How is God at work within the Pikes Peak Baptist Association?
We asked 3 churches in Colorado Springs to find out.
Pastor Brandon Stokes, Anchor Point Church
And we’re like, what if in the church planting world, we just made a really good sugar cookie?
Pastor James Medina, Calvary Covenant
We decided to partner with the Calvary family of churches.
Pastor Josh Hargett, Cornerstone Church
So on Easter of 2026, we officially launched Cornerstone Español and became one church in two languages.
Stokes: We had no TV, we had a music stand, and we had a cajon and a guitar, and we had about 15 people, and that was about half of the original church plant and half people that had come in underneath the vision of where we were going to be going as Anchor Point.
Medina: Theologically, we were asking ourselves even the question of, are we even Baptist? Much more the question of, are we Southern Baptist?
There was the time when we lost our founding pastor, and in that loss, the church lost so much of its identity. We lost a leader. We lost so much of our membership, so much of our leadership. We lost our building. We lost our finances. Dwindled down to just 17 of us, including myself and my wife. And it truly was the Pikes Peak Baptist Association that
came in and provided that very substantial and integral help from getting us to that point of struggle to a point where we could start to rebuild
and rediscover who we were.
Hargett: We’ve noticed and recognized that our community has been shifting, demographics have been moving. And so we began the process of praying about what it would look like to launch a Spanish-speaking ministry or church or congregation out of us. Three years ago, we thought we were on the right track.
We had a church planter in from NAMB partnering with us to get this project moving, and God shut the door on it.
Stokes: We never put up a billboard. We never did a social media ad. We weren’t trying to do creative videos and different things to make sure that
people knew we were here. Our investment was go be in the city, be in the places that you were in, connect with the people that you’re next to every single day, and just one person at a time, as you develop a relationship with them, you find out they don’t have a community, invite them in.
And that method from the very beginning went from 15 people to 30 people to 45 people, 100 people to two services to our last Easter having around 220 people in our little bitty 3,600 square foot building.
Medina: So we’ve officially been adopted into the Calvary family of churches, who are largely Colorado Baptists, and we’re taking that mission here in our city now to do multiplication. Multiplying leaders, multiplying teams, and essentially being able to multiply churches, whether it’s revitalization, replanting, or planting new ones. And that’s what we’re really excited about right now.
Hargett: So for the last couple of years, we’ve just been praying and watching what God was doing. And then kind of out of nowhere, we met a local church planter who had been working the ground here for 10 years, Jonathan Frey, and he had been doing great work, but had run into some of the same obstacles that we were recognizing, that it was really hard to keep second- and third-generation Spanish speakers engaged in the local church.
So on Easter of 2026, we officially launched Cornerstone Español and became one church in two languages. We do everything together. We worship together. We celebrate together. We fellowship together. We work together. And we have two simultaneous worship services going on at the same time. English is upstairs, Spanish is downstairs.
And through that process, we’ve seen families that maybe mom and dad are first-generation Spanish speakers. Well, they’ll go down to Cornerstone Español, while the kids who may be second- or third-generation English speakers at this point, they’ll come upstairs and worship with the English congregation.
We’ve really seen God do some tremendous things through moments like that in the life of our church as we try to be a church that makes disciples who worship, grow, and go, and that includes Spanish speakers here in Colorado Springs.
