Southeast embosser retires
By Patti Smith | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
John Coffman loves watching people give their lives to Christ through baptism.
As their names are being added to the Book of Life, as is written in Revelation 3:5 and 20:12, Coffman cannot help but think about writing their names on the
cover of the new Bible they receive as a gift from the church.
Every name represents a new life in Christ, and as a volunteer over the last 10 years, Coffman has embossed at least 10,000 of them on Bible covers. He
recently has retired.
“It was an interesting job,” said Coffman, who bought the embossing equipment when he learned of the need for someone to emboss. He and his wife, Sherry,
intended to give the machine and tools to the church after they made the purchase, but the volunteer lined up to do the embossing stepped down because of conflicts.
So, he moved the machine to the embroidery shop the couple owns.
“It’s always fun, unless you make a mistake,” John said. “Then it’s a long process to fix it.”
Not many people knew John did the Bible engraving. People that sat around him and Sherry at church were some of the few that did.
Whenever there would be a lot of baptisms or one with a complicated name, John would get a razzing from them.
Tongue-in-cheek, he said that he is glad he retired before the recent weekend when 686 people were baptized among the three Southeast campuses.
“Six hundred Bibles—I would have had a heart attack,” said John, who is 64.
As he ages, he said “everything starts falling apart.”
His eyes have trouble seeing the small letters. And, he and his wife like to travel to see family members who live out of state.
If he and Sherry were gone more than two weeks, Bibles would really start to pile up.
At 10 to 15 minutes per Bible, 30 to 40 of them would mean a day or two worth of work to get them all done.
John came to Southeast after listening to The Living Word broadcasts on the radio.
At first, he thought the church was out of town, but when he heard a reference to a local neighborhood, John and Sherry decided to find out more about
Southeast.
They attended one Sunday morning at the original Hikes Lane location, and have been coming ever since.
But it was a long time before he and Sherry were baptized.
That happened after John met a man experiencing some trials in his life. He told John life had been cutting him a bad deal and he wasn’t happy with himself.
“I asked him, ‘Do you ever go to church.’ He looked at me like I was asking him a question he never heard before,” John said. “He said, ‘Do you go to church?’ I
told him, ‘I sure do. You ought to come out some time with me.’”
The next weekend that man came to Southeast.
He laughed and enjoyed hearing a message that resonated with him. Then, John did not see the man for several months until one day he came up from
behind John to surprise him with good news.
He told John he had become a member of the church and was baptized.
“He said, ‘I want to thank you. You helped give me a new life,’” John said. “Here I am telling him to come out here and I looked at my wife and said, ‘You know,
we’ve never been baptized.’ Here I am helping him turn his life around, and he turned around and helped me.”
That happened more than 20 years ago.
As soon as John learned how to emboss names on Bibles, he put his own name on the cover of his Bible.
He has learned over the years that people want their names on their Bibles for different reasons.
“It kind of makes them feel like they have a closer connection with God. That personalization makes them feel like a part of what’s in the book or relate to it a
little bit more,” John said. “There’s also the fact that they won’t lose it in church.”