Pastor finds God works in unlikely spaces
Mangrum’s ice cream shop congregation fills spiritual needs
By Abe Hardesty
City People writer ahardest@greenvillenews.com
John David Mangrum was 9 years old when he began training for Christian ministry. It wasn’t his idea. He admits that he’d rather have been watching cartoons. But each week after church, Onus Sanders insisted on telling his grandsons about Jesus.
Mangrum and brother Jason were a captive audience for the Macon, Ga., probation officer who told and retold stories of the life of Jesus Christ. Twenty-five years later, John Mangrum is the pastor of Origins Church, and Jason is the youth pastor at Cross Point Baptist Church in Warner-Robins, Ga. For John Mangrum, who came to Greenville with wife Natalie in 2008 to start a new church, the belief in Jesus reached a new level when he attended a summer youth camp at age 14.
“I felt, clearer than almost anything I’ve heard or known in my life, that God was calling me to be a minister, that this is what he made me to do,” Mangrum recalls. “I wrestle with doubt in a million areas but have never wondered about God’s unique shaping and preparation for me to serve full-time as a pastor/church planter.”
He serves in an unusual church setting: the Spill The Beans restaurant on South Main Street, where Origins meets each Sunday morning. His congregation is made up primarily of those who haven’t been pulled from a traditional church building, and that congregation sees no reason to build a new structure. “I think the perception among people who don’t follow Jesus is that another church building is not the best way to serve downtown. So that’s a sacrifice we gladly make,” Mangrum says. “We are here to be a church in downtown, for downtown. I feel like this is the path God is leading Origins down. And our people agree.” Mangrum, who served seven years as a youth minister in Georgia before coming to Greenville, agrees that the Origins business model doesn’t fit all churches. “I don’t think this is the path every church is called to take, and I don’t think every church with a building is doing something wrong. I know several churches downtown that are using their spaces for worship on Sundays but also for community centers, afterschool programs for neighborhood kids, learning centers, ESL classes and recovery ministries. These are great programs that a church like ours, without a place we own, will be hardpressed to ever do,” Mangrum says. “So like we always say, it takes all kinds of churches to serve all kinds of people. We celebrate what these churches do and pray they would celebrate us. We both want to love and serve downtown and follow the lead of Jesus here in the city.” By meeting at Spill The Beans, a coffee and ice cream shop near Falls Park, Mangrum says his group can “stay downtown and cheap,” two of its primarygoals. It is an unlikely mission site that came to the Mangrums after four years of prayer. While serving as a youth minister in Hartwell, Ga., he and Natalie met a fellow Christian in suburban Toronto who started a church that met in homes.
“It really just intrigued us. After four years of praying, we felt God’s release to start a church. Then the question became where. We had been asked to pray about planting churches in Georgia, Massachusetts and Canada but felt peace about none of those. “After a time of looking at demographics and actually visiting downtown Greenville, we knew that this was the place that God was preparing us for. We never felt like we were bringing Jesus to the city but that we would be moving here and joining God where he was already at work,” says Mangrum. “In the end, I can’t tell you why we ‘chose’ Greenville over other cities; I really think Greenville chose us. We fell in love with downtown and wanted to live, work, serve, ‘play’ and invest our lives in the people of downtown.”
Mangrum, who leads a weekly congregation of about 50, says he “would never recommend anyone to take their wife and ‘parachute’ into a city with so few connections to start a church — unless Jesus clearly puts it in the heart.
“That was tough, and I underestimated how tough it would be for Natalie and for me,” says Mangrum, who last week became a father for the second time.
The experience has stretched his horizons and his interests. Mangrum isn’t an artist, but many of his congregational leaders are talented visual artists.
“I love our arts community though and firmly believe that if you take away our visual artists — or any of our artistic expressions in our city — that Greenville ceases to be Greenville. We have been fortunate enough to have artists become dear friends and let us serve with them. It started with that,” Mangrum says. Mangrum has found open doors to serve with Upstate Visual Arts, the Pendleton Street Arts District and artists at the Art Crossing at RiverPlace.
The congregation recently partnered with the Pendleton Place Children’s Art Auction. The congregation prepared frames and canvas, which the artists took to the children’s shelter to paint with the children and teens there. The works were auctioned at Spill the Beans to raise funds. “We had about 20 artists help us with the project in significant ways. It’s been so gratifying to be a friend to so many deeply spiritual artists, some who follow Jesus and some who do not,” Mangrum says. “The conversations that we get to have and the serving that we get to do together to make our city better is beautiful and humbling.”
Mangrum, who says Orgins is “less about going to church and much more about being the church,” says the past four years have been about relationships.
“I think the biggest thing that has been on my heart lately is that Origins is a group of people who want to love God, one another and our city well. This is about a love affair with Jesus and the plot of dirt they call 29601 and all the people who live, work, serve, and play on it. We believe wholeheartedly that its best days are ahead. I can’t wait to see how that goes forward.”
John David Mangrum is pastor of Origins Church in downtown Greenville.
ABE HARDESTY/STAFF
You're doing a great thing--I am proud of you and all that the Lord has done through you since those summer camps!!! Congratulations on another beautiful child--you guys are blessed!!!
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