If you really want to get to know someone, take a road trip with that person.

When Nathan Robbins, pastor of City of Light Baptist Church, Buffalo, New York, went on a church plant tour—what Brad Hoff of Continental Baptist Missions calls “The CBM Sampler”—he didn’t know he was going on a job interview. But that’s what it was.

“We visited six church plants in six days, from Michigan out to Maryland,” Brad says. “We never had the radio on once. We didn’t need to because we had this conversation going on all the time.”

Nathan soon applied to be a church planter through CBM, and over the next year, the vision for City of Light Baptist Church in Buffalo’s Five Points neighborhood was born.

Generational Church Planting

Nathan grew up in Camp Point, Illinois, where his dad, Tom Robbins, has pastored Faith Baptist Church (a 1962 church plant) since 1991. Calvary Baptist Church, Quincy, Illinois, planted Faith along with two others in the region.

As a “PK” since diapers, Nathan was familiar with the ministry life, but he enrolled at Appalachian Bible College with behind-the-scenes ministry in mind.

“I enjoyed working with my hands,” Nathan says. “I wasn’t really pursuing pastoral ministry but was highly open to serving full-time in some ministry.”

Encouraged by a youth ministry professor while serving in his church’s youth ministry, Nathan fell in love with preaching. After college, he married Christie, and he pastored a small church near Camp Point, not far from his parents. Christie was from upstate New York, and they’d often travel to the area to visit family and explore Buffalo.

As Nathan continued in pastoral ministry, he soon realized that he was preaching to himself.

“As we fulfill the Great Commission in areas where there are not established churches, the end result should be that new churches are planted,” Nathan says. “And God just eventually really used that to open my eyes to the need in our country of more churches.”

City of Light Baptist Church

In addition to their sending church and CBM, the Robbinses formed a church planting team that includes 24 churches and 30 individuals to make their vision a reality.

“We want to be a body of believers dedicated to making disciples in their homes, neighborhoods, city, and around the world,” he says.

The whole world is in Buffalo, New York.

“Eighty languages are spoken in Buffalo, and the school in our neighborhood teaches in 32 of those languages,” he says.

In the roughly two square miles of Buffalo’s Five Points neighborhood, there are 28,000 people—including refugees from Myanmar, Syria, Afghanistan, and Puerto Rico.

The greater Buffalo area has long been known as the City of Light ever since Nikola Tesla put the first power turbines on Niagara Falls in the early 20th century. In 1901, the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo featured some of the first electric powered buildings.

“Whenever someone says, ‘Oh, we love your church’s name,’ I’m able to tie it in with the city of Buffalo and then instantly tie it in with the gospel,” Nathan says. “We love Buffalo, we love the history, and we love the culture. But we love the gospel even more.”

City of Light Baptist Church began meeting in October 2023 and was welcomed into the GARBC at the 2024 GARBC Conference, just two weeks after beginning services in a new Five Points neighborhood location.

“We’ve seen people trust Christ. We’ve seen those people start leading other people to Christ, and they’ve started discipling others,” Nathan says. “And quite frankly, that’s the type of growth we want.”

City of Light Baptist Church is excited to see what other opportunities it will have to share the gospel in the coming years. One of those opportunities involved shovels.

Shovels for Buffalo

Buffalo winters are not for the faint of heart.

“The first snowstorm, we got four feet of snow,” Nathan says. “The teenage boy across the street is out there with one of those kids’ shovels and rubber gloves and no boots trying to shovel four feet of snow.”

The Five Points neighborhood of Buffalo is home to immigrants and refugees from around the world, and many do not have the finances to prepare for snow. So Nathan set out a few shovels and ice scrapers on his porch for the neighborhood. His neighbors would borrow them and put them back.

“It was an opportunity for building relationships through something as simple as a shovel.”

In a summer update to his sending church—Faith Baptist Church, Camp Point, Illinois—Nathan told the church about the snowstorm . . . and the shovel situation. Later someone approached Tom Robbins, the pastor of Faith (and Nathan’s dad), with the idea to buy shovels for the Robbinses to give away in their neighborhood.

“So we made it a project through special offerings,” Tom says. “The kids in Sunday School got into it. They brought their offerings, and the teacher taped their money to a shovel.”

The church called the project “Shovels for Buffalo” and raised about $1,000 for Nathan to buy snow shovels and gloves for his community.

“Shovels for Buffalo opened the door for gospel conversations and the opportunity to serve our community,” Nathan says.

Now the Five Points neighborhood is ready for however many feet of snow Buffalo drops this year.

Pastor Tom Robbins of Faith Baptist Church, Camp Point, Ill., holds a shovel with money attached that will be sent to City of Light Baptist Church, Buffalo, N.Y., to buy shovels and gloves for residents.

Emily Gehman is a freelance writer and editor. She teaches English and Communications at Grace Christian University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Photography by Joshua Huang/Reflecting His Image Photography.