A Mission-hearted Man

The person in today’s story is someone who knows how to build things.  He can do it all when it comes to construction, but his favorite thing to do, when pressed to pick a favorite, is framing.  He says framing is “kind of like a puzzle” because it involves putting all the pieces together.  After having written just over twenty of the faith stories for the blog, I think I have a kinship with this person as each story is “kind of like a puzzle” that has to be framed. In the case of this story, there is a frame on which it hangs, which is missions, and there is a core at the center of the frame, which is a mission-hearted man.  That man is John McGrady.

John McGrady’s father was a builder and, not surprisingly, John “grew up building” as he puts it.  “I learned to do everything from framing to roofing to siding,” says John, “the whole gamut.”  Those life experiences have made John a valuable contributor on missions that require such knowledge and expertise.  And they also have made him valuable on missions that may not involve building buildings but instead involve building lives.

John was born in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and grew up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina.  He remembers the Baptist church he attended as one that was first a wooden church and then a masonry one.  “I grew up in a Baptist home and a Baptist church,” says John.

In 1997, John and his wife Sue joined Hayes Barton Baptist Church.  “We were drawn by Dr. Hailey’s sermons and their great applicability to life,” recalls John.  Joining the Danielson Sunday School Class was the next step in their involvement in the church.  “Ed Gaskins is a good teacher,” says John, “and there are other good ones teaching the class, too.”

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and John decided to go on a mission in February, 2006.  On this mission, John supervised college students as they helped with some of the initial building efforts after the storm.  He went back in the summer of that year with a group of high school students to supervise on another building project. 

As people and organizations began to shift their attention to other places in need, John still felt called to the Gulf Coast so he went “solo” and traveled on his own back to the area to work with the Gulf Coast Baptist Association.  “I thought that there were people in need there.  I have a gift that can help them, and I felt I could make a contribution,” shares John.  On this solo mission, he spent two weeks as a house leader working on a house three blocks away from the beach.  “There wasn’t anything else left between that house and the beach,” John recalls.

If you are sensing a pattern at this point, you are in sync with where this is headed.  While John may have been “blind to missions,” as he himself describes it, for a good part of his life, in the last decade, John has developed an eye for missions and has become a mission-hearted man.  John has traveled to Helena, Arkansas, where he helped build a bathhouse by the pool where swimming lessons have been taught by the Hayes Barton Baptist Church mission teams over the last several years.  John has worked on local Habitat for Humanity construction projects about which his comments tend toward the families who moved into the houses rather than the construction projects themselves.  And in the past two years, John has gone to the Kennedy Home for Children in Kinston at which he has tutored youth in math and, perhaps surprisingly, helped them decorate cupcakes with the expert assistance of his wife Sue. 

These last mission trips to Kinston are really at the heart of this story and what make me think and feel that John is such a mission-hearted man.  “You watch these kids at Kennedy Home,” says John with emotion right at the surface, “and you will either have your heart warmed or broken.  They are so vulnerable and so needy.  I enjoy letting them know that there are people who care about them.  How many people have they been exposed to who care for them, who are willing to sacrifice for them, who are willing to accept them as they are?  On missions like the ones to Kennedy Home, opportunities exist to present a Christ-like image to these kids.”

Picking up on that theme of opportunity, John shares that he sees the heritage, hope, and home that are Hayes Barton Baptist Church as rife with opportunities.  “We have in Hayes Barton’s heritage an open church and a compassionate church, one in which we follow the two great commandments of loving God with all of our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves.”

“We have many opportunities,” says John when talking about hope, “to be compassionate, mission oriented, and an example of Christ’s love.”  With the Family Life Center, “we have made the church a bigger part of everyday lives, and we can offer more programs.”  John references Hayes Barton Baptist Church Preschool and the Frankie Lemmon School and then says, “It is well worth it to have what we have here.”

The church home we have In Hayes Barton Baptist Church, shares John, is one in which “members share lives and hear their witness.”  Sunday School is at the heart of this, says John, “My class makes me think of home.”

John and Sue’s home reared two accomplished daughters, and I suspect the parenting in that home was framed with patience, compassionate, and love.  I don’t know if John was “blind to missions” for all those many years as he said he was; the missions have just changed.  Whatever the case, what we have amongst us now is a mission-hearted man.  He is one of many mission-hearted men and women at Hayes Barton Baptist Church. They have big hearts with which they love God and their neighbors.  That is what, in particular, missions allow, and that is what John McGrady is all about these days.