Horse Creek Road Baptist Church - Thanks for the difference!

Now that you have visited with family and friends, and no doubt had a plate if not two plates full of food, have you turned the page to Christmas yet? As you know, I am in doing my own tradition that I began several years ago. Forget the fluff and pomp of most holiday traditions. Mine is very simple. I just spend the time leading up to Christmas being thankful for the blessings I have experienced, the friends that have made a difference in my life and the situations that have changed me because I was there. Over the years I have personally been amazed at the responses to my thanksgiving tradition. Let me say thanks now for your emails and phone calls. Appreciation is something that I would say one must work at. Learning how to say thanks is easy. Most folks allow thanks to fall from their lips with total ease, the only problem I hear most of the time is the lack of genuine heartfelt thanks when they say such. It is like when you hear the expression, “I will be praying for you”. Now if this is a challenge to you, then so be it, but you want to believe folks will do what they say especially when it involves prayer, but for some reason I think many people use those words because they make us feel good. Many times folks don’t know what to say, so we say spiritual and religious sounding phrases that make us feel good and hopefully will present us in a respectable and positive view by others.
Having the privilege of serving a congregation and a community as pastor is a most humbling opportunity and gratifying position. Horse Creek Road Baptist Church in Corbin, Ky., was the first church I had the privilege of serving as pastor. I could write that I am not sure what they were thinking when they did such, but looking back to 1992 it wasn’t so much what they were thinking or what I was thinking. It was really all about what God was doing! My spirit of thanksgiving continues remember what God did at Horse Creek Road and three special deacons that God used in my life. C.C. Pope was the first voice of association with HCRBC. C.C. was calling me to see if I would be willing to help fill the churches pulpit on Sunday’s while they were looking for a pastor. A very small congregation, Horse Creek is located in the Sweet Hollow Area of Laurel and Knox County as the church was founded in September 1884. Just 20 years ago it was very easy to imagine the Sunday scene. Folks riding to church on horses and mules, using the trees that filled the church property to tie their livestock to I can see clearly still. I can imagine the foot paths used by those early settlers as the church bell rings down the valley signifying it was church time.
Deacon Bill Blankenship, Phillip Howard and C.C. Pope were the forces of faith, hope and change. I had just returned to Kentucky from Fort Worth, Texas and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary when I accepted the call to be pastor of Horse Creek Road. These three deacons had been faithful to Horse Creek. Serving in the role they too had accepted and with a deep love for the community they each filled various leadership positions. Through the years they had seen lives be changed by the love and grace Jesus Christ gives to all who ask, and they had also witnessed change. Some of the change was just reality of a small church. The Bible says that His ways are higher than ours and that He does exceedingly above and beyond what we ask or think. HCRBC was an example of just that and served as a changing force in the lives of so many. Galatians 6:9 says that if we don’t grow weary, in due season we will reap if we faint not. C.C., Bill, and Phillip witnessed that truth from God’s word as did all of us who came, attended, participated and even watched from a distance.
A young man called to serve as Minister of Youth was Mike Wilson. He later served the largest SBC church in Tennessee, Two Rivers in Nashville and now he leads MYlifeSpeaks and directs an orphanage in Haiti. The blessings of a committed time continue as the current pastor, Scott Williams was also a product of that specific time and faith of three deacons who believed Horse Creek Road Baptist Church was a special place. And it is indeed. My thanks is overflowing for His work.

Until then