ELMORE CITY, Okla. (BP)–A box big enough to hold a large television sat in the middle of the town’s four-way stop. Someone had written on it in giant letters with a magic marker: “FREE Thanksgiving Dinner, 4-7 p.m., First Baptist Church.”
A block west and around the corner, the 300 members of First Baptist Church, Elmore City, Okla., were serving generous portions of turkey, ham and all the trimmings to 750 people, including hundreds who dined in the church’s fellowship hall and to dozens of shut-ins around town.
Oct. 21 marked the second year the church hosted a community Thanksgiving dinner. Last year’s feast drew more than 500 people — a success for a town with a population of 500, plus 1,000 living in outlying areas, said Bobby Allison, the church’s associate pastor.
More telling, however, is that the church has baptized 30 people who started attending church services because of last year’s Thanksgiving outreach, pastor Bruce McCray said.
“Events like this, it breaks down all the stereotypes of what people think about the church,” he said.
Children made placemats colored with Thanksgiving pictures, church service times and a brief gospel explanation. The church’s youth made banners and placed them around town.
“It’s amazing for a town this size,” Allison said. “You can see God’s handiwork in it. This is a God thing, for lack of a better word. We were obedient and God used it.”
When McCray came to Elmore City seven years ago, the church averaged about 150 in Sunday school; today it draws about 300.
In 1999, McCray baptized 89 people, and the church has led its association in baptisms seven years straight.
Longtime church member June Wiley, who organized both Thanksgiving events, said before McCray came, the church needed both physical and spiritual repair. Prior to McCray’s arrival, the interim pastor, Clyde Cain, helped the church through a difficult transition, Wiley said.
“He did a lot to heal the church, because there was friction,” she said of Cain, leadership development specialist of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, who was then BGCO director of ministerial services.
Wiley said McCray’s strong biblical teaching has helped energize the church body.
“Our motto is love the Lord, love the lost, love one another,” McCray said. “We tell our people, whether you are in the oil patch, at school, at the factory, wherever you are, be a witness.”
Wiley said McCray’s verse-by-verse teaching is always practical and compassionate.
“He preaches it to the hurting people,” Wiley said.
Everyone hurts — in health, finances, relationships or circumstances of life, McCray said. For a church to be “cutting edge,” he said it must be able to relate with the people in its community.
The church has also demonstrated change through its financial giving; a remodeled former auditorium is now a paid-for fellowship hall. When the congregation needed a van, they took a special offering hoping to pay cash. With $40,000 in the offering plates that Sunday, they were able to purchase two vans, McCray said.
The other half-dozen or so churches in the area are “not geared” for evangelistic outreach, McCray noted. “If we don’t do it, it just won’t get done.”
Of the dozens of new converts in the church, included are those who moved from the city to escape “the rat race,” as one woman said, and those who are just passing through, such as the young Australian man who will soon leave the horse ranch he’s been working on near Elmore City to return down under.
“We’ve also reached a large percentage of senior adults in the last few years,” McCray said, though noting that the congregation has a good mix of age groups.
“Some of them do well, some of them struggle,” McCray said of the new converts. “But we continue to work with them.”
To give new believers a firm doctrinal foundation, the church started a new Christians Sunday school class.
Wiley described the congregation as a “grace church. We accept everyone.”
McCray agreed, adding, “We preach the Bible. We don’t compromise the Word. But there are people out there with huge problems, and they have found that there are people here who will love and accept them.”
Lola Beavers is one of those people.
“I never was in a church until I came to this church last Thanksgiving,” Beavers said.
She had just moved to town from Oklahoma City a month before with her husband and 12-year-old grandson.
“It was awkward,” she said of attending the dinner a year ago. “At that time I thought everyone here was members and Christians. You think everybody’s looking at you wondering, ‘What’s she doing here?'”
At the insistence of her grandson, she and her husband started attending church. Several months later, after sitting through the new Christians class, she realized her spiritual need and accepted Christ, as did her grandson and husband, and all three were baptized.
David Ables, a homebuilder who commutes from Elmore City to Oklahoma City, and his wife, Brandy, found temporal and eternal friendship.
His first night in town after moving from Oklahoma City, Ables bought the last piece of lemon pie at The Ritz, a cafe owned by Wiley’s son and daughter-in-law. Ables wound up sharing his dessert with an envious young granddaughter of Wiley.
Before long, Wiley’s husband, Don, and McCray had convinced the Ableses to attend church — something David Ables hadn’t done since childhood.
The couple had struggled to conceive a child, so one day last June, “I just felt like we needed to go to church to pray. Everything we had tried in our life hadn’t worked.”
After a few Sunday sermons David Ables said were tailored just for him, he and Brandy accepted Jesus as Savior and were baptized.
“It just pretty much filled the empty hole I felt in my soul,” Brandy Ables said.
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(BP) photo posted in the BP photo library at www.bpnews.net. Photo title: THANKSGIVING DINNER AT FIRST BAPTIST.
