Commencement Week 2019

Graduation Week at Heritage has become a much anticipated occasion full of outstanding events. We are looking forward to a safe & wonderful time of blessing (Tuesday evening - Thursday).

Everyone is invited to participate in the various activities: Spring Graduation Banquet, Wednesday Night Rally, Alumni Fish Fry, and the Commencement Exercises. The date of the banquet this year is Tuesday, May 4, 2021 at 7:00p.m. on the Hopewell Campus. There will be plenty of room with small groupings of tables. Besides the good food, Dr. Tom Wallace will bring a special message that will encourage your heart.

Commencement will be held on Thursday, May 6, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. in the auditorium of the Hopewell Campus. Pastor Bill Blakely of Greenwood will be the Graduation speaker that evening. He has ministered at Berean Baptist Church for over three decades. All are invited.

The President's Perspective

Thomas Edison is often labeled as America’s greatest inventor. During his lifetime, he recorded 1093 patents for many different kinds of inventions. Some of his discoveries have truly changed the way that we live today.

Yet in a March 10, 1912 interview, Edison made these stark comments: “I’ve never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does...The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The ’genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he’s there to catch it;...” (p.12).

Thomas Edison got his beginning education in electricity, at the age of fifteen. A grateful, local stationmaster trained Edison as a telegraph operator, after the young Edison had rescued his infant son from being crushed by a moving boxcar. Four months of tutoring in Morse code, soon landed the teenager a job as a telegraph operator.

Young Edison moved around the Midwest. In the latest biography on Edison (Edison. New York: Random House. 2019. p. 594), Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Edmund Morris, states that 18 year old Thomas Edison started work as a telegraph operator for the Western Union Company at Union Station in Indianapolis. In Indianapolis the beginnings of this inventor burst forth. In the fast paced dots and dashes of the telegraph, teenage Edison invented a second repeater spool that could be recorded and played back at a slower speed. The high quality of his work embarrassed the station’s top pressman, and Edison was encouraged to move on.

Later, working down the road in Louisville, Kentucky, Edison burst out at breakfast. “I am now twenty-one. I may live to be fifty...I’ve got so much to do and life is so short, I am going to hustle.” (p. 603)

And that became the driving force of Thomas Alva Edison, experimenting and inventing up until he died at age 84.

Our work for Christ should encourage us to follow that same principle. We need to be “Steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.”

Graduation Week

Revealing Light in a Darkening World

“I do not believe it is possible to be a good Christian without having Godly friends.” - W.E. Biederwolf

Meet Our Student

Tyler McDonald began his life with the advantages of a Christian family and a good Baptist church. Tyler was saved at 10 years old, after much counseling and spiritual direction from his deacon grandfather. With later baptism and membership at Berean Baptist Church (Pastor Bill Blakely - HBC director), Tyler gained a love for the Lord.

In the middle of his junior year of high school, one Saturday morning, the Lord called Tyler’s father home to heaven. With two younger siblings, the responsibility of the oldest brother found its way into his priorities.

After graduation, Tyler began studying at a local, secular college in the field of Sports Broadcasting.

As Tyler testifies: “The early months of the pandemic, allowed me to weigh what was really important in my life. At the forefront I came to understand, it was Jesus.”

Headed in a new direction, Tyler now realized that the “most important message broadcasted anywhere, at any time, is the message of the Gospel. There is no better place than Heritage to receive & give that message, especially for me.”

Wednesday Night Rally

For the fourteenth year, Heritage will host a special Wednesday night rally for the churches. All are encouraged to attend. Special music also that night.