Pastor Davis Hooper was clearly happy the evening of July 12
as several hundred Baptists from churches around Macon County gathered at his
Coweeta Baptist Church for Macon Baptist Association’s summer meeting.
The visitors nodded in approval at the just-completed,
sparkling new fellowship hall/sanctuary which cost nearly $1.5 million, a huge
project by any definition in Otto, a community laid across the rolling hills
south of Franklin.
It was also a big project for Coweeta, a lively congregation
of just under 400 members.
But here’s the good news about that building: Coweeta
members managed to pay down $500,000 in cash and finance the rest of the
construction cost in a six-year project —
all without reducing their missions giving through the Cooperative Program.
“We actually have increased our Cooperative Program giving,”
said Hooper. Coweeta
contributed 10.7 percent of its undesignated receipts through the Cooperative
Program in 2010.
BSC photo by Mike Creswell Davis Hooper, pastor of Coweeta Baptist Church in Otto, with the new $1.5-million sanctuary/fellowship hall complex behind him. Even while building, Coweeta members continued to give strongly to the Cooperative Program. |
“Our church believes in being cooperative with the
Cooperative Program because we have a mind for missions and evangelism,” said
Hooper.
“We love to go on mission trips. We love to do evangelism,”
he said. In 2008 Hooper led a Coweeta team to Scranton, Pa., to renovate a
building for a new Baptist church plant, for example, and they plan to work on
tornado damage in Georgia this year.
“But we realize that since we’re a small church, we have our
limitations. We cannot go and help a child in Thomasville who is without a
sufficient home life. We cannot help with so many of the inner-city churches
that need to be started,” he said.
“However, we can give of our means through the Cooperative
Program and in doing that, not only can we help hurting children and families
through the Baptist Children’s Homes, we can also help start churches across
our state. We can help start churches all across North America through the
North American Mission Board, and through partnerships with different conventions,”
he explained.
“We’re helping start churches in North Africa and in Muslim
countries where we would never have an opportunity to go. We feel it’s
important to go when we can; it’s also important to give of our financial
resources to help send people to those places we cannot go ourselves.
“We can pool our resources with people from all over our
state and all over the Southern Baptist Convention to do these things through
the Cooperative Program.
“It’s one of the greatest tools we have to fulfill the Great
Commission in taking the gospel both at home and to the ends of the world,”
Hooper said.