The elderly pastor looked out across the faces of his small congregation, his eyes stopped on the 17-year-old youth sitting on the front row tightly gripping his Bible. He grinned as he remembered his own anticipation of his first sermon decades earlier. The Pasadena High School senior made eye contact with the older man and nodded that he was ready. The pastor cleared his throat and then turned to his congregation, introducing their Sunday morning speaker as the son of Dr. L.D. Morgan, the longtime pastor of the First Baptist Church (FBC) of Pasadena. The young preacher boy stood to his full height of 5’10”. He had a lean, athletic build with sandy blonde hair styled in a flat-top cut and was wearing a freshly pressed dark suit. He walked confidently to the platform, placing his Bible and sermon notes on the pulpit. He quickly scanned the notes that he had spent hours preparing. Though his heart raced in anticipation, he had confidence in knowing that his calling and message were from God.
That Sunday morning in 1959, the small congregation of San Jacinto Baptist Church of Deer Park, Texas, heard John Morgan preach his very first sermon in which he compared Saul of the Old Testament and Saul of the New Testament. He recalled the conclusion of that first sermon.
The Saul of the Old Testament was chosen to be King of Israel from the smallest tribe of Benjamin. He had everything the world had to offer as king. He had power, money, fame and physical strength. However, he ended up committing suicide. His words to David in 1 Samuel 26:21 were, “I have sinned, I have played the fool, I have erred exceedingly.”
The Saul of the New Testament, a brilliant man in the Jewish schools, set out on a mission to kill Christians. When God got his attention, his name changed from Saul to Paul. God chose Paul to write much of the New Testament. His final words in 2 Timothy 4:7 were, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” King Saul died with everything but God in his life. Paul died with nothing but God. The question was, which one do you choose to be?
Now, 58 years later at the age of 75, the Senior Pastor of Sagemont Church for the past 50 years, Dr. John D. Morgan smiled as he shared, “I knew from the time I was 15 years of age what I was supposed to do with my life. It was to preach the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. His words are truth!”
From his first sermon, to his graduation from Baylor University in 1963, Brother John preached in many small churches and led several youth revivals. One most memorable experience occurred when he was part-time pastor at a little church in Greenville, Texas, eight miles from Brenham. Brother John recalled, “It was a German Baptist Church. I didn’t even know it wasn’t Southern Baptist. It did not matter; it was a place to preach every week. One of the professors at Baylor University called asking for a reference for a part-time weekend pastor that would preach and visit the rural community.” Sitting in his office, Brother John leaned back in his leather chair and chuckled, “That little church rarely had additions before, but we saw many new people come to the church.”
Years later, while taking twenty-hour semesters at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Brother John began receiving invitations from all over to preach. One day, he received a phone call from Dr. Reavis, assistant to the Seminary President, who recommended him to Posey Baptist Church in Sulfur Springs, Texas. “At my first deacons’ meeting there, they told me they had visited every house out in their part of Hopkins County, and everybody there had already been saved!” He laughed and then continued, “They weren’t expecting the church to grow! When I first got there, they had about 30-35 people attending. In the first year we had 19 additions and 17 of them were salvations. The first young boy that asked Jesus into his heart and life was afraid of water. I practiced with him for three months before he would let me put his head under water. We were having up to 75-80 attending each Sunday.” Brother John chuckled as he pointed out that he was paid $35 a week as their part-time preacher. “I drove 150 miles each way every Saturday and Sunday.”
Brother John’s wife of 53 years in June, Bethel, shared her first impressions of her husband’s preaching over the years.
His preaching became stronger with each sermon. To this day, he is still more and more powerful in his delivery! After all these years, he still continues to grow in his teaching. I am sure he has touched the hearts and lives of many as he did mine and God has used him growing churches… especially at Sagemont. God has multiplied the church over and over again and God kept growing him and filling him with wisdom. He has given John a lot of wisdom from the very beginning. He had good training from the seminary and from having a wonderful father that was an experienced pastor. All of those things formed him as God grew him. Little old me…I was just standing by in the background praying.
Originally, Bro John thought that God had called him to be an evangelist, but in March of 1966, that all changed. When he received a phone call from FBC Pasadena, he was shocked! He recalled, “I was up late studying, when I got the call from Mr. Gene Alexander around 11:00 p.m. one night. Mr. Alexander had just come home from the FBC Missions Committee meeting. He told me, ‘We are going to be starting our seventh mission soon out in a place called Sagemont.’ He said, ‘Have you ever heard of it?’ I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’” Mr. Alexander shared the vision with Brother John and told him fourteen FBC members were going to attend the mission.
As Brother John and Bethel prayed about the possibility of moving back home to Houston, they began to realize it was God’s plan for their lives. He explained,
What really impressed me about starting a church in the Sagemont area was that this was a very unusual community. You had young married couples coming to work at the new Houston Space Center. For so many of them, this was going to be their first major job and they were going to be making a reasonable living and growing a family. There were also some older and more mature adults who had chosen Sagemont as their home. The Pasadena school district was phenomenal and known everywhere for their integrity and the quality of the schools and faculty. They wanted to raise their families in a place that was safe and protective. At that time, there were no nightclubs, strip clubs, liquor stores or X-rated theaters in the community. There was none of that stuff.
He leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands in front of him as he continued.
NASA offered these young adults the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of an incredible dream of going to the moon one day. In mine and Bethel’s personal vision, we saw all of these young couples wanting to raise their families in the nurture and admonition of the Lord!
From March of 1966, until the doors of the newly-built chapel opened in October 1966, Brother John caught a flight from Fort Worth to Houston every Thursday after finishing his seminary classes. He smiled as he recalled, “I would fly in on one of those WWII vintage DC-3 propeller-driven aircrafts. That’s why I think I have trouble hearing now because of those loud motors weekend after weekend! I remember the plane tickets were around $17 round trip!” Each Friday and Saturday, he went door to door in the new Sagemont and Beverly Hills neighborhoods, inviting families to join him at the new church that was under construction and would open soon. He would then spend each night with his Mother and Daddy “for free lodging.” Beginning June 1 of 1966, the congregation of 25-50 met in homes during the week and went to Sunday services at FBC, Pasadena. On October 5, 1966, the first service was held in the new Sagemont Baptist Chapel! Brother John shook his head as he explained, “I couldn’t have conceived how long 50 years was back then. I never entertained the thought of moving to another church! I never thought what the next steps would be. It’s always been one step at a time. I still think that way!”
From the beginning, Brother John recognized that Sagemont Baptist Chapel, even as a young congregation, had a special purpose. He said, “First of all, we believed the Bible! We were already starting to see liberalism creeping into a lot of churches. Secondly, we were all willing to serve and we all wanted to be faithful in our financial giving. They didn’t just want to go to church on Easter and Christmas!” On the first Sunday in the new chapel, 50 men, women and children walked the aisle to join the new church and nine-year-old Kevin Morrison gave his heart and life to Christ. Over seventeen thousand would follow in the next 50 years. Just two years later, there were 400 members! Sagemont Baptist Chapel became Sagemont Baptist Church.
At just 25 years of age, Brother John transitioned from a theological student and part-time preacher, to a full-time pastor of a young growing church. One memory he shared occurred in his second year at the church. Just two to three weeks after his oldest son, Sean, was born, he arrived home late one night after a finance committee meeting. “At that meeting, our big discussion was that our Coca-Colas were disappearing! Somebody was ‘removing without permission’ about three cases of Cokes a month. This committee was meeting to set up some way to catch who was doing it. It is so crazy to think about it now how upset we all were!” He chuckled as he added, “I got home about 11:30 p.m. and Bethel was waiting up for me. She wasn’t very happy. She was firm as she asked, ‘Where in the world have you been?’ I answered, ‘You know where I have been. I have been at the finance committee meeting.’ Then she said, ‘What have y’all been doing all that time?’ ‘Well…um…well we have…um…been trying to save God some money.” Brother John laughed for a moment before he continued, “I didn’t dare tell her about the Coca-Cola thief! She pointed her finger at me and said, ‘John, let me tell you something. You don’t need to be saving God any money. He’s got plenty! What you need to do is be here and help me raise our son!’ That was just like a word from God. That’s when I understood that my family came first! God understood.”
Brother John explained that the hardest churches to pastor are those that have 300-500 in membership “because they expect you to be at every single thing. You can’t always be there, but people expect you to be there. For those first years, if I drove by the church and saw the lights on, I knew that I had missed something that I was supposed to be attending.” Fortunately, the church began to hire ministers and support staff as the church grew and needs increased. He said,
I have always tried to bring in staff who were strong where I was weak. Over the years, our church staff has been a big family! There are not words in my vocabulary to express the appreciation Beth and I feel in our hearts for our staff family. THEY ARE THE BEST! There are a lot of people in ministry that have an ego and a feeling of superiority, but that is not the case here. What makes Sagemont wonderful is that our ministers and staff are all very different. We are much diversified. We have different spiritual gifts and we have different backgrounds and passions. Where we disagree, it is iron sharpening iron and there is still that respect. Most all of our staff could be classified in some way or another as ministers. It is very common to see our Building Superintendent, Emery Clark, talking to people about salvation in the hallways when our doors are open. He was even doing that 35 years ago when he was not on our staff. But the point is, he has never lost his calling. You see that in our staff!
Beverly Chambers is one very important staff member who has worked side by side with Brother John for the past 40 years as Administrative Assistant to the Senior Pastor. She had been working for an attorney in the Esperson Building in downtown Houston. She and her husband, John, had moved to the Sagemont neighborhood and she was concerned about their four children being home during the summer months with her working so far away. She started working at Sagemont on June 1, 1976 as the receptionist and secretary to Emory Gadd, Youth Minister. A few months later, Beverly was asked to move to the pastor’s office and take over the secretarial responsibilities for Brother John. Beverly laughed as she shared, “Our Executive Pastor Bill Moore reminded me daily that this assignment was only temporary!” She has been a part of many changes over her tenure, “After 40 years you would think by now I could read the pastor’s mind but that will never happen! It’s been a great experience and I am blessed to serve with such a great man of God.”
Brother John praises many of the powerful ministries that have come out of the church over the years from many faithful members. He credits them by saying, “We have had lay people who have a genuine concern about doing things better, for example, bringing in the AWANA children’s program and communion every Sunday morning. Also, the Bookstore and Cafe, the bus ministry, as well as the motorcycle and prison ministries. One day Laurie Cole came into my office to ask permission to start a women’s ministry that God had laid on her heart. Priority Ministries has impacted many women at Sagemont and across the country.”
In 1974, when the church was meeting in the Gymnatorium (what is now The Hall), a deacon told Brother John that he thought he had spotted a pulpit committee in the congregation. Sure enough, five men and women approached him after the service and explained that they were from the Castle Hills Baptist Church in San Antonio, which Dr. Jack Taylor had recently left as pastor. He and Bethel agreed to go to lunch with them, and after the meal, the chairman of the committee took charge of the meeting and called everyone to order. Brother John recalled, “We had a wonderful visit and it was very positive; they even started talking about things they wanted to do in the future. Bethel and I prayed about it, but just didn’t feel that it was God’s will for us. I thought, ‘I am too young,’ since I was 33 years of age at the time. I called and told him that God was leading us to stay right where we were. From that time ‘til now, I have never had another committee want me to come to their church! People asked, ‘How could you stay at a church for 50 years?’ and I am quick to answer, ‘Well, nobody invited me to go anywhere else!’” Brother John threw his head back and laughed.
One of the challenges that Sagemont Church and our pastor faced occurred in 1979. The Southern Baptist Convention leaders began to debate the inerrancy of the Bible’s sixty-six books. It became apparent that books and literature being printed by our denomination and distributed in our churches were often challenging the accuracies and authority of the written word of God. Our pastor and church took a firm stance that the Holy Scriptures were the inspired, inerrant and infallible word of God. The secular news media picked up the story and the New York Times sent a reporter to Houston to interview our pastor and the prominent pastor of another growing Houston Baptist church that did not believe in inerrancy. The story was well written and appeared in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times. Sagemont Church then and now stands firm on the written word. Today the other church has only a few members and attendees but God has blessed Sagemont as He blesses any church that teaches, preaches and practices the teachings of the Bible. Sagemont is living proof that God blesses His Word.
Over the years, Sagemont has had many themes and mission statements. The current one embodies the message of the entire church. Brother John said, “Our present mission statement says we are to be ‘Living Proof of a Loving God to a Watching World.’ Most people have heard a lot of preachers, most people have heard the majority of the different kinds of religious music, but the thing they are not sure of is what does a real Christian look like? They will say, ‘I am not sure I have ever seen a Christian. I have heard their preaching and I have heard their singing, but what do they look like?’ Well, the Bible says, ‘As He is, so are we to be in this world.’” He ran his hands over his face and said with great conviction, “The thing that God wants most from us is for others to see Jesus in us. That is where we are the living proof. God changed us! Once I was lost and now I am found. This would have been a good mission statement for the Apostle Paul because he was the embodiment of being living proof of a loving God to a watching Jew or Gentile. As long as the world can look at us and say, ‘I don’t know what in the world got into him or her but that is what I want in my life.’”
As the Senior Pastor of the Sagemont Church for the past five decades, Brother John has accomplished so many memorable things in so many areas of the church, including preaching year after year, encouraging debt-free living, building without borrowing, leading life-changing revivals, financially supporting missions all over the world, and evangelistic outreach programs and biblical preaching for all ages. The result is that thousands have come to know Jesus Christ as their personal Savior. The list goes on and on, but when asked what his greatest accomplishment has been, the answer may surprise some. He shared,
I think the biggest thing that we ever did as a church was read the Bible through one year in the early 1970’s. So many things came from that one event. That’s when God impressed me to lead the church to go debt-free. I was reading from Deuteronomy where God told Moses twice, ‘Don’t you borrow!’ That’s when churches were paying far more in interest on our church buildings in the Union Baptist Association than we were giving to missions. That was probably the greatest decision Sagemont ever made. The Great Commission, Matthew 28:19-20, became our marching orders for the rest of our lives.
When asked what his father would think of Sagemont today. Brother John simply smiled and said,
Daddy would cry with tears of rejoicing over what God has done because His children have been faithful! He wanted to put a Southern Baptist Church in every area of Pasadena before he retired, which he did. As the pastor of FBC, Pasadena, he started seven churches, Sagemont being the 7th. He would just be absolutely thrilled because Sagemont Church was the one that truly fulfilled his vision. Before he passed away, he loved to attend here and watch, look and pray. He witnessed the same unity he had known at FBC Pasadena for 33½ years as the unity that Sagemont has been blessed with for half of a century. And just think, THE BEST IS YET TO COME if Sagemont Church stays faithful to the purpose of her existence!
As for celebrating 50 years of serving as the Senior Pastor for Sagemont Church, Brother John shared, “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives. On bended knees, we need to take ‘our hats off to the past and our coats off to the future.’ Just keep looking to Jesus as the Author and Finisher of our faith. This is certainly not the peak…just a spot to stop on the mountain and look to see what the Lord has done, then keep on until His return!” His hazel eyes sparkled as he concluded, “Just like I preached about the Apostle Paul all those years ago, for the last 50 years here at Sagemont, I have fought the good fight, I want to finish the course and I want to keep the faith. Of course, I don’t know what God has in store, but I don’t think that any of us ever finish until we meet the Lord…and everyone should want to finish well.”
It has been 58 years since Brother John preached his first sermon about the two Sauls of the Bible. Now, a 75-year-old, highly respected pastor stands before his loving congregation. With his worn Bible in hand, he still spreads out his notes on the podium before each sermon. Thousands of sermons later, no longer having the feelings of apprehension, he still feels as strong a calling from God as he did as a 17-year-old boy…to preach the Gospel!