History

Grace Baptist Church was started around June 6th 1994. The church had around twenty-five charter members and Brother Jimmy Lively was the founder and pastor of our church. Early in 1995, due to the majority of the membership living in Winnsboro, many of them felt the need to start another work in that community, because the drive was becoming a challenge for some of them. This part of the membership left Grace to begin the new work in Winnsboro. This work came to be known as Bible Baptist Church. In the middle of 1995 Brother Lively was getting a little older and struggling to do concrete work as well as pastor a church. After struggling over the issue of the small church being unable to support his family fulltime, Pastor Lively resigned the pastorate. Later that year Grace called Brother Kerri Hoefner to be the pastor of the church. During this time the church continued to struggle to maintain itself. In February of 1998, Brother Hoefner officially resigned as pastor. Since the church knew their pastor was planning on going to the mission field in December of 97, they had already begun to look for a new pastor. In March of 1998 Brother Daniel Ledford and his family came to candidate for the pastorate. After praying about this the church of eleven people agreed to call Brother Ledford to be their new pastor. Brother Ledford lived in Tennessee at the time, so it would take him a month to get moved. On April 30th 1998 Pastor Ledford, wife Michelle and their youngest daughter Ashley arrived. While things were being put in place the three older children remained with their grandparents and would later be brought to live in Texas. Pastor Ledford worked at Hulsey’s Body Shop, off and on, for two years until the church was able to support his family fulltime. In May of 1999, realizing that debt was holding the church back from being more effective in the work of God, Pastor Ledford challenged the membership of the church to commit to give a weeks pay to the church for a debt reduction. The commitments for that Sunday were around $ 4,300.00. After that step of faith, God began to reduce the $ 60,000 debt and on the last day of May, 2001 Grace Baptist Church became debt free. A year later realizing that the auditorium was no longer adequate to seat the people who were coming, Pastor Ledford once again challenged the congregation to give whatever God laid on their hearts to build a new auditorium. God had put him in contact with some people who had money that they wanted to use to build a church for an Independent Baptist Church.