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Photo courtesy of Cynthia Randall
Community members work Saturday to complete an addition at New Life Baptist Church, 601 S. Westgate St., Garnett. The new addition will be used as an auditorium and fellowship area.
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Volunteers raise the roof on new Garnett church
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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GARNETT — The rain might have kept coming down but a church building kept going up Saturday.
Members from Baptist churches in Iola, Shawnee and Garnett, plus a group of itinerant church builders, put up the frame and roof trusses for the New Life Baptist Church on the west edge of Garnett.
“We had so many people and they worked in the rain,” Cynthia Randall, wife of the church’s pastor, the Rev. Rick Randall Sr., said. “But their spirits were so strong.
“It was a blessing to watch all of them raising the building.
“They didn’t pout about the rain. And we kept barbecueing for them.”
Builders from the Shawnee Mission Baptist Temple and Iola Baptist Temple, the “mother church” for the Garnett church, and The New Testament Church Planters helped the Garnett congregation build the new structure.
The New Testament Church Planters, volunteers from Texas, Oklahoma and Illinois, travel across much of the country to help build new churches for new congregations. A small group will live in RVs at the church for the next three months helping to finish the building, she said.
The congregation has outgrown the old building, Rick Randall said.
He said he hopes to have the first services in the new building by October.
The new building includes a new sanctuary double the size of the present sanctuary, baptistery and a fellowship hall. It was built attached to the existing building, which will be converted to be the entrance and into an education area for Sunday school and other classes, he said.
The expansion will allow for additional bathrooms, he said.
The Shawnee group came bearing gifts: a trailer-load of construction materials left over from their own new church, she said.
“It was such a blessing when they came in with that big trailer,” she said.
The trailer had enough tile and other materials to help the Garnett congregation finish much of the new building, she said.
Another volunteer also offered $5,000 worth of new wooden doors, she said.
Before he started the new church in Garnett nearly three years ago, Randall was a pastor at Centropolis for eight years.
The new church bought a small metal building that had been used to manufacture horse trailers but had been sold because of a foreclosure, she said.
The church is grateful for the help, Randall said.
“We’ve really been blessed by the Lord,” he said. “I’m amazed. Whenever there’s been a need, people show up.”
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