First Baptist Church of Jamestown stands on Guilford Road in Jamestown, North Carolina, and two things come up first when people talk about it: the 10:30 Sunday worship service and the Wednesday night farmers market that meets on the church grounds from May through August. The church names all three of its priorities in a single breath. It exists to worship and experience the presence of God, to love others the way God loves us, and to build everlasting connections with the community of Jamestown. That third commitment is not decorative here. It shows up in a market that took two years of dreaming and building, in small groups that gather for Bible study at 9:30 on Sunday morning, in a senior adults' club that calls itself Xtra Years of Zest, and in a worship service built on purpose to mix traditional and contemporary elements so that people from different backgrounds can find their place in it.
Sunday School at 9:30 and Worship at 10:30
Sunday is described at First Baptist as a time of community, worship and fellowship, and the morning is laid out in two parts. Sunday School and small groups begin at 9:30 a.m., where people of every age gather for small group Bible study. At 10:30 the worship service begins. Nursery care is provided for children from birth to age 3 during all activities, so a family with a small child can be present for the study time and stay for worship.
The worship service itself is deliberately built around a mix. The service blends the best of both traditional and contemporary worship elements, and because the congregation is described as a diverse community of faith, the leaders work intentionally to include as many elements of worship as possible. Traditional and contemporary music often appear alongside each other in the same hour, paired with engaging preaching and experiential elements.
The theology of worship is stated plainly. Worship is essential for the life of a Christian, it reminds worshipers of the mighty acts of God, and it reorders thinking and lives. Gathering is framed as a response to what God has already done rather than an attempt to earn something from him. At the same time, the congregation is told that God does not call people to comfortable worship, but to worship that challenges and deepens faith. The invitation that closes the description is warm and simple: there is always a space for you at the feast.
The Rainbow Over Noah's Ark in the Nursery
The nursery is one of the places the church's teaching reaches most directly. The image of a rainbow bending over Noah's ark, with pairs of animals gathered underneath, hangs in a great many church nurseries, and the pastor said plainly that this nursery is no exception. The story is offered to children from the earliest ages because it seems central to the message of God's love and hope, and the point of telling it early is that even in the midst of the worst chaos, God will never forget them.
That sermon, on Genesis 9, pushed the rainbow image past the nursery. It asked why the colors of the rainbow do not also run up the stairwells and into worship and committee meetings, into youth group, adult education and mission projects, into choir rehearsal and church potlucks. The answer offered was that a promise taken seriously would change a faith community, opening hearts to be remade in the image of God's heart and moving people toward patient, forgiving, loving action for the renewal of all creation. The same teaching described God as a God who changes and limits himself for the sake of creation, a God touched to the heart by the suffering of what he made, willing to accept hurt to keep hope alive. The rainbow becomes the sign that redemption is possible.
The Jamestown Community Farmers Market
Every Wednesday evening from May through August, between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m., the church grounds become the Jamestown Community Farmers Market. Vendors and neighbors fill the space for an evening that is as much about conversation as commerce, and the market has become the clearest single example of how First Baptist carries out its mission to build everlasting connections with the community of Jamestown.
The market did not appear by accident. The pastor has said plainly that it was really two years in the making and that it all started with a dream he shared with the congregation. That pattern of dreaming out loud became a habit. Dream boards have been placed in the sanctuary and around the church buildings, and people are invited to write down what they see for the church's future, whether the dream is large or small.
The thinking behind the market runs deeper than a nice idea. At the annual gathering of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, which the church calls its local denominational association and partner, a leadership presentation told the story of an Italian grandfather named Guido Evangelisti who came to America through Ellis Island and held two things above all others: food and education. Food gave his family a way of connecting with one another, because coming to the table was the practice of checking in with each other. The market in Jamestown works the same way in the present, gathering people around tables where they can be known.
That same concern for neighbors shows up in the church's teaching about hunger. The Exodus teaching on manna and gathering only enough for the day has been paired with a blunt look at food waste in the United States and with the reality of food insecurity in the surrounding Triad region. The message is that no one has to experience hunger personally to recognize that it is real, and that people of faith should step in with help. The church's teams have joined the CROP Hunger Walk, an interfaith event that builds community while raising funds to end hunger both locally and around the world. The reasoning is plain: the church is the community of people who feed each other.
Wednesday Nights: Prayer, Questions and Lectio Divina
Midweek at First Baptist carries more than one rhythm. There is a Wednesday night study, and one of its recurring themes has been prayer itself, with time to center yourselves and to pray in a way that acknowledges where in the body pressure, pain or anxiety are felt. There is also an Ask the Pastor gathering, an evening conversation in which the congregation brings questions about the text being preached and about Christian life, from relationships and marriage to the shape of the early church's advice to the Corinthians.
In Lent, the midweek gathering takes the form of prayer time that uses Lectio Divina, the slow practice of reading and praying through Scripture. That season is described as a reminder that you do not have to do everything alone, and that during the times when you cannot fight any longer, love fights for you and all you need to do is rest. The Wednesday night study has also been the place where the pastor and his team worked through the lectionary together and where questions about God, sin and grace have been taken seriously rather than smoothed away.
Ash Wednesday is marked with a service of prayer and the imposition of ashes. Instead of the familiar line about dust returning to dust, the words used with the congregation are, "Remember you are mortal, and remember you are loved." Those words were first shared with the staff during a Wednesday morning worship planning meeting, and they carried an unexpected weight in the season of Lent, when the fragility of human life is hard to ignore. The Advent season has its own service, a Hanging of the Green in which the sanctuary is prepared together and the congregation waits with eyes wide open for Christ to come.
Youth ministry also meets on Sunday nights, and it has been a place for honest conversation about struggle and mercy, including a study of Psalm 51 that grew into a meditation on guilt, shame and the relief of handing weight over to God.
Xtra Years of Zest: The XYZ Group for Senior Adults
The church's senior adults gather as XYZ, short for Xtra Years of Zest. The group meets on the second Thursday of every month, and every meeting includes a program along with a potluck lunch. There is also a traveling group within the club called the Zoomers, which takes the fun on the road. The combination of program, food and travel is a small picture of the church's larger conviction that connecting people around a table is one of the simplest ways to build the kind of community the mission describes.
The Story of Grace: What First Baptist Believes
The church's beliefs are written as a story rather than a list of propositions. In the beginning of time, God began a story unlike any other ever told. God spoke the world into existence, taking what was nothing and making it into something, and filled that world with people, plants, animals and all sorts of good things. God lived in harmony with those things, and everything was good. Then the harmony was broken. Sin entered the world and began convincing people that God was not after humanity's best interests, in fact that God wanted people to miss out on what was really best. The connection between creation and God was fractured, and sin began to tear the creation from the Creator.
God decided to act. God revealed God's own self to humanity through signs, messengers and wonders, proclaiming more and more about the Creator to the creation, and then took the outrageous step of sending God's own son, Jesus Christ, to proclaim the true nature of God's love. Jesus showed that love through all he taught and all he did. The powers of the world found the message threatening to their own kingdoms and decided Jesus had to die. Through a rigged trial and a bloody crucifixion, Jesus died. His enemies rejoiced and his friends hid in fear. Early on the third morning after Jesus' death, the miraculous occurred and Jesus appeared, raised from the dead, conquering the power of sin and death forever.
That is the reality the church celebrates today: death is no longer the ultimate end, Jesus has conquered death, and he offers new life to all who seek it. From that comes the shape of discipleship. Jesus called his followers to go out and make disciples of all nations, and the church holds to the biblical account that defines disciples as those who seek to pattern their whole lives after the example of Jesus. That is why the church says it chooses to give its whole lives to the service of God. Its members are invited to embrace the story of grace and forgiveness in their own lives and to speak that truth to others.
The beliefs section is honest about difficulty. Life is hard, and the church says so plainly, but it also says that faith anchors people and gives them hope. The struggles they face are not the end of the story, and God is not through with them yet. The road can be hard, but going together makes the trip easier. The invitation at the end of the statement is the church's own: come be part of a bigger story, the story of God's amazing love.
The teaching builds on that story in a way that is distinctly pastoral. A recurring theme holds that Scripture says only two things about what God is: God is holy and God is love. Everything else is a metaphor. From that conviction the church teaches that God's love is never controlling, always freedom giving, and therefore self limiting; that love protects the freedom of the beloved rather than overruling it. It is a God who can be vulnerable, who is grieved by the suffering of creation and who answers that grief with reconciliation. The line that recurs through the preaching is that God always does the most God can do.
Another long-running theme is that nothing you can do or say causes God to love you less. The church has preached that a person's worth does not rise and fall with performance or approval, that being chosen follows being rejected in the life of Jesus' first disciples, and that the good news is never about the preacher. It is good news for the oppressed, for those who stand outside the club, and for anyone who feels they do not belong.
Baptism, Water and the Mikveh
First Baptist holds to believer's baptism. The church teaches that rather than baptizing newborn babies, the practice is to wait, to let a child grow and learn faith and what it means to be a follower of the Way, and then to welcome a public profession of faith. Baptism in this understanding is not the end of a journey but the beginning of one, and it is a moment of public statement about who a person is and whose they are.
The church has also dug into the water tradition of Judaism in a way that has shaped its own practice. The pastor studied the mikveh, the ritual immersion used for transitions including entering the faith, learning about it through world religions courses at Campbell University Divinity School and through conversations with Rabbi Eric Solomon of Beth Meyer Synagogue in Raleigh. The argument made is that Christian baptism grew out of the Jewish mikveh, and that Jewish practice treated water as an ongoing, limitless offering rather than a single event. The mikveh is about transition, marking the end of one phase of life and the entry into the next.
That study has been turned outward rather than kept as scholarship. The congregation was invited to come forward and place hands in the water as a symbolic cleansing, or as a way of marking a transition, or to remember their own baptism, with music accompanying the moment. In this telling, baptism does not have to be a one-time event, and the cleansing power of water can take part in a person's spiritual development again and again.
A Church That Makes Room for Questions
One of the most repeated convictions at First Baptist is that faith and questions belong together. The teaching on Genesis 15 points to Abram, whose trust in God runs deep and who still asks hard questions about how God will accomplish what he has promised, with the observation that questions about God are a sign of belief rather than a failure of it. The example of Mother Teresa's private writings, published after her death and revealing decades of doubt, is used to make the same point from a different angle: her questions never interrupted the life of service she had been called to. In the church's telling, questions are necessary dialogue, and the people of God are invited to be two-way with God rather than silent.
The same theme shows up in a teaching on Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus at night because the questions he wants to ask are the ones he is not willing to ask in the light. Jesus does not dismiss him. He turns toward the sincere questioner and stays with him, and the church says plainly that those late night, half whispered questions are the moments where people discover they are not alone. The congregation has been encouraged to treat questions as a gift rather than a failure, to celebrate them, and to notice that some people need a safe place to ask them before they can find their own voice again.
Belonging runs through the teaching as well. Human beings want to belong, and the church has preached that belonging is a force powerful enough to shape decisions and friendships. Jesus' ministry made room for people who had been excluded, and the charge to the congregation is to make sure everyone feels that they belong, including those who have been treated as outsiders. That impulse is part of why worship is intentionally blended, part of why questions are honored, and part of why a market on the church grounds is worth the work of two years.
Preaching Justice, Deliverance and the Needs of the Neighbor
A large share of the church's preaching is given to justice, to how the good news becomes practice. A teaching on Psalm 72 has framed justice as a call to action rather than a good idea: stop talking about the poor and the needy and get in the ditch with them, because they are family. Another teaching on the parable of the vineyard workers warned against treating religion as an exclusive club whose insiders decide who is welcome and what is acceptable, arguing instead for a church that cares for creation and holds no ownership over its own calling.
Teaching on 1 Corinthians has taken up boasting, freedom and the way a message can either connect people or cut them off. The argument is that the good news is always about the people who need it and never about the person carrying it, that boasting blinds a person to the needs of others, and that freedom given by God should be used to welcome the oppressed and to stand up for justice for all of God's beloved. A sermon on Exodus and water made the case that when people are desperate for the things that sustain life, calling out loudly is not bad leadership but faithful witness, and that God meets cries for water with creativity.
Giving is taught as discipleship and as grace rather than as a transaction. The church has taught that God is a selfless giver whose grace comes first, and that giving is a way of sharing grace with others and of building relationships rather than tearing them down. It is equally firm that giving must never be compelled or guilt driven, and that a person should take the time to decide freely what to share.
Communal praise is another theme. The church has preached Psalm 148 as a call for the whole creation to praise God, including the sun and moon, the animals, the young and old, the wealthy and poor. The hard part of that sermon was the seasons when grief makes praise impossible, and the answer given was the community itself: when a brother or sister cannot find a voice, the church steps up and praises without judgment, shaming or isolation. That, the teaching says, is a gift the church can give that nothing else can.
Memories and Imagination: A Church Looking Forward
The church has done some honest reading of its own history, and it is worth retelling because it shapes how the congregation is moving now. Almost twenty years ago, members of the church dedicated time to brainstorming what they wanted to see. One person wanted the committee structure reorganized. Another wanted the church to step up its outreach ministry. A third wanted to see more actual, true commitment. Reading that history years later revealed something sobering: the same issues were still being discussed, and the pastor named that directly, asking what it means to let the past define the present for two decades.
The response was a charge to move. Today needs to be a new day, the pastor said, the first day of a new First Baptist Church of Jamestown, a church freed to become a community living out of its imagination rather than its habits. The question that frames that work, borrowed from a pastor and scholar who asks churches whether their life together is shaped primarily by memories or by imagination, is one the church keeps returning to. Tradition deserves honor, but it should not become a chain.
Core values are the other half of that conversation. In a teaching on Joshua, the people of Israel re-affirmed their covenant before entering new territory, and the point was that some things do not change when leadership changes. A group's DNA does not change. The question asked of the congregation is what First Baptist's core values are, the things so central to who the church is that no change of staff or structure would alter them. The process is expected to take time and to require everyone's participation.
The People Behind the Ministry
Senior pastor Jason Knight serves the church bi-vocationally alongside a legal practice, and he has taught college courses in real estate law, wills, trusts and estate law, and business law, first in the paralegal program at Guilford Technical Community College and then a survey course for students considering law school at Elon University. He studied at Mars Hill University and then at Campbell University Divinity School, and he keeps a weekly lectionary reading group with other pastors, a Tuesday discipline of settling on a direction for the Sunday text and then testing it with other preachers before the weekend arrives. He leads the Wednesday night prayer study, sits in the Ask the Pastor conversations, and preaches a sermon most weeks from the lectionary.
Minister Daniel Godfrey preaches at the church, including a message on Isaiah's invitation to come and buy without money, and teaches with the congregation and with youth. He has walked the congregation through the advice Paul gives the Corinthians about marriage and relationships, and has led young people through Paul's letter to Corinth in a sustained study.
Mark Ashworth leads the Ash Wednesday service and its reflection, and shares in the Wednesday morning worship planning meeting that shapes the blended music and preaching at the Sunday service. He is the one who proposed the words spoken over the ashes, that people are mortal and loved, words that the congregation carried through the Lenten season.
Come Be Part of a Bigger Story
First Baptist Church of Jamestown keeps its life in public in a good many ways. Past sermons are preserved in full text, with video, and are available through the church's YouTube channel along with a Facebook account and an Instagram account for the broader life of the congregation and the market. The church's invitation is the same one its beliefs have always carried: come be a part of a bigger story, the story of God's amazing love, and go together, because going together makes the trip easier.
The address is 306 Guilford Road, Jamestown, North Carolina 27282, and the church phone number is 336-454-2786. On Sundays there is Sunday School and small groups at 9:30 and worship at 10:30 with nursery care for children from birth to age 3. On Wednesday evenings from May through August the market runs from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and on the second Thursday of each month the Xtra Years of Zest group shares a program and a potluck. For directions and a map, the church keeps contact information and directions ready, and the market itself is described at Jamestown Community Farmers Market. The sermon archive at fbcjamestown.net/sermons holds the church's teaching in its own words, and the YouTube channel carries the worship and teaching video. That is the life of First Baptist Church of Jamestown: a worshiping community on Guilford Road that keeps Sunday school, a Wednesday market, a midweek rhythm of prayer and honest questions, and a long conversation about grace in motion.