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Grace Baptist Church
Church History Grace Baptist Church was started around June 6th 1994. The church had around twenty-five charter members and Brother Jimmy Lively was the founder and pastor of our church. Early in 1995, due to the majority of the membership living in Winnsboro, many of them felt the need to start another work in that community, because the drive was becoming a challenge for some of them. This part of the membership left Grace to begin the new work in Winnsboro. This work came to be known as Bible Baptist Church. In the middle of 1995 Brother Lively was getting a little older and struggling to do concrete work as well as pastor a church. After struggling over the issue of the small church being unable to support his family fulltime, Pastor Lively resigned the pastorate. Later that year Grace called Brother Kerri Hoefner to be the pastor of the church. During this time the church continued to struggle to maintain itself. In February of 1998, Brother Hoefner officially resigned as pastor. Since the church knew their pastor was planning on going to the mission field in December of 97, they had already begun to look for a new pastor. In March of 1998 Brother Daniel Ledford and his family came to candidate for the pastorate. After praying about this the church of eleven people agreed to call Brother Ledford to be their new pastor. Brother Ledford lived in Tennessee at the time, so it would take him a month to get moved. On April 30th 1998 Pastor Ledford, wife Michelle and their youngest daughter Ashley arrived. While things were being put in place the three older children remained with their grandparents and would later be brought to live in Texas. Pastor Ledford worked at Hulsey’s Body Shop, off and on, for two years until the church was able to support his family fulltime. In May of 1999, realizing that debt was holding the church back from being more effective in the work of God, Pastor Ledford challenged the membership of the church to commit to give a weeks pay to the church for a debt reduction. The commitments for that Sunday were around $ 4,300.00. After that step of faith, God began to reduce the $ 60,000 debt and on the last day of May, 2001 Grace Baptist Church became debt free. A year later realizing that the auditorium was no longer adequate to seat the people who were coming, Pastor Ledford once again challenged the congregation to give whatever God laid on their hearts to build a new auditorium. God had put him in contact with some people who had money that they wanted to use to build a church for an Independent Baptist Church. To make a long story short, God sent in the funds to build the new auditorium. When the last bill came in, Grace Baptist wrote a check for it and had two thousand dollars left in the bank. God does supply our every need. A month later our piano broke and once again God already had enough money in the general fund to purchase the new Baby Grand that we use today. In 2005, realizing that the old auditorium was no longer large enough for a fellowship hall, pastor Ledford challenged our people to give whatever God laid on their heart toward the new fellowship hall. This fellowship hall will also be a gymnasium. We have the building erected and are working on the inside to get approval from city officials to open it. There is a second story over the kitchen area that for now is storage space. It is our desire, if God permits, to use this space as a double profits chamber for visiting missionaries, evangelists and their families. On Easter of 2006 Grace Baptist Church had a high day of 236 people in attendance. This broke the previous record of 207 which had been set in 2004. People often think God cannot grow a church by standing on the fundamentals of the faith, Grace Baptist is proof that HE (God) can. The problem with God blessing us is never with God, it is usually with us. Look what God has done in the past twelve years. Let’s expect Him to do even more in the next twelve. God truly is good all the time. |
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