Great Soul-Winning Churches - Elmer Towns

Florence (S. C.) Baptist Temple
Bill Monroe, Pastor
Chapter 1
“Stability and Excitement”
How large can a church grow in three years? How stable can a young church become in
36 months? Stability through excitement is the key to growth at the Florence Baptist Temple,
begun in November 1969. Attendance averaged 504 this past quarter, with a high day of 1,355
on its third anniversary and a weekly offering approaching $2,000, a modern streamlined
$200,000 building, a Christian day school and an area-wide ministry. But the future has more
excitement: the congregation is selling a second $200,000 bond issue, and by this fall will double
its building, occupying an auditorium seating 1,100—an unthinkable attainment for a three-yearold
church.
Bill Monroe had a deep feeling that God was calling him into the pastorate. He had read
The Ten Largest Sunday Schools many times and concluded that “if Dallas Billington could work
in a rubber factory and build the largest Sunday School in the world, why not me?” Monroe had
sung in a gospel quartet all over America and knew these large churches. Being music director
for Dr. Greg Dixon, Indianapolis Baptist Temple, no longer held the same challenge. He wanted
to preach. Monroe, only 25 years old, walked into Dixon’s office and told him God was calling
him to preach. Two weeks later, he was driving out of Indianapolis, all of his belongings on a
Ryder Rental Truck heading for Columbia, South Carolina.
Bill attended high school in South Carolina, having graduated from Edmunds High
School in Sumter, where his father pastored Harmony Baptist Church. Monroe knew of the great
independent churches up north and in the midwest, but he did not know of such great churches in
South Carolina. He spent three days in Columbia, but couldn’t find an apartment to rent, his
furniture still on the rental truck. Pastor David Wood, Harbor Baptist Church, counseled with
him and suggested a church was needed on the other side of town. Nothing opened up there,
either. Then Monroe visited Florence, South Carolina, where an old friend, Larry Denham, lived.
They drove around looking at the subdivisions. Florence, a city of 42,000, was quite a mission
field with no independent fundamental church. Within an hour, Monroe found an apartment and
a place for his church on the air base, an abandoned theater building that had been used by the
Florence Little Theater Association, a decaying frame structure with red asbestos brick siding
peeling off the walls. The interior was painted completely black so no light would reflect.
As Monroe looks back, his first message there was the first sermon he ever preached. He
had spoken at other meetings or Sunday School, but he had not preached before beginning the
church. The roof leaked, and one time as ‘:Monroe preached on baptism during a hard rain, the
roof sprung a leak, drenching him with water. During the next two years, the church service was
cancelled several times because of rain and, according to Monroe, “No one took his coat off that
first winter.” Two hundred dollars a month spent on fuel oil couldn’t keep the building warm.