Editorial: The Botsford Baptist Church family has kept the main thing the main thing for 250 years

For more than 250 years, Botsford Baptist Church has been shining the light of Christ in Georgia, establishing itself as a wonderful example of a congregation bent on reaching lost souls.

The congregation endured the difficult years of the American Revolution, ministered through yellow fever outbreaks, and survived on little through the Great Depression.

This church family endured to become one of Georgia’s oldest congregations, continuing to proclaim the gospel just as it did when founding pastor Edmund Botsford and a small group of hardscrabble pioneers built a log meeting house near here some three years before American colonists declared their independence from England.

Now, Botsford Baptist has a modern facility where nearly 300 people gather for worship on the average Sunday morning. Pastor Mike Dann preaches the same gospel that the beloved founding preacher did all those years ago.

“It’s church the way it’s always been,” Dann told our editor, Roger Alford, in an interview. “We’re just people trying to love the Lord and to be faithful in reaching outside our walls to show His love to the world.”

Dann, who has served here for the past 10 years, said it amazes him to think that the church, founded in 1773, was in place even before the United States came into existence. The congregation pulled together through a long series of wars involving local soldiers, including the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the War on Terror.

It also survived despite religious persecution that Baptists of that era  faced in Georgia. That persecution forced the founding pastor to flee the state.

Clearly, Dann said, the Lord established Botsford Baptist to ensure generations of residents here would hear the gospel.

“We continue in the same path forged long before us,” he said “We preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We strive to reach the lost and build disciples.”

Kudos to the Botsford Baptist family that has kept the main thing the main thing for more than two and a half centuries.