Sometime after the purchase of the land for our new, current church, Ronald Culp, long time deacon, built a small chapel with materials that were left over from Easter and Christmas pageants past. He labored over the project in a workshop across the street from our downtown educational building in what was once Melvin’s Garage. The dimensions of his project were determined by the heights of the doors of the garage and the heights of red lights to be maneuvered between the workshop on Green Street and W.S. Young — with a one-inch clearance. Using his bobcat, Ronald carefully loaded and precariously hauled the almost finished chapel onto a flatbed trailer to the near-center spot he had chosen on the enormous lot that would, he prayed, eventually house a beautiful new campus.

Ronald had learned the power of prayer as a child when he and other boys in his third-grade Sunday School class prayed for unfortunate boys in the Round Rock orphan home and saved meager pennies, nickels, and dimes in hopes of making a difference for them. “It took forever to fill a coffee can,” Ronald said, but with prayers and time, they eventually did. And Brother Bob Lambert, our pastor at the time, took the class to the orphan home, where they presented the full can of coins and played basketball with the boys who lived there.

So years later, Ronald decided to build a little chapel for members of First Baptist to pray for our church-to-be. The chapel contained a speaker’s podium and cutdown parts of the original benches from Clements Chapel. It had a steeple of sorts that had to be placed upon arrival because it made the structure too high to go through the garage doors. Made with almost no nails, the design of the chapel was intentionally open and simple with only the frame for the door and four simple corner pillars so that visitors there could see the surrounding dirt on all sides and from all angles.

Once the chapel was in place, volunteers organized a day for our congregation to pray. Everyone in the church was invited, including older members who were in nursing homes.

From morning to night, one by one, members came (some bused from nursing homes). Some sat in the chapel; overflow sat in folding chairs outside the chapel. They came, they prayed, they left.

After that day, deacons had one meeting with a breakfast Ronald cooked and another with lunch. Sunday School classes, the youth, and others often met there.

The little chapel, built by a man who believed in prayer, built as a place to pray for the new building, stood in place until our new church took its place.

As Ronald said, “Supporting the new church, it began with prayer. This is how we got the missions from our original church. We started with prayer. When you care, you pray. It’s a faith thing. You have to put your foot where your faith is.”