Bill O'Brien

Bill O’Brien

At the northwest corner of Greenville and Royal in the Lake Highlands area is a building that houses many churches and nonprofits. It’s called Gaston Christian Center and leaders have just announced an executive director, Bill O’Brien.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

(Read a 2008 Advocate story about this and other neighborhood churches here.)

The complex houses five church congregations: Gaston Oaks; La Promesa Iglesia Bautista, a Spanish-language congregation; the Karen Fellowship; Afrika Fellowship and Bhutanese Fellowship.

Also on the property is several nonprofits we’ve written about — Healing Hands Ministries, Gateway of Grace and the Korean-America Sharing Movement. English as a Second Language classes are held and a computer training lab also is under construction at the site.

Gaston Christian Center’s board of directors elected O’Brien last week. (The board includes Chairman Gary Cook, pastor at Gaston Oaks, Vice Chairman Mark Wingfield, associate pastor at Wilshire; Treasurer Tom Diggs, layman from Gaston; Secretary Joy Fenner, retired executive director of Texas Woman’s Missionary Union; Dorothy Myers and Nell Bowles, lay leaders at Gaston Oaks; Allan Stafford, an attorney and member at Wilshire; Heather Mustain, minister of missions at Wilshire and Patty Lane, ethnic congregational consultant with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.)

“I am excited about working again with Bill,” Cook says. “We served together years ago on the Inter-Agency Missions Council of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Gaston Christian Center is incredibly blessed to have a person of his experience to be its first executive director.”

According to an announcement, “O’Brien is an internationally recognized missiologist who most recently has taught at Dallas Baptist University, Baylor University’s Truett Seminary and the John Leland Center for Theological Studies. He was founding director of The Global Center at Samford University and served as executive vice president of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. He began his career in missions as a music missionary in Indonesia.”

Gaston Christian Center is a registered nonprofit, according to the same announcement, “whose mission is to ensure that the 66,000-square-foot Gaston Oaks property is managed in perpetuity as a mission and ministry center, focused both on service ministries and congregational incubation. The vision is to create a collective of faith-based agencies and churches that build synergy with each other and serve the needs of the region.”