Sandy Creek Baptist Church, a tributary of Baptist life, marks 250 years

When the bells chimed at 10 a.m. Nov. 6, Sandy Creek Baptist Church, near Liberty, N.C, inaugurated its 250th year in ministry.
   
Inside the white country church, Pastor Travis Brock and guests from as far away as Georgia, Texas and Illinois exchanged greetings and waited in anticipation of the event, a full year in the making. The congregation and choir sang old standards such as “Amazing Grace” and “I Love to Tell the Story” with both smiles and tears.
   
“It is humbling to think what God has done in this place,” Brock said before the celebration. “One pastor I spoke with said that God had done more through this church than through any other since Pentecost.”
   
When the Sandy Creek church was founded, the United States did not exist. The year was 1755 and two recent converts to the Baptist faith, both products of the revival preaching of the First Great Awakening, made their way into very rural Randolph County and there, with 16 others, founded the first Separate Baptist Church in the South.
   
Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall both believed that they would be well received among the settlers in North Carolina who favored emotional, expositional preaching to the High Church style displayed in churches in the North and Charleston, S.C. Within a few years, the church had drawn more than 600 members and within 17 years, had planted 42 other churches.
   
Just outside the church today stands an obelisk, erected during the church’s bicentennial year as a memorial to Stearns, the church’s first pastor. The monument sheds light on the importance and expansive ministry of the church.
   
“It is a mother church, nay a grandmother, and great-grandmother,” the monument reads. “All the Separate Baptists sprang hence, not only eastward towards the sea, but westward towards the great river Mississippi, but northward to Virginia and southward to South Carolina and Georgia. The Word went forth from this sion [zion], and great was the company of them who published it, in so much that her converts were as drops of morning dew.”
   
Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, preached at the church during its anniversary celebration. He said Baptists usually describe the “Southern Baptist river as flowing from two tributaries, one having its beginning in Charleston, S.C., the more Reformed tradition of Baptist life, and the other at Sandy Creek.”
   
“I am a Sandy Creeker. If I could manage to have honorary church membership in any church in the Southern Baptist Convention, it would be Sandy Creek,” Patterson said, adding that he fully appreciated what the church has carried on throughout the years. “We Sandy Creekers still believe we are in the era of evangelism, missions and great revival.” (BP)