Taylor Burgess, Shifting the Narrative from Church History to Church Destiny

story by LINDSEY LENOIR     photos by GREYSON JOHNSTON

     Within the 33.6 square miles that is Beaufort, there are approximately 18 Protestant Christian churches. Essentially that means there is a church on every corner. With so many options why would one local pastor, four years ago, decide to plant a church, a portable church, right in the heart of Beaufort County?

     When God sent Jesus to teach and spread the gospel, He didn’t send Him to Rome, the epicenter of the world and a culture immersed in Pagan worship and lawlessness. Instead, He ordained to send His son to the heartbeat of the Jewish religious culture, Jerusalem.  When Taylor Burgess prayed to God and told him that his life was, “a blank check in His hands.”  He asked God to,” just take me and fill in the details… wherever you send me I will go and not waste any time.” Taylor definitely never imagined that place would be one of the birthplaces of the Protestant Christianity.   “My wife Emily and I were wide open about where God wanted to send us. We felt the call to go to a highly unchurched area, we didn’t know if that meant South Africa, or perhaps South America. We were definitely not thinking it would be South Carolina!”  

     While researching Beaufort county they realized that it is per capita one of the most unchurched counties in the United States. The religious landscape of Beaufort had, “become like most of our country in a post-Christian culture, a community with an external veneer of religion, but when you get beneath the surface, you find very little evidence of what it means to be a true follower of Christ.” Taylor and Emily were broken over this reality and refused to accept the fact that Beaufort county, one of the birthplaces of the Protestant Church in America, had essentially become a place where the church was virtually dying.

Taylor’s Back Story

     18 years ago Taylor Burgess would have never imagined that God would have placed this calling on his life. Frankly, for a long time, he intentionally tried to not go down that path. “I basically pretty much reluctantly stumbled into ministry.”  Having grown up in a family with a very long line of pastors and surrounded by ministry, he said he saw a lot of the demands put on the leaders and felt he didn’t want that for his life’s path. Although not a pastor himself, his father Tommy worked for an organization that served pastors and their families. “ My Dad actually became a confidant for a lot of his pastor friends.” 

     Taylor’s plan was to coach football, teach P.E., and “just have a low key normal life.”  When he was 11 years old, Taylor experienced his first “crisis of faith” when his grandfather passed away. He would again enter into crisis at the beginning of high school when his brother’s friend took his own life. Those events, coupled with the tragedy that was 9/11, propelled Taylor into a period of despair and brokenness that caused him to question the sovereignty of God. “I thought to myself, if there is a God, I’m not sure I want anything to do with him.  I wondered how could all of this be if God is good?”

     Taylor would spend much of his time in high school struggling to find his identity and running from God. It wasn’t until early in his senior year of high school that one of his youth pastors came to him and told him he felt like God was calling him into some kind of ministry. “I thought to myself, do you know me? I mean have you seen my life? I really was not excited about that at all.” He began to let those words resonate inside of him and decided to follow this advice by helping lead worship through music in various student ministries. By the end of that year, he had started preaching locally at different youth events.  He then graduated and headed to college. While at Liberty University, he began to feel that God was calling him into pastoral ministry.

     Fast forward a few years. By June of 2011, Taylor was married to Emily and they were serving at a church in Charlotte, NC working in student ministry. It was during this time that Taylor began to grapple with his “why” in ministry. He loved working with students and loved seeing the impact that it was having on their lives, but he still wasn’t fully grasping what God wanted him to do with his life. That summer, he and his family had taken a trip to Hilton Head, where they would often vacation growing up. One evening, his father,  the most spiritually influential person in his life, called Taylor out on the deck.  He sat him down and said to him,” I don’t know exactly what is stirring in your heart, but I feel compelled to challenge you and tell you that whatever God is placing on your heart to do, to not delay in doing it!” He went on to share with Taylor that he himself had felt the calling to go into pastoral ministry when he was around Taylor’s age. He said that the decision to not pursue that path caused him to have a lifetime of regret. In December of 2011, a mere 6 months later, his father would pass away. The year following would be an emotionally challenging year for Taylor as he dealt with the loss of his father and the struggle to find his purpose and calling. Through much reflection, prayer, and healing, Taylor prepared his heart for what was to come.  He prayed that “blank check’ prayer to God and soon after found out about a student ministry opportunity that would eventually lead the family to Beaufort and to Tidal Creek Fellowship. 

     In January 2015, during his time as the youth pastor at Tidal Creek, Taylor sensed that God was calling them to plant a church in this community and felt that God was preparing to bring a supernatural, spiritual awakening to Beaufort County.

Navigating the Church Landscape of Beaufort

     As Taylor, Emily, and their Tidal Creek family prayed about this church plant, they began to evaluate the church landscape. They saw the landscape in two extremes: the very traditional church, churches that had been established in the community for a long time, and, at the opposite end of the spectrum,  the very new, modern churches. They realized there was a large generational divide where predominantly older generations attended the established churches, and predominantly younger generations attended the more modern churches.  This left an entire section of the population unreached. They said, “What would it look like if we planted a church that is still, in a traditional sense, clinging to the power of scripture, teaching the Bible verse by verse, preaching the gospel every week and challenging people to be the hands and feet of Jesus and also offering a modern element and approach.” 

Planting the Church

     “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth…”     
                                 -1:Corinthians 3:5-7

     Statistically, church planting is the best way to connect with people that are overwhelmed by the thought of breaking into an established and traditional church. By the beginning of 2016 a launch team of about 25 people had gathered to pray, study, and train, and to build a community, a family of believers who set out to really “see” the needs in the community and to reach its people. “We felt like our aim from day one was to share the hope of the message of the Gospel and be the church of Jesus. It hasn’t been to do whatever we can just to boost attendance or numbers. Jesus doesn’t just call people to make decisions, he calls the church to make disciples. So, it’s not just about joining the club, it’s about joining a family, a community, understanding you have a new life, a part to play, a gift to give.”

     On January 22, 2017, in the auditorium at Beaufort High School, Cross Community Church opened its doors for the first time. “It was pouring rain, this massive lighting and thunderstorm going on…the power went off halfway through the service and I had to preach for about 10 minutes with no microphone. A lot of people came to that first service, a typical thing that happens with new churches. People are curious and they come to check it out, but what was really awesome is that they kept coming back!” By the fall of 2017, they had already added a second service to accommodate the number of people coming every Sunday. Now having relocated to the Wardle Family YMCA in Port Royal, CCC now averages upwards of 525-530 people coming to worship every Sunday.

The Future of CCC

     In April, Cross Community will begin a capital building campaign. “We have loved being portable.  We’ve not built our church with a building, we’ve built it with relationships, and yet a lot of time, energy, and resources have been poured into the fact that we don’t have our own facility. We want to take that time and those resources that we have poured into being portable, and invest it back into our community and outreach ministry.” Ministries like the St. Helena Outreach, a food bank sponsored by CCC, that provides food for upwards of thirty Beaufort families in need weekly, and the Good News Club. Cross Community has also taken its ministry and mission outside of our borders to Haiti. The church is working alongside the World Orphans Organization to support and provide resources to Pastor Thony and the 14 families connected to World Orphans in his church.

     Taylor Burgess is a man of God who loves his family and his community. He has a true and sincere desire to see God do a transforming work in the lives of others. “My desire is to help people imagine a better story for their life. It’s a story where we are immensely more flawed than we can recognize on our own, but we are immeasurably more loved than we could ever comprehend. Our sin leaves us a broken shell of who God intends for us to be and that through faith in Christ we are not just good people made better, we are dead people made alive, and we get to walk in that in freedom and victory.”

The Mission of the Church

          Standing behind Taylor in this mission are his wife and three boys, and an army of praying, loving, Christ-centered believers who are ready and waiting to welcome the “doubter, the drifter, the seeker, and the person who needs space to kind of work all of this out. Come in, we will share what we believe, but we also want to be a safe place for you to grapple with your faith and hopefully see a clear picture of who Jesus really is.”

     In the South, there is often a heavy emphasis on the external veneer of our lives, especially when it comes to our religion. Taylor beams, “Jesus spoke emphatically against us having the appearance of being holy, but internally having a heart that didn’t love him, cherish him, and value him. That is one of the hearts and aims of our church!”

     The very last instructions that the risen Christ gave to his disciples were, “Preach the Gospel and make disciples.”

     The Mission of Taylor Burgess and Cross Community Church in Beaufort is simply to, “Preach the Gospel, make disciples. To those people who don’t consider themselves Christians, people fighting addictions, broken relationships, those who have walked away from the church. We are here and we are a church that is going to lean into the truth of the gospel, but we are also a church who will greet you at the door and let you know that we love you and there is a place for you here. You are always welcome. I’ve never seen in the Bible where Jesus had to choose between truth and love, so we are going to be a church of unapologetic truth, as we find it in God’s word, and we are also going to be a place of unconditional love. We are all on a level playing field with our sin.  We all need the redemption that is made available through Christ.  We all have a past and God is capable of freeing us from that past and ushering us to a new future.”