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TRENTON?The searing July heat and mid-afternoon sun was a harsh tandem, but Pastor Chris Cowen and his wife, Shara, were unfazed.
After all, they were looking up at the frame of an 11,500-square-foot structure that had been built from the slab up with most of the rafters already in place in the span of a day-and-a-half.
That pace is unheard of in commercial construction, but most construction sites don’t have 350-plus worker bees buzzing busily nearby.
These Southern Baptist volunteers were men like Dave Butler, a Naval Academy man who spent 20-plus years as a submarine officer, Keegan Thomas, a 17-year-old high school student from Merkle, and women such as Wilma Barbian of Abilene.
Some were in perpetual motion, some high atop 40-foot-high rafters, others firming up stud walls.
Most, if not retired or self-employed, paid their own way and took vacation time to build a church at no charge. To boot, the Texas Baptist Builders lavished the church, Cornerstone Baptist in Trenton, where Chris Cowen serves as pastor, with an offering of more than $44,000. It’s an annual rite the night before construction begins, and this year the gift was especially appreciated by the three-year-old church plant.
“And they don’t let us give them anything, sorry dogs,” Cowen quipped.
Annually in the third week of July, the Texas Baptist Builders?a loosely knit volunteer group that includes only a few construction tradesmen among men, women and children?build a church facility somewhere for a congregation that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford one, explained Tillman Boyd, the SBTC’s consultant for Texas Baptist Builders. The ministry began in 1978 with 47 people.
Boyd said the builders saved Cornerstone $250,000 in labor costs alone.
Cornerstone averages 125 people in attendance each Sunday for services at the Trenton Elementary School gym, Cowen said.
“If we had been too much larger of a church, we would not have met the criteria for Texas Baptist Builders,” Cowen said. ‘We’re building debt free. That’s our commitment.”
Clifton Griffith, pastor at Union Baptist Church in Snyder, is a carpenter by day who serves his church bivocationally after answering a call to preach eight years ago. He is the leader on the ground of the operation, spending hours before the work begins assessing the church’s needs, its financial stability, and planning for the construction process.
“We don’t want to get them in a building that they cannot continue in,” Griffith explained.
Jay Barbian, a retired Abilene police officer, was on his sixth consecutive church building trip with the Texas Baptist Builders. He said he learned of the ministry through a Sunday School class member who had gone. This year, 60 people from his church, Pioneer Drive Baptist Church in Abilene, including three of Barbian’s grandchildren who range in age from 7 to 17, traveled to Trenton to work.
“My 17-year-old grandson, Keegan, this is his fifth year,” Barbian boasted like a proud grandparent, noting that he was working high up on the rafters.
The younger kids helped in the kitchen where meals were prepared, putting ice in drinking cups and placing wrappers around paper napkins and plastic eating utensils.
“I have always done roofing work on the side,” Barbian said. “I like to go and help churches do what God is leading them to do. And building a church is near and dear to my heart.”
In taking his grandchildren on the trip, “we get the fellowship with them. Teaching them to serve God and serve people, that’s invaluable. You can learn to have a missionary heart at a young age.”
For more information on Texas Baptist Builders, visit sbtexas.com/missions or e-mail Tillman Boyd at tboyd@fanninelectric.com.
