Harrisville native son Trent Grantham is a “let’s get it done, no holds barred” kind of man. He pastors New Covenant Church in Harrisville, where he is also a member of the Harrisville Economic Committee.
Wearing all three of those monikers puts Grantham in a prime position to see a need in the small community and fill it. New Covenant Christian School opened the Tuesday after Labor Day, September 2. “We really think our community needs to do this and the surrounding areas, trying to cater more to our community.”
Grantham is the administrator/headmaster as well as an educator. Classes meet from 8 a.m. to 12 noon Monday through Thursday. He said Friday is not a free day; rather it is used to teach life skills to all the children enrolled, from woodworking and auto mechanics to cooking and sewing. The school provides grades first through twelfth. With this being the inaugural year, Grantham noted how thankful the school is to Discovery Christian Center in Florence, MS, for a donation of at least $10,000 worth of various curricula.
Grantham was homeschooled and got a degree in Christian education. His four children have been homeschooled. “I’m a Christian and so I believe in Christian values. I believe in Christian principles. And I want my kids to be raised in a place where they have Christian values and Christian principles. And sometimes you can't find that in our public school system. And then in the last two or three years, we sent them to some other local educators around here that do things out of their homes and do homeschool collectives and things like that. And you know, we were like, why don't we just do this? There's an overwhelming need in our community for this. And so we were like, we can meet that need. We have our church.”
New Covenant has been in Harrisville since the late 1970s. Grantham is only its third pastor. The congregation moved to its current location in the early 2000’s, having sold their original property to Simpson County. It is now Harrisville Medical Clinic, an affiliate of Simpson General Hospital.
“So this is the church I grew up in as a young man. My parents back in the early 80s, they got saved here at New Covenant Church. This is where they found the Lord. I grew up in this church till I was 13.” At that time his family moved to Restoration Church in Florence. Grantham then moved to Hot Springs, AR, at 21 to attend Bible College, where he met his wife, Hillary, a Dallas girl. They returned to Harrisville in 2011.
Grantham said that in 2020 through a series of conversations from God, with God, and godly conversations with then pastor Kent Yarbrough, he was called to become the pastor of New Covenant. He officially took the position in July 2023. “God has moved. Part of the vision that God has given me is that I love my community. I grew up in Harrisville – I’ll die in Harrisville. I'm going to be buried in that graveyard right there behind this church. I will be at this church serving for 40 more years. You can’t pry me out of Harrisville; I love this place!” Grantham explained.
He has invested time and energy driving the roads, praying for his community. As such Grantham believes God gave him another vision for unity in his community. “One of our goals has been to get the local churches to do things together again and to get our local community to do things together again.”
Grantham continued, “And so God has really done so many significant things to make that happen in the last two years. We have a Harrisville Economic Committee. They accidentally invited me. This was in 2023. They were having trouble getting a lot of footing in the community. It kind of thinned down to five or six people. And my youth pastor, whose grandfather serves on that committee, said, ‘they're looking for people.’ And my youth pastor said, ‘Trent, would you mind just coming to a meeting?’ I said, absolutely.”
Plans included meeting at the park pavilion, but it was raining. Grantham offered the old fellowship hall at New Covenant, and HEC has been meeting there ever since. During that meeting members began talking about the churches having a voice in the community, bringing unity back to the community. Committee attendance has grown to 20 to 30 at any given meeting.
“And so God is really bringing unity. You know, there was a time in this community where our churches would not work together. We've seen that, not just this community where denominations just have these things they want to fight over, things that don't matter, instead of rallying around the things that do matter. We are fighting really hard in this community to change that narrative and change that spirit. And we're going to rally around the things that matter,” Grantham said.
Harrisville is hosting community events again on a regular basis to engage its residents. Things took a major downturn in 2020 with Covid, but the HEC and local churches are working to bring unity back to the community as Grantham repeated several times.
Grantham is excited about the future of Harrisville, not just the opening of a school to serve its community but growth as a whole, investing in relationships and people one interaction at a time.
