current school year took place in March, and Norris said NBC provided an option for students who did not go on typical spring break vacations. Those included hanging out at coffee shops or restaurants or watching a movie at Southgate 6.
Locally, the Liberal Ministerial Alliance provides assistance for many of the town’s churches, and Dow said New Beginnings takes a page from that idea, even for churches in other communities.
“We spend a lot of time talking about how to help other churches around us,” he said. “We’re focused more on churches around us that are missing pastors with Assemblies of God, but we also think about how to help the churches in town that are missing pastors. What do they need? How can we help them?”
For Dow and Norris, working with more than one pastor is nothing new.
“We work together well as a team in that we overlap each other, but our specialties are very different,” he said. “What I’m good at, these guys may not be real good at, and what they’re good at, I may not be really good at. It’s very different. I’ve actually never worked at a church where I was the solo pastor. I’ve never had that experience. I’ve always had staff and other pastors with me. I’ve always had people, even if they’re just volunteers.”
“I’ve always worked with multiple people,” Norris said.
Bernsten said his experience at New Beginnings has been somewhat different.
“For me, this is the largest group of pastors I’ve ever worked with, and it’s a great opportunity for us to grow together, support each other in the various things,” he said. “We’ll help serve at other people’s events and really see where we can look each other up and help each other succeed in what we’re doing.”
