After Decades of Ministry, a Church-Planting Pastor Returns to Vermont to Grow a Rural Church and to Mentor Other Pastors
Waterville Country Church Christmas Concert
A former hippie, Robby Pitt was so inspired by God after reading a counterculture oral history, Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont (2018), that he moved last summer to the Green Mountain State—for a second time—to be a church-planting pastor.
After four decades of ministry including stints with Baptists in Colorado and Southern California, Pitt is steadily but surely planting a church in the northern farming community of Waterville (population 704 in 2018), in Vermont’s Lamoille County, some two hundred miles from Boston and twenty-six miles due north of the famed Trapp Family Lodge.
With a passion for teaching and for mentoring pastors, he is also directing the Baptist Churches of New England’s Pastoral Leadership Development endeavors and teaching three classes a week at Trinity Baptist School in Williston.
Pitt is now planting the Waterville Country Church, located on Route 109. The building was the Waterville Church of the Nazarene, which commenced worship in 1910, closed their doors fifteen years ago, and moved to Johnson, VT.
After just four months in Waterville, the Pitts have hit the ground running. They have already held an end-of-summer cookout, two concerts featuring gifted local musicians, a Christmas market, monthly reading-hour gatherings for children, a pair of church potluck dinners, and eight Sunday worship gatherings. And they held two events that are sure to be annual highlights: The Great Pumpkin Carving and the Gingerbread House Christmas Party. An average of forty neighbors have been attending worship and at least twice that number have been turning out for the community events.
95 people attended Waterville County Church’s recent Gingerbread House Community Event
“We are getting settled and becoming a part of the fabric of our community. We’ve been building a core group, developing friendships, and meeting lots of people. We are discovering multiple ways to be part of and to be a blessing to our community. God has been giving us favor and we have received a warm welcome,” Pitt commented.
For the second time in as many decades, Pitt decided to join a growing contingent of pastors who have been planting or replanting congregations in the three states of northern New England. Vermont—which 61 years ago, in 1963, became the last of the fifty United States to count a Southern Baptist church—is a good example.
“There were about 30 churches in the Vermont region and now there are over 50. Between 2010 and 2020 more than 20 church plants began that are still thriving and multiplying,” wrote Russ Rathier, a New England native and BCNE’s Vermont Regional Coordinator, in an August 2023 article called “Silent Revival in Vermont.”
The Pitts decided to become forerunners of that revival when they moved to the Burlington suburb of Colchester in 1999 after Jim Wideman, then the Green Mountain Baptist Association director (and later the BCNE executive director), invited them to launch a church. A joint partnership of the North American Mission Board and the Cecil B. Day Foundation provided a one-year salary and Daybreak Community Church was underway.
A Virginia native, Pitt named Daybreak in Colchester and another church of the same name that he planted in Ashburn, VA, in 1992.
Over four decades, he has scattered seeds of gospel faith across the United States and has seen these grow into healthy, living congregations of Christ-followers. Pitt draws inspiration for this peripatetic lifestyle from Mark 4:26-29, in which Jesus describes “the kingdom of God” as being like a “man [who] scatters seed on the ground.” The seeds grow even though he does not understand just how this happens and soon enough “the harvest has come.”
Pitt is a servant of God’s mission to start and grow Bible-preaching fellowships far and wide—from California to Virginia to Colorado to Vermont. He draws additional insight from the example of two first-century church leaders, Paul and Apollos, who saw themselves as “servants” through whom the Corinthians “came to believe” (1 Cor 3:4-10). Each church leader had a specific task (“I [Paul] planted the seed, Apollos watered it”), but “God has been making it grow.”
The Pitts visited northern Vermont after the COVID-19 pandemic subsided to explore church-planting options in the region in which they had invested their lives at the beginning of the new century. Some of their friends from Colchester surprised the couple with news that they had purchased the vacant Waterville church building and parsonage on speculation, perhaps to transform it into a school, a church, or a similar community-focused venue.
Pitt leading a mountainside baby dedication
The next time Pitt and his wife, Kim, who now teaches two classes at Trinity Baptist School and is the administrative assistant for a church planting network in Denver, visited the northern Green Mountains, he joined the regularly scheduled bluegrass jam at the Waterville town hall. Pitt was part of a bluegrass band during his years as a James Madison University student in Harrisonburg, VA. He plays guitar, mandolin, and harmonica.
Neighbors invited Pitt to preach a pre-Easter sermon. He chose Luke 15 as his text and expounded that night on the related parables of the lost sheep, coin, and son. Whether they knew it or not, some on that evening themselves were “lost” spiritually.
Eventually, Pitt, now age 66, was invited to move to Waterville and serve the residents as a church-planting pastor. What’s old would soon become new again. After a time of prayer, the Pitts, accepted an invitation and arrived in Waterville in August 2023.
In addition to his church responsibilities, Pitt coaches and mentors his lifetime of ministry experience with younger pastors. Terry Dorsett, the BCNE executive director, who himself was a pastor, church planter, and mentor to pastors in Vermont, said, “Robby’s ministry is critical to helping pastors be effective. Far too many pastors have a degree or two from a seminary and are great theologians, but really don’t know how to pastor a group of people.”
“This is especially true in smaller towns where knowing how to build relationships with the community is vital for church health. Robby excels at this and [he] can mentor other pastors in these important ministry skills,” Dorsett added.
Pitt grew up without the influence of a faith community and was not always the inspiring Christian servant he is today. In Virginia during the early 1970s, he made some problematic life choices. “I used a lot of drugs including hallucinogenics. It made quite a mess with my life. I had a bad trip and I thought I [had] crossed the line of no return. I cried out to God and asked if he would fix my head.”
Even though “it did not seem like God had done so” at the time, Pitt said that prayer was answered. His mother was not a church attender, but she did occasionally watch a televised sermon by the famed evangelist Billy Graham.
Pitt watched Graham too and in 1972 he located and started reading a paperback copy of the American Bible Society’s mass-marketed Good News for Modern Man (1966), which delivered the New Testament in “today’s English.” [This was before the first edition of the contemporary-language New International Version, which was published in 1978.] After reading for two days, he reached the end of The Gospel of Matthew and there learned of Jesus Christ’s life-saving crucifixion and resurrection.
Pitt then knelt next to his bed and voiced a prayer of commitment to follow Jesus. Soon he was reading Ken Taylor’s The Living Bible (1971) paraphrase, and he began to grow in faith. His mother then committed her life to Jesus Christ, and they started attending a church.
After he and a college friend, a pastor’s son, decided that they were being called by God to Christian ministry, Pitt enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX, where he met a pastor named John Worcester, who told him about church planting. “I knew immediately [that] that is exactly what I was supposed to do,” commented Pitt. From that experience, he added, “God began to shape me and develop my character” for a life of church planting.
Robby and Kim Pitt celebrating Christmas with their children and newborn grandchild
After marrying in 1989, Robby and Kim Pitt honeymooned in the world-class ski village of Breckenridge and then moved to Colorado, where they encountered Russell Richardson, who was the evangelism director of the Colorado Baptists and, in the 1970s, was evangelism director for the Baptist General Association of New England (before the BCNE was formed). “God used that experience [in Colorado] not to change my calling but to change my direction.”
The couple’s calling to ministry once again in Vermont was confirmed when they saw the sixteen-foot “Whale Dance” outdoor sculpture off of I-89 at Exit 4 in Randolph VT, and after they heard a sermon on Jonah and the Whale.
Family has been a special feature to their lives. The Pitts are the parents of two adult children, Brecke Ann Paine and Cassie Mae Pitt, both living in Oklahoma, and the grandparents of newborn Shepherd Jay Paine.
Even though he had started a church just twenty-eight miles away in 1999, Pitt admits that it is not an easy prospect to build relationships and grow a church in Waterville. He knows what it takes in principle, but he also understands that the methods used in Colchester or Breckenridge or Los Angeles or Ashburn must be contextualized for the culture of the Waterville area.
“What I learned in ministry [elsewhere] does not necessarily apply to rural Vermont.” Borrowing a quaint term that true Vermonters apply to out-of-state newcomers, Pitt concluded, “I’ll always be a ‘flatlander,’ even though we moved from Colorado!”
A Massachusetts native and a New England Baptist since 1970, Dan Nicholas is the BCNE managing editor.