Friona church’s furniture bears mark of 92-year-old carpenter

Updated: 4/13/07

Woodworker labors long for
Carpenter from Nazareth

By George Henson

Staff Writer

FRIONA—A look at J.G. Baker’s hands gives a glimpse into a man who has enjoyed working with wood his entire life, but a look at his heart gives insight into a man who has placed his eternal life in the hands of yet another carpenter.

While he is approaching age 92, even a casual observer can tell he was a powerfully built man and no stranger to hard work. He and his family ran harvesting combines from Arizona north to almost the Canadian border, and then back south, ending in the wheat and maize fields of the Texas Panhandle for many years. During the off-season, Baker worked in his woodshop.

“I made whatever anybody would pay for,” he said with a smile. But woodworking has long brought a smile to his face. He still has an animal carving he made as a small boy.

“I could carve any type of animal you wanted without even looking at them from the time I was 8,” he said.

For the last 54 years, Friona has been Baker’s home. The First Baptist Church there bears the marks of both of his passions. The sanctuary pulpit furniture, the cross that hangs on the wall of the baptistry, the cabinet for the sound equipment and desks throughout the church—all those and many other pieces are evidence of his love for wood and God.

The ministry that has strewn his handiwork across the state started about eight years ago, when a man he had cut grain for 40 years started a church in Phoenix, Ariz. As a show of his support, Baker made the pulpit, the communion table, two platform chairs, two flower stands and two lecterns.

He now has made eight of those sets, the first four of white oak, the last four of red oak.

“It’s good, sturdy stuff; I can tell you that,” he said.

At the time, he averaged about one set a year, but something prompted him to make four sets in 2006. He didn’t know why then, but now he thinks maybe he does.

“It guess the Lord knew I wasn’t going to be able to do much more after I got that done,” he said.

After a lifetime of excellent health—“I was working eight to 14 hours a day before October”—his health deteriorated rapidly. A series of setbacks left him using a walker and using oxygen to breathe scant months later. He’s trying to wean himself off the oxygen, but the exertion forces him back to it.

For months, he was unable to get into his workshop, but now he’s trying to spend at least a couple of hours there each day. Even so, he confesses he does more resting than working.

His handiwork will without a doubt succeed him, because it has scores of years ahead of it.

He laughs as he recalls his meeting with a pastor in Happy. First Baptist Church there was struck by a tornado, ripping away the roof. Eighteen days later, as repairs were hours away from being completed, fire stormed through the building, leveling it.

When the church neared its rebuilding, Baker visited the community and remembers walking around the unfinished building. When someone asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for the pastor.

Baker recalled Pastor Paul Burwash told the story of the meeting when the church held its open house a few weeks later with a set of Baker’s furniture prominently featured.

“The pastor over there, he’s a joker anyway,” Baker said with a grin.

He recalled the pastor relating: “I saw this old man walking around who looked like he’d escaped from a nursing home, and then he told me, ‘I want to give you your pulpit furniture, and there won’t be any down payment or any payments afterward.’ I thought: ‘I better call somebody. He’s starting to talk irrational.’”

Most of Baker’s furniture has gone either to churches that recovered from disasters or churches just getting on their feet. He has a heart to help those who could use a dose of encouragement.

Encouraging is precisely the word Deacon Woodrow Browning used to describe Baker’s gift to Kokomo Baptist Church in Gorman. Wildfires that raced across that part of the state took no pity on the church and burned it to the ground.

“It’s hard to put into words what his gift meant,” Browning said. “It’s just unbelievable that he gave us that furniture—and what a craftsman he is. It’s comparable to when we were working on the church and somebody would come by and talk for awhile and leave us a check before they left.”

The check would have to be a big one. The church furniture he used as his model sells for $8,500 out of a catalog he found.

And that was $8,500 that definitely was not in the budget when his church finally was able to build a building after more than a decade of renting space, Pastor Monte Byrd of Mill Creek Baptist Church in Bellville said.

“This was a tremendous example of God supplying exactly what you need,” he said. “It wasn’t in our budget by any stretch of the imagination, but when we went and picked it up, it matches perfectly with our organ that was also donated, the exposed beams we have in the ceiling and the cabinets the Texas Baptist Men built for us. We couldn’t have picked it out any better if we had known what we were doing.”

Baker is thrilled his handiwork is being used for God’s glory across the state, but he said he is just as thankful he has found a way to serve.

“There’s a lot of different ways to serve the Lord, and this is one way that I found,” he said.

“You wander off sometimes from serving, but more than anything, I’ve always tried to live my life in a way where I didn’t have to make any apologies.”

Baker said he may have gotten that philosophy of living from a doctor he knew when he was growing up in McKinney.

“This old doctor had a son who had just finished doctor school, and I remember he told me, ‘I told him if you want to be a good doctor, you have to be a good man first.’ I’ve always thought that was good advice no matter what you do,” Baker said.

And so, Baker has put his hands where his heart is.