Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit exactly two years ago, the leadership at First Baptist Church in Indianola was already looking for ways to better connect with its community.
Most foreign missions were put on hold in the spring of 2020, but that ended up playing right into that need.
Rev. Guy Burke, who has spent the better part of the last decade as FBC’s leader, said the church had been going through some books and other resources at the time.
“A big question blossomed out of that time with our leadership, and the question is this, ‘If our church was removed from our community, would anybody notice?’ We wanted to answer that, ‘Yes, they would notice,’” he said.
The goal then became to narrow the focus of the church’s outreach and mission efforts, and they did this by utilizing the connections they had within the church, and thanks to that outreach, FBC has purchased and plans to install special needs playground equipment at Lockard Elementary School this spring.
“We had a connection with Principal (Dafne) Heflin at Lockard, and we had a connection with the baseball coach at MDCC,” Burke said. “We started a ministry with the baseball team there. Then we also started an adoptive ministry with Lockard as well.”
Heflin, Burke said, had a list of four big projects that needed to be done, and the church went to work.
“One was cleaning up the big playground that is right across the street,” Burke said. “We were able to accomplish that first.”
The next project at the school was in the teacher’s parking lot.
Heflin told the church the concrete bumpers in the lot needed to be painted.
“35 people showed up and painted all those bumpers in about 45 minutes,” Burke said.
Then there were the dumpsters outside the school.
Burke said the school did not want to put a fence around them or do anything that would disrupt trash pickup, so Burke contacted a Greenville artist he knew from a prior ministry, Melanie Word.
Thanks to Word, there are now kid-friendly murals on those dumpsters.
The biggest need for the school’s exterior was special needs playground equipment. The school serves around a dozen special needs children, Burke said.
“Basically, there was some pea gravel and one swing, and that’s the special needs playground,” Burke said. “We started praying, and we started brainstorming.”
After trying one avenue for obtaining new equipment, which fell through, Burke said that one of the church’s deacons was looking at an online auction one day and noticed that a shuttered school in Oxford was auctioning of the exact equipment that was needed at Lockard.
Burke said the church’s leadership team approved the bidding process, up to $5,000.
“It was supposed to cut off at noon, but it kept being pushed back 15 minutes, because people kept bidding on it, but we finally won the auction,” he said.
Now, approaching a year after FBC got started on those four projects, they are almost complete, and Burke said he hopes these will be impactful for years to come.
“I think with the special needs playground, it’s going to give the kids a space for a long time,” he said. “For years, kids will be able to use this equipment.”
Burke said that throughout the past year, the entire church, including the leadership team, has been 100% supportive of these projects at Lockard.
“I didn’t have anyone say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I didn’t have anyone say, ‘Why are we spending money on this?’ It’s been a unified front, fully generous and fully aligned with reaching out and making our community better in this capacity,” he said.
Burke said that speaks to being Christ-like in the community.
“We want to get outside the walls,” he said. “We want to be visible. We want to have those times where we’re engaging in the rhythm of service, the spiritual rhythm of service, because we see Christ, he came to serve and not to be served. He set the template for us, so we want to be Christ-like in that we consistently, redundantly have that rhythm of service to others in our DNA.”
