Mission home opens in Braymer
BRAYMER – Braymer Baptist Church held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house April 30 for the recently completed Braymer Baptist Church Mission Home.
The idea for the Braymer Baptist Church to provide housing for international missionaries began over lunch at the local steakhouse. Don and Diane Combs, international missionaries to Belarus and a former pastor and pastor’s wife of First Baptist Church of Braymer, shared a prayer request that would initiate a year-long project to transform an old parsonage into what is now a beautiful home for international missionaries.
A team, which included Danny and Danielle Pennington, Ray and Roxanne McBee, John and Tommie Sue Feil, Tom Jamison and Pastor Eric Turner, was set up to ensure completion of the house for missionaries to use.
For Southern Baptist missionaries a stateside assignment is required for a period of rest and further training before returning to the mission field. One thing that the team discovered was that they would have to provide everything the missionaries needed, from plates to bedding and every piece of furniture a normal house would contain. Most missionaries come back to the states with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes.
Another obstacle would be the home itself. The home that was chosen was in need of serious repair. One of the upstairs rooms had a hole in the wall you could fit a small couch into. Most of the kitchen was in desperate need of renovation and did not even have a refrigerator or a stove. The wallpaper in most of the home was peeling if not torn off. On top of all this, the home needed a new roof.
To help with these needs, the church decided to register the home with the International Mission Board (IMB) and to partner with the Heartland Baptist Association (HBA). Out of this partnership the HBA provided a mission team led by Director of Missions Jerry Palmer to put a new roof on the mission home. Other churches in the association began to designate specific funds from their budgets to go toward completion of the project.
Braymer Baptist Church is looking forward to providing a comfortable and restful place for missionaries to stay and prepare to go out again in fulfillment of Matthew 28:18-20.
