SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Michael Cooper was not prepared for what he saw.
He had driven to Hunter High School to watch something unusual happen. The volunteers had come from Houston and Virginia, most of them strangers to each other, and they were doing something that seemed almost too simple for the distance they’d traveled: handing out donuts to high school students on their way into class.
But Cooper wasn’t concerned about the donuts. He was curious to see how his daughter would handle things.
She’s 15, a freshman at the same school where her mother has taught math for 11 years. She grew up in Utah, one of the most religiously distinct places in the United States as the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On any given Sunday, more people attend a worship service in Utah than in any other state. And yet, Cooper will tell you plainly, Utah is one of the darkest mission fields in the nation. Many residents who claim faith in Jesus believe their own works play a role in their salvation. Most people here, he says, do not know even one evangelical Christian.
His daughter had grown up knowing that. She had spent most of her school years without Christian peers. But this year, a small group of students at Hunter High started something new: the school’s first-ever Christian club. They called it Leap of Faith.
That morning, she stood at the entrance of the school with a box of donuts in her hands and told every student who walked past the same thing:
Come to Leap of Faith. Jesus loves you.
“What I got to witness,” Cooper told the rally crowd that night, “was 15 million Southern Baptists standing behind my daughter. I saw my grandfather standing behind my daughter. A legacy of people who were not afraid of dark places, saying Jesus loves you.”
He had been praying for that school for 11 years.
A Thousand Donuts and One Question
The donuts were gone in minutes. But what they opened lasted longer.
Lauren Napier led the volunteer team that served alongside Valleylight Church at Hunter High that morning. After the last box was empty, the student who leads Leap of Faith pulled the group aside.
“This wasn’t about the donuts at all,” he told them. “Y’all handing out donuts allowed me to get to pray for my brothers and sisters at this school and share the gospel with people in a way I never had before.”
There are just 20 Christian students in the entire school. That morning, they stood in front of their classmates and talked about Jesus.
Later, Napier’s team went from Hunter High to the Utah State Correctional Facility, where they handed out more than 300 flavored sodas to staff and correctional officers. Nobody in that building had ever seen anything like it. One woman on the team works at the facility and had been quietly building gospel conversations with coworkers for months. When her church showed up to love on the people she works beside every day, walls came down. The conversations she had begun now had room to continue.
One Weekend Across the Wasatch Front
Serve Tour Salt Lake City, held April 17–18, brought 37 churches from 15 states together for 24 projects across the region. The 275 volunteers served more than 2,150 people, packed 2,900 meals, logged 1,880 construction hours, and had at least 270 gospel conversations. They worked in five schools, four churches, 12 community settings, and served three bivocational pastors doing ministry on the margins of their own time and resources.
The partnership behind it included the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention, Send Network, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, and Send Relief, who together made the weekend possible. Utah-Idaho Disaster Relief prepared lunches for volunteers during the day and served a full BBQ dinner with peach cobbler at the Saturday night rally.
Because volunteers were spread across the city, the Saturday night rally was where it all came into focus—what God had done and how to keep it going.
Why Are You Here?
At a nearby elementary school, John Perkins and his team built shelving and set up a resource center for food and clothing. About half the students there need both on a regular basis.
Teachers kept pulling Perkins aside, one after another, asking the same questions in hushed voices.
“Why are you doing this? Why are you here?”
He told every one of them.
“This is the gospel,” he said. “We’ve received a great gift, and this is why we serve.”
He watched it start to register on the face of the school administrator as he explained it. “We pray,” Perkins told the crowd that night, “that those families would not just be clothed with clothes, but long-term, clothed in Christ’s righteousness.”
The administrator wrote to the team afterward: “Thank you for all the amazing service given to us today. Thank you for the beautiful spirit you brought to our school.”
At the University of Utah, volunteers partnered with Resonate Church for a campus outreach, giving students food truck vouchers and asking two simple questions about faith. In response, 25 said they wanted to learn more about Jesus and the Bible, 14 asked for a follow-up conversation, and 15 said they wanted to visit a church.
During the outreach, a volunteer started talking with a young couple. The girlfriend was not a believer. The volunteer shared her testimony and gave her a Bible, encouraging her to start with the Gospel of John. The couple left together for the library. A few minutes later, the boyfriend came back alone.
He wanted a Bible too. He wanted to read John with her.
Going Door-to-Door in a Place Where That Is Radical
Ashley Smith’s team did what most people in Utah do not do. They knocked on doors.
The project was called Prayer on the Porch. Three groups covered three different streets, offering to pray for neighbors, help with yard work, and simply introduce themselves. In a state where door-to-door religious conversations carry a particular weight and history, showing up as a neighbor rather than an institution was its own kind of statement.
One group had a long gospel conversation with a man who had been LDS his whole life. Another team met a woman who had a one-week-old baby and spent time with her, helped around her house, and prayed over her new family.
One volunteer on Smith’s team arrived that morning too nervous to knock. By the end of the day, she was the one who couldn’t stop.
At a skate park adjacent to Redemption Church, Stu Ross and his team hosted a block party with food, tricks, and conversation. Ross got saved through a skateboarding ministry as a teenager, and the park sits directly in front of his church. Over the course of the afternoon, the team had a dozen gospel conversations. One man told Ross he was planning to come to church Sunday. He wanted to follow Jesus, he said, but he wanted to take it one step at a time.
In Utah, that kind of decision rarely stays private. For many, choosing to follow Christ means stepping away from a faith tradition that is also family, community, and identity. He could feel the weight of it. A volunteer from a Montana church prayed with him before the day ended.
In partnership with Gospel Grace Church, volunteers served 150 meals and distributed 30 Bibles inside a refugee community, sitting with families and staying long enough to hear their stories.
Volunteers also completed significant construction work for three bivocational church planters stretching themselves thin between jobs and ministry: a new shed, a renovated garage, and major landscaping they would not have been able to finish alone. At Gospel Light Church, a team stripped five layers of shingles off a house being converted into transitional housing, filling three large dumpsters. At Kings Cross Church, volunteers built two pergolas from scratch, creating a welcoming outdoor space for a congregation still finding its footing.
The mayor showed up at a first responder appreciation block party, hosted by Canyons Church with the Cottonwood Height Town Council. He was not the only one who noticed something different was happening.
Beautiful Feet
On Saturday night, the volunteers gathered at Risen Life Church for the rally. Rob Lee, executive director of Utah-Idaho Baptists, told them plainly what they were dealing with.
“The majority of people in Utah do not know four biblical Christians,” he said. “Most don’t even know one. We need people to come here and help us.”
Will Galkin, a Send Network city missionary in Salt Lake, asked the crowd not to just go home. “On the way home,” he said, “write in a journal: Lord, what did you do in me? And Lord, what do you want me to do about Utah?”
Then Michael Cooper stood up.
He started by saying thank you. Then he told the room the truth about what it costs to build the church in Utah.
There are days, he said, that feel lonely. You are planting in a city where the gospel is crowded out not by apathy but by a deeply held alternative—one that looks familiar from the outside and asks the same eternal questions but answers them differently. You are serving people who are already religious, already devout, and already certain. That is a particular kind of hard.
But every morning, his wife, Devon, gets up before school starts and pulls out eight index cards.
She teaches math at Hunter High. Has for 11 years. And every morning she writes a prayer on each card, one for each of eight students, and sets them on the desks before the kids arrive. Every one of her 150 students gets prayed for twice during the school year. When students graduate and move on, some of them come back to ask her if she’ll recreate the card. They lost it, they say, and they want it back. For a while, students were taking pictures of Mrs. Cooper’s cards and sharing them on social media.
For most of those students, Devon Cooper is the only Christian teacher they will ever have from kindergarten through graduation.
His own daughters have never had one.
Then Cooper told the room what he saw at Hunter High that morning. His 15-year-old daughter, standing at the entrance of the school her mother has prayed over for 11 years, holding a box of donuts, telling students she does not know that Jesus loves them.
“The conversations happening before you came and the conversations that will happen after you go far beyond what you did this weekend,” he said. “For months, people are going to ask us: why did those people come to Utah to do that? And we are going to get to say, over and over again, because they love Jesus. They want you to know Jesus.”
He closed by thanking them one more time.
“Thank you for your beautiful feet that walked to Utah. Thank you for your beautiful feet that sat in vans and airplanes. A flicker of light in a very dark room can make a huge difference. You may think all you did was that. But let’s not let it end here. Let’s ask the Lord: what do you have next?”
Eleven years of prayer cards. A freshman with a box of donuts. A young man who walked back alone to ask for a Bible.
For years, the missionaries serving in Salt Lake City have been faithful in the dark. This weekend, 275 people rolled up their sleeves to serve alongside them, reminding them they are not alone.
Send Relief, a collaborative ministry between the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, is Southern Baptists’ global compassion ministry. For more information on opportunities to serve alongside us, visit SendRelief.org/trips.
Visit our Facebook to see more Serve Tour Salt Lake City photos and the Send Relief YouTube channel to download the recap video.
