BEAUMONT, Texas – The sacrificial giving that happens at Calvary Baptist Church today has a direct link to the church’s beginning.
At the turn of the 20th century, First Baptist Church in Beaumont sponsored Gospel worker Sue Cochran’s efforts to establish a Sunday school in an area known as the Cartwright Addition, growing from an oil boom.
That Sunday school, after a couple of name changes, is now Calvary Beaumont. After 125 years, the church is still going strong.
“From its very beginning, Calvary has been a church that exists because of the giving of another Baptist church that had a Gospel heart and a mission mindset,” said Justin Buchanan, Calvary’s lead pastor since 2023. “We are indebted to First Baptist Beaumont for the work that they did and their willingness to see the work of God happening and the Gospel advancing so that the kingdom would increase here and around the world.”
About 700 people attend Calvary on Sundays. The church has two campuses and a Hispanic congregation and is among the top givers through the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ funding plan for national and international missions and ministries.
“We owe our whole existence to the generosity of God’s people who were willing to give to the mission, sacrificially providing resources to start a work that has become Calvary for the last 125 years,” Buchanan said. “I think that has just always been part of the DNA of who the people are here at Calvary.”
The church has been involved in disaster relief, sending teams to Florida and Georgia during the past year in the aftermath of hurricanes. Calvary has sent missionaries through the International Mission Board and other mission organizations and has sent some who are fully funded by the congregation.
“[We have] watched God work in the midst of our people,” Buchanan said, noting CP has enabled them to be called out to serve across the globe.
After faithfully supporting CP throughout its century-long existence, Calvary continues to find ways to keep support of the mission relevant. New member classes explain CP and what it funds. Sometimes new members are coming from an unchurched background or from a different denomination and have no concept of something as unique as the Cooperative Program, the pastor said.
“I think they’re trying to get their heads around it and understand what it is, why it’s there, and why it’s important,” he said.
The work goes beyond sending missionaries and training pastors, Buchanan said. When he was a pastor in North Carolina, he saw CP dollars fund children’s homes, foster care and adoption processes. Such a picture of believers’ adoption as daughters and sons into the family of God is motivation for CP giving, he said.
“In 2025, it’s as important as ever to give to the Cooperative Program because the work of Southern Baptists has not diminished and the need has not reduced,” Buchanan said. “The mission is still ever so critical and must remain central to who we are and what we do.”
Earlier this year, Southern Baptists of Texas Convention Executive Director Nathan Lorick spoke at Calvary, and “there was just a move of God among hearts as he served that morning,” particularly as he asked people to think of specific people they could ask God to save.
The church has benefited from SBTC personnel advising them on discipleship and other ministry areas.
“We had a special needs training weekend for the community, and the SBTC staff helped us with that to know what we needed to address … to best be a church for all people and everyone made in the image of God,” Buchanan said.
Looking back, God used the Cooperative Program in various ways to shape Buchanan for ministry. He didn’t know of anyone in his family who had been a pastor, and until ninth grade he attended a small Bible church in his hometown in East Tennessee. Then his family moved to a Southern Baptist congregation.
“It was there in that Southern Baptist church that not only did God bring me to salvation, but also then called me to vocational ministry,” he said. “I went out from that church after college to attend Southeastern Seminary to be trained for this calling of God upon my life.”
Buchanan has served on staffs at Southern Baptist churches, planted a church in North Carolina, and served for a time as a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“I am indebted to those who have already fought the good fight, finished the course, and kept the faith, but who in their lifetimes and their generations gave to see the work of God and the gospel message advance,” he said.
“Because of that, they have left a legacy that has impacted my life, enriched who I am, and brought me to where I am today in following God.”
This article originally appeared in the Southern Baptist TEXAN.
Related posts:
‘Jersey’ impacts Ohio & the world 
LifeSpring Church: Keeping Missions in the Forefront 
COOPERATIVE PROGRAM: Together in God’s mission 11% increase in CP Missions recorded by SBC in February 
COOPERATIVE PROGRAM: A matter of love 
COOPERATIVE PROGRAM: A missionary’s gratitude 
FIRST-PERSON: Keep your eye on the ball 
Alaska church combines ‘special forces’ with CP
