Pastor Seth Hood said he could hear the enemy whispering in his ear Sept. 29 after he threw out a challenge.
That day, his church — First Baptist Colbert Heights — had celebrated 12 baptisms but prepared 15 towels.
“We’ve got three dry towels up here,” he said.
He said maybe there’s no one else here who’s ready to commit their lives to Jesus and be baptized, but all he knew was that he didn’t want those three towels to stay dry.
“If you need to embrace the gospel today and you want to be baptized today … I’ll be right here, and while we’re singing, just make your way to me,” Hood said.
He prayed silently for God to bring just one more. And by the end of the service, they had baptized 26.
“It has not stopped; since that day we’ve baptized 65,” he said.
Hood shared his testimony during the first DifferenceMakers theme interpretation during the Alabama Baptist State Convention annual meeting Nov. 12 at Eastern Shore Baptist Church in Daphne.
The topic for that segment — DifferenceMakers Through Evangelism — focused on how God works through Alabama Baptists as they make the gospel known.
Hood said the growth at FBC Colbert Heights has nothing to do with him and everything to do with what God is doing in their church through prayer.
A while back, they began to measure success not by how many people were attending services but by how many people were coming just to pray.
“We launched a Sunday night service titled House of Prayer,” Hood said, noting that they took inspiration from Brooklyn Tabernacle’s Tuesday night prayer service and Charles Spurgeon’s Furnace Room.
During those services, the church prays for personal, corporate and national revival.
“We ask God to help us to love Him more deeply than we love anything else and pursue Him more passionately than we pursue anything else,” he said. “We pray for the lost. We pray for God to do incredible, epic things. We pray for God to do something so incredible that only He can get the glory for it.”
Hood told story after story of God’s work in his church, then said he could share more — but instead he said, “I’m going to leave you with this: pray. Pray urgently. … If He can do it at First Baptist Church, he can do it anywhere.”
Rob Jackson, director of evangelism and church revitalization for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said where he’s seeing God move in Alabama “are churches that are taking prayer seriously, praying for the advancement of the kingdom.”
He said he and others were praying for March 16, a day the SBOM is calling John 3:16 Sunday, followed by a Baptism Sunday on March 23.
“If you’re going to be praying for it to rain, you better carry umbrellas,” he said. “And if we are going to be praying for God to move at your church and at my church, then we need to be preparing the water for baptism.”
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