Melissa Baxter added, “It brought the young and the old together on a project, working together as a church body for a family who was there working alongside us.”
“The first family in particular was so engaged and so appreciative. I still maintain contact with the homeowner and drive by the home often when in San Antonio,” said Newton.
BT raised some of the funds, but the money came primarily from a grant from Wells Fargo Bank, where church member, Carol Gray, worked. Church members provided the labor.
Shad Purcell, youth Minister at the time, remembers that the experience shaped his understanding of ministry. Working side-by-side with church members, sharing physical labor and common purpose, embodied the kind of communal faith he valued.
Prior to the laborers’ arrival, the site would have a slab poured, utilities connected, and a pile of prefabricated walls ready to be assembled. For several weeks a work crew would be on the site hammering, roofing, drywalling, painting; lunch would be prepared in the church kitchen and brought to the site. Robert Persky said that a group of retirees were there every day. “I remember Aurelia Newton on the roof nailing in shingles,” said Robert’s wife, Muriel, who was also at the work site daily.
“I will never forget standing in the yard and glancing at the home on that final Saturday afternoon... children were hauling grass, women who had been on the roof and hanging Sheetrock were now inside cleaning. Eighty plus year old men were finishing up the wooden fence and I'm almost certain I heard God proclaim, ‘Well done my good and faithful servants!’” said Newton.
Leeth’s parents were pillars of Baptist Temple. Morgan and Lynn were deeply involved in teaching, music, and community ministry. But Jarrett was drifting in the opposite direction. “I was getting out of the church scene and going my own ways. Not good ways, doing bar scenes and such and going the wrong way,” he said. What began as casual drinking hardened into habit, and habit into dependence. He would later describe those years plainly: hurting other people, hurting himself, using friends and even his parents for money, and watching alcohol quietly dismantle both his work and his integrity.
He was a licensed journeyman plumber who learned his trade in the Navy as a Seabee. Plumbing was the one steady thing in his life. But even that began to erode. After a diabetes diagnosis, he refused to change his lifestyle. Medication came; the drinking continued. He let his plumbing license lapse and tried to begin again at Home Depot, imagining a steady career until retirement. Instead, he found himself working part-time at night stocking for modest wages, barely covering fuel costs.
He pivoted again, this time into sprinkler fitting. The work suited him. The drinking did not stop.
Then came the physical consequences. Diabetes advanced. Sores appeared on his feet and would not heal. A toe was amputated and still he drank. His nights blurred into mornings as he drank himself into brief unconsciousness only to begin again. Finally, it got so bad he was hospitalized for liver failure.
That was three years ago. “I don't even have the slightest thought of alcohol in my mind anymore,” he said.
Leeth quit cold turkey. No gradual taper. No negotiated compromise. March 14 will mark three years without a drop of alcohol. The early weeks were difficult, but the cravings eventually fell silent. Sobriety did more than restore clarity; it restored memory. With painful vividness he began to see the damage he had done—to himself, to others, to the life he might have lived.
Then he began to pray. He began to feel the Holy Spirit working in his life; a quiet conversation between him and God. He had been thinking about baptism for months before he spoke it aloud. He even considered marking the occasion on the third anniversary of his sobriety. Yet his deeper questions were not about ceremony but about direction. About following the way of Jesus.
He was baptized on February ninth, not just as a testimony of what he left behind but, also, a declaration of where he hopes to go. At fifty-five, Leeth describes himself as “wide awake.” Plumbing was his identity, the one thing he stuck to. But now, sober and alert, he feels the weight of larger questions: Where am I headed? What is the purpose of the years that remain?
He reads Scripture and seeks deeper understanding. He searches the stories for answers about life and eternity. He is seeking a way to make a difference. “Serving others, that’s probably what I'm looking for right there,” he said.
And the questions that once haunted him—about death, about direction, about meaning—are gradually giving way to something quieter and more enduring: the desire to belong to Christ and to spend what remains of his life serving others.
He hit the ground running. He took the youth to Centrifuge his first week. The following week featured a mission trip to the border town of Van Horn with VBS and construction work all day, followed by worship in the evening. He was surprised to find out at the first worship service for the Spanish-language church that he was to be the preacher. He gave them a fifteen-minute message (including translation) and, on his guitar, played the one song he knew in Spanish—twice.
When Purcell arrived at Baptist Temple, he was young and still discerning the shape of his ministry. BT called him to be the full-time Youth and Activities Minister after Danny Johnson’s departure. He had been the part-time minister of youth at Dellview Baptist Church while completing his Master of Divinity at the San Antonio extension of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Purcell’s early years in ministry would be shaped under the leadership of Pastor Mark Newton. “He was a great mentor to me,” Purcell said.
Purcell quickly developed an affection for the church’s south-side location and long history of community presence as he entered a congregation already navigating complex transitions—demographic, theological, and cultural. The youth group reflected those tensions. Some students came from long-established BT families, commuting from neighborhoods north and east of the city. Kids from the neighborhood were drawn by open gym nights, the promise of food, and a place to belong. But integrating students from different social worlds proved uneven. While open conflict was rare, true unity was lacking. The church could gather young people into the same room more easily than it could draw them into a shared identity. “They were rough,” he said.
At twenty-five, Purcell found himself working with young people who faced challenges and influences beyond the church environment. In one case, he recalled sensing a struggle between competing claims on a young man’s soul—between the pull of gang affiliation and the faith-based community offered by the church.
The gym continued to be one of the church’s most effective outreach tools, particularly through volleyball leagues and recreational programming that kept the campus active throughout the week. Purcell credits Cathy Peeler and her daughter, Linzi, with keeping the gym full and the leagues organized.
As meaningful as the work was, Purcell increasingly sensed a separation between his own developing convictions and the church’s institutional culture. BT, responding to broader currents within Baptist life, placed consistent emphasis on denominational identity and distinction. While Purcell affirmed those commitments, he found himself longing for a ministry less about tradition and more about the joy of the gospel. Worship services were too formal and reinforced a model of church life that seemed distant from the community the church hoped to reach.
One incident stands out. It was in the wee small hours of the morning when Purcell finished replacing the chairs used for the Fiesta Saturday Night Parade fundraiser. He went home for a nap and showed up for worship without a suit and sat with his wife rather than on the platform with the rest of the staff. “I caught so much grief for that,” he remembers.
These dynamics seemed misaligned with the immediacy of the gospel work he was encountering among students and in the surrounding community—an expression of larger questions facing the congregation. Could BT function as a neighborhood church again? Encounters with students navigating gang pressure, economic instability, and broken family systems sharpened that question.
Purcell’s time at BT was also marked by moments of deep affirmation. The Habitat for Humanity build stands out as a highlight. Working side by side with church members, sharing physical labor and common purpose, embodied the kind of communal faith he valued. The experience would shape his understanding of ministry long after he left.
In cooperation with his home church, Crossroads Baptist Church, Purcell was ordained at BT. It was an occasion made especially meaningful by his father’s public expression of pride and affection. “He's from the generation where you just don't say that out loud,” he said.
Shad Purcell remembers his time at Baptist Temple as formative rather than frustrating. The church tested his assumptions, refined his priorities, and shaped his calling. The lessons learned there, amid both affirmation and strain, would continue to shape his ministry for decades to come. Today he serves as Pastor of Discipleship and Assimilation at Alamo Community Church.
Baptist Temple was faithful to who it had been, even as younger ministers and emerging communities pressed toward what the church might yet become.
