“I think if I knew what God had planned, I would have told Him no,” Eddie Jones confessed. “I was young, about mid-20s, and I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know I could have been killed, shot or whatever. I was out there wanting to start a church. I wanted to preach, and that’s what I did.”
Jones, now pastor of Victory Temple Baptist Church Greenville, Mississippi, was an inexperienced preacher in the 1980’s. He went to Jackson County Baptist Association, with the intention of starting a church in Moss Point, since he had been told the association could provide funds.
“Don’t you move,” the secretary told him, and Jones nervously thought, “I’m in trouble now!”
“Then Dr. David Lee and another gentleman came out from the back,” Jones recounted, “and he said, ‘Brother Eddie, we’ve been praying that God would send us somebody to help us start up a church.’
Jones had no idea that there were not any black Southern Baptist churches in the state of Mississippi at that time, he noted.
The beginning of Jones’ church-planting mission
This encounter began Jones’ church-planting mission. A few years after starting Christ Temple Baptist Church Moss Point, he partnered with First Baptist Church Greenville to plant Victory Temple.
They began to draw people in with two Bible clubs and Bible studies within an apartment complex. In the small community of Avon, a farmer named Buddy Cochran agreed to have Jones lead Bible studies for his farmhands. Jones also taught drug and AIDS seminars in the school systems, building relationships with teachers and principals.
As Victory Temple began to form, the church met in Jones’ house, then rented a church building — all while saving money to buy property. In time, the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board provided a land grant, and Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) loaned the church a trailer. Mississippi Baptist churches, mission teams and Tennessee Baptists arrived to offer construction assistance.
But even after the building was finished more work was to be done. Through broadcasting and newspaper columns, Jones continued to invite the community to Victory Temple.
‘Different animal’
On paper, Jones’ journey appears simple.
But as he had learned from planting Christ Temple, obedience to God causes worldly opposition.
“The Delta is a different animal,” Jones said. “You have a lot of racism here that is thicker than other areas. I got here in the late 80s and began to knock on doors and tell people about Jesus. That was the easy part. The hard part was that a couple of years before First Church, Greenville, invited me to come, they had apologized for their part in telling blacks that they were not welcome in their church.
“So even though I wasn’t there, the black people never forgot that. Someone in the church told me, ‘God got ahold of us, and we changed our mind,’ and that’s when they extended the invitation for me to start a church in the black community.”
Before Victory Temple took shape, Jones set up an office at FBC Greenville, and although many members were welcoming, some were hesitant toward him. For the most part, Jones walked on eggshells, and his situation was no easier in the neighborhoods.
“When I went out to knock on doors, behind every door they would say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re that boy that Southern Baptists hired to keep us black folks out of First Baptist.’ And I said, ‘No sir, no ma’am. That’s not true. I’m out here starting a church and the church will be independent of First Baptist.’
“But they said, ‘No, we remember you didn’t want black folks to come.’ So I knocked and I knocked and I tried, but they kept saying things like, ‘No, they didn’t want us there.’”
‘Get back out there’
“I went back to the pastor of First Greenville at the time, Dr. Kiely Young, and said, ‘Look, every place I go the black people said that they didn’t want to come because of the history here. I can’t do anything. I’m trying to get the church started but I can’t do a thing.’ And Bro. Keily looked at me, and I was waiting on him to come around his desk and give me a hug or say, ‘Brother, let me pray with you.’
“What Bro. Keily did, however, was stand up and say, ‘Bro. Eddie, suck it up and get back out there.’ After every door had been slammed in my face, I really got energized. That’s when I went out and started all those different ministries.”
Jones said of the Victory Temple that stands today, “It’s an all-black congregation, and we probably fluctuate between 65 and 95 people, which is the average since the pandemic. The Sunday School is still weak and we’re trying to build back on that, but Wednesday Bible study is pretty strong, running about 40 or 50.
“At one time, Victory Temple was doing so much in the community that other churches began to mimic it,” Jones recalled. “We have been recipients of missions and we have done missions. One thing we did was take part in a ministry from the WMU, ‘Christmas in August,’ that would buy school supplies for churches to minister to their communities, and that opened doors for us to have Bible studies in the schools.
“A lot of work still needs to be done,” Jones noted. “The MBCB does what it can to try to help us. Back in the early 80s the convention supported my church planting financially, and when I sent in a request for a mission team, they would send that request around the state and people would stop in and help us.
“I’m afraid if I were to leave Victory Temple today that they wouldn’t be able to get the right pastor,” Jones said. “I’m trying to keep it connected to the convention, because this is the largest — and I believe the most productive — black Southern Baptist church in the Mississippi Delta, and we don’t want to lose this church.”
Lowell Walker, African American ministry consultant for MBCB and pastor of Mt. Sinai Baptist Church Tupelo, said of his coworker in Christ, “We are thankful for pastor Eddie Jones’ commitment and service as he continues to encourage his congregation in giving to the Cooperative Program, and for his service to the churches and surrounding communities with the gospel.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Lindsey Williams and originally published by the Baptist Record.
