Faith Temple Celebrates 50th Anniversary

Written by Bob Dill

Jan 15, 2007 at 11:55 PM

“To say that the task of building Faith Temple was easy would be to grossly misrepresent the situation! It wasn’t easy. It required the cooperation of every person.”  Faith Temple celebrated 50 years of Christian ministry just before Christmas. Dr. James H. Thompson, the founding pastor, was the speaker for the occasion. Many of the founding members have gone to be with the Lord, but those remaining and many of the original families attended the service and dinner in a much improved facility than where they first met. It was raining on Sunday morning, December 16, 1956, when the congregation of Faith Temple met for the first time in an old store building in northern Greenville County. The rain had been falling for several days, but the inclement weather in no way dampened the spirits of the people, some of whom had labored in the rain on Saturday to get the old building ready for the Sunday service. The service began at 10:30 a.m. and lasted until 1:00 p.m. For more than two hours the people rejoiced and exercised their liberty in the Lord. More than two-hundred people showed up for the service. Not all of them could get inside the store building. By the time the service ended, more than seven thousand dollars had been raised toward construction of a new church facility. There were eleven offers of land for a building site. The offer of property by Mrs. Mary C. Bearden, located at a picturesque intersection with a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside in the Sandy Flat Community, was accepted unanimously by the new congregation. Permission was granted to hold services in the Blue Ridge High School auditorium until the new facility was built. The high school was then located on Tiger Bridge Road, the site of the current Blue Ridge Middle School. The congregation decided to name the church, “Faith Temple, for all people.” Dr. James H. Thompson, D.D. was the pastor. In later years Dr. Thompson wrote: “To say that the task of building Faith Temple was easy would be to grossly misrepresent the situation! It wasn’t easy. It required the cooperation of every person. It took hard labor and a lot of it. Money was needed almost every Sunday, but God always came to our rescue. Some might say that we were tempting God by obligating ourselves for so much in the way of building materials, but we say that it was believing the Lord. God has promised to supply all of our needs and to even give us the desires of our hearts, if we walk in His will... He never one time failed us. “The church was built almost entirely on a pay-as-you-go basis. We built as the Lord supplied the needs. We raised the money week by week, as it was needed.” The new church facility was dedicated one year from the founding. Steve Crain, of Southern Pines, North Carolina, was present with his family on the rainy Sunday morning in December, 1956. (See his article this page, as well as a poem by the pastor’s wife.)