First Baptist Church of Godley

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm going to tell it to you. Way out in Johnson County, about four miles from where the town of Godley sits today, there was a home, J. P.

Vickers's home, and in the spring of 1878, something got started there that would outlast just about everything else in the county. A congregation. They called it Bethany Baptist Church, and they gathered in that farmhouse and they made something out of nothing, the way Texans have always had a way of doin'.

Now, they didn't have a fancy building, and they didn't meet every week. They worshipped the first Sunday of the month, and every third Saturday and Sunday. You work the land, you keep the schedule the land allows.

By 1880, the Rev. S. E.

Brook was leading the pastorate, and under his watch, the congregation was accepted into the Alvarado Baptist Association; a sign that this little gathering out in the countryside was being recognized as something real, something lasting. And it was. For more than twenty years, Bethany Baptist held on in that rural stretch of Johnson County.

Then came 1899, and the congregation made a decision that congregations sometimes have to make: they moved. Picked up and followed the people into the growing town of Godley, and when they got there, they took a new name to match their new address: Godley Baptist Church. They kept on going.

Decades rolled by. And then in 1974, the fellowship took the name it carries to this day: First Baptist Church of Godley. Started in a farmhouse.

Ended up a cornerstone. That's nearly a hundred years of Sunday mornings, and that is a story worth pullin' over for.

What the marker says

Originally known as Bethany Baptist Church, this congregation was organized in the spring of 1878 at the home of J. P. Vickers, about four miles from what is now the town of Godley. In 1880, during the pastorate of the Rev. S. E. Brook, the new church was accepted into the Alvarado Baptist Association. Worship services were held the first Sunday and every third Saturday and Sunday of the month. In 1899 the congregation moved into the town of Godley and adopted the name Godley Baptist Church. The fellowship became known as First Baptist Church in 1974.