According to Pastor Donald Harris, Friendship Baptist Church, Lawley, has always lived up to its name, but in recent months, it’s been especially focused on sharing God’s love. Inspired by the statewide evangelism emphasis God’s Plan for Sharing (GPS): Across Alabama, the Cahaba Baptist Association church has made its community its missions field.
Last fall, members of the small church began going door to door, inviting neighbors to either start attending church or return to church.
“Our prayers have been for God to use the church, and everyone’s been excited because we’ve been able to do more than we ever have before,” Harris said. “The church has truly banded together because we saw such a need to get into the community.”
Since October, he has baptized nine new members — a huge feat for a church with 40 to 50 in worship each week.
And three of those new members have an especially unique story. They were homeless and struggling just to survive when Friendship Baptist members changed their world.
Longtime church member Cecil Cash noticed smoke coming from under a bridge on a few occasions and finally decided to investigate. After calling the police, he learned that a family of six — three adults and three small children — were living in two vehicles under the bridge. The family had come from near Mobile and run out of money and food.
“The next morning, after finding out about the family under the bridge, when I got up to eat breakfast, I could hardly eat thinking there was someone under there who didn’t have enough,” Cash said. “I brought them some food, and when one of the children realized I was bringing breakfast, she reached up and clapped her hands. Such a little thing meant so much to them; it just broke my heart.”
Since discovering the family, the church has worked to get it into a mobile home and get it necessities like food and clothing. The church might even have a job lined up for the young father of the family.
“That smoke coming from the bridge — it was like a smoke signal from God,” church member Dewey Green said.
“We don’t know what God’s plans are, and some people at our church feel like God put these people in our path to see how we’d handle it.”
According to Green’s wife, Gwen, the church has handled the situation well and it continues to see positive results from its GPS focus.
“This program brought our church closer together,” she said. “Usually ministries and programs will go for a while and then come to an end, but this doesn’t seem to have ended. It continues to progress just the way we hoped it would.”
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