September 18, 2000
Big rigs become rolling pulpits
___By Ferrell Foster
___Texas Baptist Communications
___ELDORADO--Pastor Byron Orand's sermons are being taken for a spin.
___Four truck stops in West Texas are giving away tapes of Orand's messages, and those tapes are showing up in the far reaches of the country.
___A trucker stopped in nearby Sonora recently to call Orand on the phone after listening to one of the tapes. The driver had picked it up in Los Angeles.
ANETIA FRAZIER (left) of Big Country Truck Stop in Merkel receives a box of sermon tapes from Rita Reeves. Big Country and three other West Texas truck stops make the tapes available to drivers at no charge. Funds from the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions helped launch the ministry.
___A driver from Arkansas told the pastor he made a profession of faith in Christ and is now going to church after listening to the tape. And another in Ohio said he had accepted Christ as well.
___Orand is pastor of Community Baptist Church in Eldorado, 50 miles south of San Angelo. His preaching is reaching beyond that congregation thanks to the efforts of church members and through the support of Texas Baptists.
___The church is distributing hundreds of tapes to the truck stops, and the truck stops make them available for free. Texas Baptists helped the ministry get started through the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions, which provided $1,800 for equipment and supplies.
___"It's just a good witness for a small church in a small town," said Orand, who is "semi-retired" after years of ministry in larger congregations. Community Baptist averages about 50 people in worship each week. "We're a ranching and oil field kind of town and limited in ability to reach out," with only about 3,000 people in the county.
___The tape ministry started with one trucker's request. David Behrens wanted tapes of Orand's sermons because he couldn't be at church all the time. After listening to the tapes, Behrens passed them to other truckers.
___Bob Bailey, a member of Community Baptist who runs a trucking company, began making the tapes available to his drivers. Then church members Rita Reeves and Jan Bailey had a dream. They envisioned giving the tapes to drivers at truck stops, and the ministry was born.
___Demand has been so great that one of the truck stops asked for 800 tapes a month, a number that is too great for the church to provide. That establishment has to settle for about 200.
___The tapes contain Orand's Sunday morning sermons. Church members use a duplicating machine to make three tapes at a time. Then Reeves, who owns a home health care business, called Choice Homecare, delivers the tapes to the truck stops as she makes the rounds for her business.
___Big Country Truck Stop in Merkel, west of Abilene, was one of the first facilities to make the tapes available. They disappeared. That indicated to manager Anetia Frazier that the tapes met a need of truck drivers. So along with showers, telephones, a TV lounge and a restaurant, Big Country now is providing something for drivers' spiritual nourishment. If it helps the drivers, then the truck stop wants to provide it, Frazier said.
___Thousands of the tapes have been distributed from Abilene, Ozona, Fort Stockton and Merkel truck stops.
___Asked to describe her pastor's appeal, Reeves said, Orand is "just wonderful. What I like about him is he's a cowboy. He's down to earth, yet he is educated," she said. "He tells it like it is," and it's right from the Bible.
___Orand is, in fact, a rancher as well as a pastor. "We run a lot of cattle and some good roping horses," he said.
___When church members approached him about starting a tape ministry, Orand agreed to give it a try even though he said he didn't have that much confidence in his preaching.
___Now, the tapes are going "like hotcakes," Orand said. "It's gotten so good it's outgrown our ability to do it, ... but we're doing it."
___In what he calls a "little town with kind of a laid back tradition," God is blessing, Orand said. The tape ministry is "not producing big numbers of people" at Community Baptist, but "the gospel is the gospel whether it's here or in Alabama."
___Had it not been for Texas Baptists and the Mary Hill Davis Offering, "we could not have done it," Orand said. "So my church is sold on state missions."
___
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