With much hard work and dedication, Cornerstone Baptist Church in Sedalia has renovated and reopened a Hughesville church that had been closed for years.
“The church dates back to 1897,” Cornerstone Pastor/Elder Roger Austin said, “so it's got a long history in that community with the railroad town. It's been there over 100 years but got shut down finally during COVID. They had a water break during that time, so there had been some flooding.”
Cornerstone Baptist was approached by the Harmony Baptist Association last spring to see if it wanted to move into that location, 206 Moore St. in Hughesville.
“Our elder group went out to Hughesville, looked through the facility and then we started having meetings with various folks about what the cost to rehabilitate the building would be,” Austin said. “Just in general costs of running of that ministry up there, and then frankly, started reaching out to folks within the community and people that have been involved in that church in the past to see if there were still a desire to have a facility in that area.”
It turns out there were many looking for a local church, with some faithful making the long trip into town to worship.
“Part of the reason we ultimately decided God was moving in that direction was that if you kind of look around Hughesville and draw a radius out around Hughesville, there's only one other active church in that area,” Austin said. “We felt like this was a great opportunity to move into that area and provide a Bible-believing church so folks that needed and wanted to attend can have that ability.”
Austin is from the Hughesville area and he and his wife, Sheri, have roots in the area, having both graduated from Northwest.
“We were familiar with that facility," Austin said, "but honestly because we've been actively involved at Cornerstone, we hadn't been up there to see that particular facility.”
After taking over, the rehabilitation of the church went quickly as many hands made light work.
“The Lord really blessed us during that period,” Austin said. “We've had over 100 volunteers, from not only our church and the Hughesville community but other places as well that had gone out and helped to kind of strip things down and then slowly start to rebuild.”
Catherine Sanchez works as the city clerk in Hughesville and moved there after the church was already closed. She lives near the church and noticed the flurry of activity one day.
“I live a block over, like the church is right in front of my house,” Sanchez said. “We saw everybody over there working on it and everything, so I went over, offered to help, you know, and they told us when they'd be open.”
Sanchez has a friend who made the commute to Cornerstone Sedalia for church before the restoration.
“She got a message from them saying that they would be here because it's closer for her,” Sanchez said. “She's been waiting for them to open over here, but she let me know and mom and I went on Christmas Day, they had a candlelight service. There was lots of people there for the Christmas candlelight vigil.”
“We had our first service on Christmas Eve and our first Sunday morning service,” Austin said. “We will now be open every Sunday. We opened this past Sunday (Jan. 21) at 10:30 with our first Sunday. We have three active pastor elders at Cornerstone today: Pastor Tim, Pastor Troy, and myself. I will be the lead pastor in Hughesville. They'll be up there on occasion filling in, but with my ties to Hughesville, it just felt like a nice opportunity to minister to people I've known pretty much my whole life.”
Cornerstone’s new ministry is a calling they are ready to answer, even if they aren’t certain of every detail.
“It's both exhilarating and exciting, but also, there’s some trepidation with that,” Austin said. “We've never had a second campus. We really believed as an elder body that this was the right approach in a smaller community. You've got financial support if you run this as a second campus of Cornerstone Baptist Church, Cornerstone Ministries, but also we get to share our most valuable asset, which is our people – people that can come in, support, and reach out to that community, provide them a great place.”
Chris Howell can be reached at 660-530-0146.
