Church celebrates 130 years of service this month

A local church will celebrate more than 100 years of service at the end of this month.

New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, 1531 Shady Grove Road, which was founded in 1887, will celebrate its 130th birthday on Oct. 29 with a homecoming ceremony.

New Hope Pastor Tom Brown said no one knows the exact anniversary of the church because the records with that information were lost after a fire in a record clerk’s house in the mid 1980s. He said the church was originally planted in the community that surrounded Shady Grove School in an outreach effort by Oaklawn Missionary Baptist Church.

“There was Shady Grove School, like Red Oak School and Sulphur Springs School,” Brown said. “In all of those locations, there were also churches.”

Brown said the church’s first structure was a single building comprised of wood panels and a wood-burning stove. He said the church began meeting once a month and would open its doors to visitors once a year.

“That was a very popular practice among Baptists,” Brown said.

The church’s structure grew with its congregation, eventually adding on Sunday school classrooms to the original building. Brown said he recently viewed records of meetings that held votes to add things like electricity, lights, fixtures and propane to the facility.

“Most of the construction in the present day was done by men of the church,” he said. “It was around the ’40s or so that they ever had a church bus, and part of it was made out of wood.”

Brown said New Hope’s congregation peaked in the 1930s and 1940s with “a couple hundred” members.

New Hope is now fully open to the public on Sundays and has a consistent congregation of about 45 members. Brown said family members of the original New Hope congregation attend the church every Sunday.

Brown said other than meeting every Sunday, his congregation has focused on making its facilities open to the public in times of tragedy and supports missionaries in Mongolia and Tanzania.

Though New Hope has changed over the years, Brown said the congregation is still about the same things it was founded on.

“The basic existence of this church has just been the preaching and the practicing and the teaching of the truth,” he said.

Going forward, Brown is happy for his congregation’s history.

“I’m thankful for that heritage — the fact that we can come in and turn the lights on and walk over to the thermostat and turn on the heat and the air and have indoor plumbing. Basic things, things that we take for granted,” Brown said. “Those that made that sacrifice to get us to where we are, I’m very much indebted to them.”