The first time Kady Cooley visited Temple Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, she met with the church’s 4Friends ministry for children and adults with disabilities because doctors suspected her two-year-old son had autism. At first she was hesitant to become involved. However, sometime later a friend invited Cooley and her husband to an event at Temple Baptist. By this time, doctors had diagnosed both her children with autism.
“We put them in the 4Friends special needs ministry, and we’ve been [at Temple] ever since,” she says.
The 4Friends ministry is just one outreach the church offers to its community, and people in the area are paying attention. Senior Pastor David Whitten, who took the helm at Temple Baptist in 2019, says the church is enjoying explosive growth. “Numerically, we’ve doubled in worship attendance in the time that I’ve been here. And then our Sunday school has grown by 75%.”
According to Whitten, the 4Friends ministry is a nod to the incident in the New Testament (Luke 5:17–39) when some friends lowered a paralytic man down through the roof of a home for Jesus to heal him.
Participants at 4Friends enjoy worshiping together and participating in Bible Fellowship and a range of activities and games, he explains. “It gives a parent an opportunity to come to church and know that their child or the person they’re caring for is receiving care in a safe environment.”
Cooley likes that the 4Friends ministry provides sufficient volunteer staffing on a rotating schedule. The church even offers respite care so parents and other caregivers can enjoy an evening off.
“They’ve given gift cards for parents to be able to go and spend time together, which is crucial,” Cooley notes.
Besides the classes, 4Friends hosts a Night to Shine prom for teens and adults with disabilities ages 14 and older. The Tim Tebow Foundation sponsors the event.
“[At Night to Shine], we had 305 honored guests, and over 600 volunteers or buddies who helped out with that, plus an additional 100 volunteers who helped out with the logistics,” Whitten recalls.
Not only does Temple Baptist care for the disabled in “the way Christ would tell us to do, and the way he modeled for us,” says Whitten, it also is a congregation with a passion for serving the local community in many ways. Folks in the area have come to know about the church because of its yearly Love the Hub Day, during which church members go out into communities around Hattiesburg to serve people and local nonprofit organizations.
“Love the Hub was birthed during COVID-19 because we couldn’t do anything [related to] international [missions] because of the travel restrictions,” Whitten says, explaining that Hattiesburg is nicknamed “Hub City.” “We set a goal that we were going to serve 50,000 hours outside the four walls of our church over the next five years.”
During Love the Hub, volunteers lead services and sing in local nursing homes, work at food pantries, minister to international students at the University of Southern Mississippi and William Carey University, and provide lawn care services for shut-ins and widows.
“It’s like taking the church to the people instead of the people coming to the church,” Whitten says.
The church also manages an important disaster relief ministry to help their neighbors.
“We have a large group of trained individuals through Southern Baptist Disaster Relief that goes all over whenever there’s some type of natural disaster,” Whitten explains. “Being here in South Mississippi, we seem to have hurricanes more often than not, so, we have a significant amount of equipment that we have invested in so that we can go out and really make a big difference when somebody experiences some damage due to the storms.”
International missions is also a focus of the church. This year, church members traveled to Iquitos, Peru; Mulhuaca, Honduras; and Vancouver, British Columbia. This fall, members will minister in Kenya and in Rochester, New York. Whitten says the ministry is inspired by Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
“I think sometimes there is this fear that people don’t want to share their faith, or that they don’t want to go out and serve,” Whitten reflects. “What we have discovered is that if you give them the opportunity and give them the ‘why,’ our people have been 100% on board. They say, ‘All right, let’s go do it. Let’s go serve.’”
TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Pastor: David Whitten
Website: TBCLife.net
Denomination: Southern Baptist
Founded: 1907
Fastest-Growing: 85
