Wednesdays are delightful at New Prospect Baptist Church. I haven’t attended a Sunday service yet, but I plan to, because of a Wednesday’s.
DRY PRONG – Wednesdays are delightful at New Prospect Baptist Church. I haven’t attended a Sunday service yet, but I plan to, because of a Wednesday’s.
“Dry Prong” is just the church’s mailing address. Actually, they’re way out in the country, or it seems like it – 15 miles sort-of-north of the Baptist Building in Alexandria, a fact I apparently was not the first one to discover, judging from the slew of newer – nice! – homes in the area near the church.
Drive north on U.S. Highway 167 about 10 miles past Tioga, and there on your left is a big huge uptown-style, red-brick church sign.
You’re not there yet.
Turn left at the sign; that’s Taylor Road. Wind around a ways down that road, and just about the time you think you’ve done something wrong, there’s the church on the left, surrounded by enough lawn to make a riding lawnmower tired.
Inside you can tell New Prospect has added on here and there as they’ve grown from that original rectangular worship center the old Home Mission Board used to refer to as a “first unit building.”
In other words, humble roots. Roots the members obviously haven’t forgotten, even though they seem to a guest to be walking in high cotton by comparison.
The older parts of the building have been carefullymaintained, with a thoughtful eye given to the best use of the space.
Even so, the new worship center, completed in 2000, looks like a church. Pews. Reverence. It’s a place you can feel God’s presence.
I was just reading in 2 Chronicles that Samuel built a temple as a place where God would feel comfortable.
That’s the feeling I had at New Prospect, that God would sit back in His Throne of Grace right there in that worship center, and bask in the love of the people.
But about Wednesday:
New Prospect has a noon prayer meeting for those who prefer it. It starts with a potluck meal – best Southern cooking I’ve have for a good long while! Plates are made up from the potluck extras and taken after prayer meeting to the homes of shut-ins.Members bring friends because they know there’s always plenty to eat.
Pastor J.R. Lee’s succinct pre-meal devotion was a power-filled reminder that with God and by helping others, we all can make it through to Sunday.
Among the members’ many outreaches are a clothes closet; delivery of Food Bank boxes to seniors (and payment of an annual $100 fee for each senior who gets a box); Christmas store, with youth buying gifts for people who’d rather give money than choose a gift that might not be ‘right;’ deaf ministry, plus a full slate of children’s programming: RAs, GAs, Mission Friends, Centrifuge, RA and GA camps in the summer, plus VBS, plus more.
Pastor Lee is home-grown from Big Creek Baptist Association and was a youth minister at New Prospect when an LC student. He went to SWBTS and was surprised when God called him “home,” he says.
His vision for the church includes a complete wellness center on the back side of the property – out the doors to the right side of the worship center and on the other side of a mighty convenient drive-through rain shelter.
The suburbanized people in the community need a place where they can rally, to build a sense of community, the pastor said. If God lets him build it, Lee added, they will come.