The Good Side of Baptists…

March 22, 2007 | 9:35 PM

Here’s a story I’ve heard twice this week from the building coordinator at Edgewater Baptist Church in New Orleans. (That’s my church.)

We had a team of Baptists from Georgia scheduled to work on our sanctuary for last week. Two weeks ago, we found out that the sanctuary had suffered extreme termite damage over the years. One contractor suggested we tear the building down. (We just put a brand new roof on both of our buildings, so that would have been pretty crappy.) Another contractor said it would cost about $200,000 to fix the damage. That’s about what we have in our building fund, and the goal since the beginning of our rebuilding has been to stay as much out of debt as we can. Basically option two was to spend all of our money to bring it back to the point it’s at now- gutted and empty. Well here’s the neat thing. That team of Baptists scheduled to work last week came down, and four of them were all very knowledgeable in construction. In particular, they knew exactly what to do and how to fix our termite damage. So we told them to go at it, and forget cleaning up after themselves. Spend all their time fixing it and forget the rest. And they did. And our sanctuary is good to go. Termite damage fixed.

We were all very excited about that news. This week our building coordinator said he had all this work to clean up but no workers. Then he ran into someone who said there was a MissionLab group on campus whose week-long plans had been sidelined. There was a mission group staying on campus at NOBTS with nothing to do… until now.

Cool, huh?