Church Plant - One Month In 6-7-2016

September 2015, I took my wife for a quick birthday trip to the Bluefield, WV/VA area to view the area that I thought God was calling us to.

She choose the initial place to stay.  An old church located right by the police station was renting rooms.

We loved the old church.  It seemed to  welcome us.  We sang in the huge sanctuary and talked to the pastor about his ministry.

Then we rented a different house in Bluefield and waited through the winter.

In the late winter the pastor of the old church called.  God was leading him away and he wondered if I would be willing to step into the ministry as Chairman.  I agreed and, because I was not Pentecostal, I changed the name with the State of West Virginia to Bluefield Baptist Ministries.

One of the first questions that we had to answer upon re-opening the church was, "why is the kitchen sink disconnected?"

Donnie and Ervine and I went under the church to examine the plumbing. Much to our surprise we found that most of the plumbing in the front of the church seemed to be running from three inch steel pipe through boots to a 1.5 inch PVC pipe and then after a u-bend, through the brick wall.

If you know anything about plumbing, you know that you can't run sewer through a 1.5 inch pipe.  You can't run it through a u-bend either.

Thinking that we had found the source of the back-up in the sewer that was causing the kitchen sink to over pressurize, we disconnected the entire 1.5 inch pipe system, chiseled out the concrete to a 4 inch diameter pipe and ran that pipe system through the wall into a 6-foot-deep trench that we dug in the front yard of the church.

Wanting to make sure that the new line was clear, we replaced the hundred year-old terra cotta pipe in the bottom of our trench and prepared to hook up a boot to connect it to the PVC from inside the church.

We rented a 50 foot snake from United Rentals in Princeton and spent three days and several different bits confirming that under the street was a blockage in the sewer system.

Working with the Bluefield City Government wasn't an issue!  They were GREAT!  After trying to blow out the line and confirming a blockage, they brought out a back hoe and dug up the street.

Bluefield is an old city.  Incorporated in 1889, its history springs out of the large local deposits of coal.  In 1896, a group of Christians bought a parcel of land downtown and began to build a church.  These members, according to historic documents,made up,in 1896, the Bluefield Baptist Church.  In 1907, they finished the block, brick and slate building and changed the name to the First Baptist Church of Bluefield.  Because it is very old, no records exist in the Bluefield City Government of the historic utility construction in the streets surrounding the church.

The city, after the backhoe work,confirmed that our sewer line for the church was a line to nowhere.  It had been hooked up twenty years ago from the kitchen sink the bathroom faucet and the shower into  a line that had been operational 100 years ago before the storm water system went in.  Now, the church sewer line, that we had been working and re-routing everything into for the past fourteen days, ran directly into the side of the 95 year old storm water system.