Jefferson Baptist Church started on October 7th, 1973, 50 years ago. Patty and I were at that first service with about a dozen people. We met in the Conser house on Main St in Jefferson. We met there for a couple of months and then we moved to the grade school gym. Actually we met on the stage in the grade school gym, and in 1977 we had enough people and moved down to the gym floor. We continued to meet in the gym until 1979 when we moved into our very own facility that we built with all donated labor. All of our buildings were built with cash from special offerings that we took once each year the first Sunday in June, and all of them have also been built with donated labor from people in our church, so all of our buildings have taken ten years to build. As soon as we moved into our first chapel we started building on our multipurpose building with a gymnasium. We moved into it in 1989 and held our worship services in the gym using stacking chairs. We then started building on our present sanctuary and moved into it in 1999. In 2009 we poured our present concrete parking lot for 150 cars, and in 2015 we finished our two story Discipleship Center. Now we are in the process of pouring concrete for parking for another 100 cars.

It has been an enjoyable 50 years watching God work in and through so many different people in JBC over the years. We are going to have a big anniversary party during all three of the services October 7th and 8th. We will see slides and videos of the old days and have testimonies by the old people who haven’t yet died who were around back then. Back when we met in the gym Patty and I led worship for our services. Our singing wasn’t very good but that was all we had. Patty played the guitar and I held big pieces of poster paper with the words written on it. So we are going to lead singing for a couple of songs with the words written on big poster paper and Patty playing the guitar. I have been thinking about getting recorded music of the songs and lip synching, maybe use some songs by Johnny Cash!

You all are invited to our 50th anniversary party.