New Caney pastor, 38 who died giving aid honored by thousands

Two years ago, Phillip Bethancourt received a morbid text and directions from his longtime friend.

“I just shared a computer file with you,” his friend John Powell wrote in September 2018. “Don’t read it until after I’m dead. I’m making contingency plans for my family and church, and you’re a part of that so you have your own instop structions sheet. … I’m just trying to make sure my plans are solid.”

Powell, the pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in New Caney, died July 19.

Police said he and a friend were driving on a stretch of highway in Sherman when they saw a car that’d been in a small wreck and caught fire.

Powell pulled over and was helping the other motorists when a truck approached. Seeing that it would not be able to in time, Powell pushed at least one person out the truck’s path, likely saving their life.

He was a 38-year-old husband and father of four.

He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and later received a degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He’d wanted to be a pastor since he was 14, and the talented young preacher eventually moved to Hamlin in West Texas to lead a small church

there.

In 2017, he moved to New Caney with his family to establish a church on behalf of Northeast Houston Baptist Church.

Though there are only about 140 members of Emmanuel Baptist Church, Powell’s death sent shock waves across the Southern Baptist Convention.

That much was clear as thousands of people celebrated Powell’s

life this weekend. A memorial service, recorded from Houston Northeast Baptist Church because of COVID-19, has been watched more than 14,600 times.

Many said they were friends of Powell, though some watched simply to honor the young pastor’s life. One person said they were viewing from South Korea.

“Why did God let this happen to John Powell?” Nathan Lino, pastor of Northeast Baptist, asked during the two-hour service. “Do you know of a more righteous man than John Powell? The scriptures

tell us that there is a reward of God for the righteous, that he gives to some righteous people at his discretion. We don’t understand to whom he gives it or why, but he does.”

“And this reward of the righteous is that he lets you come home early,” Lino continued.

For Bethancourt, it was an opportunity to fulfill the now-seemingly prescient directions his friend gave him two years ago.

“Today’s service is a reflection of what he desired us to do, which is to focus our attention on

Christ,” Bethancourt said before announcing a missions drive in honor of Powell. “John had a heart for helping others and a heart for seeing the Gospel reach the nations, whether that was serving widows in Hamlin (in West Texas), going door to door in evangelism in New Caney or going to unreached people and groups in Kazakhstan.”

“John has never been more alive than he is right now,” he said.