HAMLET — About six years ago, Dennis Holloway stood up to speak at First Baptist Church of Rockingham and asked for the congregation’s support to purchase a utility trailer.
Fast forward to 2016 and Holloway, recovery team leader for the N.C. Baptist Men, and his group of volunteers are still using that trailer and are hard at work on a house in Hamlet.
The First Baptist Missions Team is helping to remodel a home that was previously bought by a family who later found out the father had Stage 4 leukemia. With the father only in his early 30s and with four grade-school kids and another on the way, the father reached out to Holloway to see if his group could help finish the remodel he started.
“They bought a house to remodel for his family, and then he found out,” said Holloway. “They couldn’t finish. They contacted us and wanted to know if we could help.”
Holloway, of course, obliged, and he said Pee Dee Baptist volunteers from half a dozen churches have been working on the house for the last two weeks to finish the job by the end of the month.
“We’ve completely done the entire inside including plumbing, electrical, floors and trim,” he said. “We’re planning to re-shingle the roof next week.”
With the Christian Closet donating funds and Habitat for Humanity donating cabinets, it made the mission team’s job a little easier. But on any given day, there could be between 15 and 20 people working on the house at one time.
Despite the group’s name, the Baptist Men is a nondenominational ministry. Holloway said Christians from various local congregations, including Methodists and Pentecostal Holiness and Church of God members, serve on the Rockingham-based recovery team.
While the group is best-known for its disaster relief missions, Holloway and his crew have built hundreds of wheelchair ramps for disabled Richmond County residents — including more than 40 within the last year.
The N.C. Baptist Men also renovated the Claude and Lois Smith Family Care Home in Marston, a home for young single mothers and their children that was donated to Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina last summer by the Smiths’ daughter, Claudia Robinette.
Although with the group doing so many positive things for the community, Holloway never wants to take any credit for himself.
“This crew of mine, they’re the ones who deserve all the credit,” he said. “I don’t know how to do a lot of these things (in construction), but the people I’ve got around me know how to do everything.”
The recovery team is always recruiting volunteers, and though Holloway jokes that at 70, he’s “one of the youngest ones there,” the group ranges in age from young working men to retirees.
Holloway wasn’t able to skirt at least a little fame back in January as he was honored at the Richmond County Chamber of Commerce’s 33rd annual meeting and recognition night as its Citizen of the Year.
Reach reporter Matt Harrelson at 910-817-2674, follow him on Twitter @mattyharrelson and listen to him at 12:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays on G-104.3 FM.
