Under construction - church builders
By Nathan Straus Statesman News Reporter

Courtesy Photo Top: Jarrett greets a young African friend. Bottom: Just one example of a place of worship built by men like Jarrett, come to foreign lands to serve.

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of stories showcasing local resident Dick Jarrett's committment of donating his time and labor for around 26 years of buildings churches.

Dick Jarrett's retirement activities include eating "stir-fried" bugs, walking past wild lions and showing African kids what arm hair is.

Jarrett, a Chandler man, is a member of Faith Baptist in Chandler and a church builder; his work takes him to the ends of the earth to accomplish the goal of spreading the Word.

For Jarrett, the work started in 1982 when he heard about a group known as the Texas Baptist Men who just happened to be building a church in Baxter at the time.

"I went over and was so impressed I grabbed a hammer and went to help them," Jarrett said. "I thought, `This is what I'm going to do when I retire'."

Courtesy Photo

The Texas Baptist Men had a rally and challenged an audience, Jarrett among them, to join.

"I was bitten by the bug," Jarrett stated.

Since then he has taken three or four church building missions each year, sometimes to places where the work hasn't even begun, sometimes to grow an already established church.

After all, church building is just as much, if not more so, about the congregation as it is about the building itself.

When Mr. Jarrett goes on these missions, it is entirely out of his own pocket; he does not ask for church support for these often expensive trips.

"I was blessed with an extremely good wife and job," he said. "Working for the railroad, if you do your job right they'll take good care of you."

Ask Jarrett what building locations he likes and he'll probably ask if the question can be narrowed down to time zones; he's been pretty much everywhere from Japan to South America and Africa.

"Looking back on these African pictures makes me want to go back," he said while + browsing through his album. The pictures + in his collection were taken by him, and there's no shortage of snap shots of ferocious lions, gleeful children and stunning scenery contained within Jarrett's collection.

Jarrett's first trip out of the US to build a church took him to Japan, where he worked in a crew of seven for seven weeks to begin construction on a church.

After the seven weeks a second crew came in to finish the job, and found only the inside was left on the construction list.

"The Japanese thought we had overbuilt," Jarrett said.

The work is done, he said, by workers mostly in their 70s. This expands the notion of what can be built when a group of people put their minds to it.

"The people that you work with, the workers, are the best people on earth," Jarrett claimed. "They're a clean bunch, and they never complain."

The work takes Jarrett to an uncountable variety of environments with an unfathomable number of diverse cultures.

One thing remains the same: those Jarrett and the Texas Baptist Men visit, those who receive the gift of a new church, are all eager to hear the Gospel of Christ.