Jacob Fowler’s Life Revisited as Bell Shoals Baptist Gathers in Prayer

A series of 30 questions was put before the congregation of Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon.

Church members were asked:”What do you want to hear addressed from the pulpit?” The top six responses would become the topics of a series of sermons that would start July 3.

The No. 1 choice, selected weeks ago: “Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen?”

“The Lord’s timing is perfect,” said Senior Pastor Stephen Rummage. “The Lord knew we would need to hear this message this week.”

Rummage made his comments June 29, after a prayer assembly for Jacob Daniel Fowler, 22, who died June 27 in Alachua County while camping with some 550 children from Bell Shoals Baptist.

Fowler drowned June 27 after a snorkeling accident at Camp Kulaqua. His father, Bill, brother, Matt, and wife, Diana, served with him as counselors at the camp, which had programs for children from elementary through senior high school.

Fowler graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida at age 20 and just completed his second year of medical school at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM) in Bradenton.

More than 100 people gathered in prayer for Fowler, a man Jimmy Evans, the church’s director of facilities, said he first met about 17 years ago.

“He was about five years old when I first met him and his family at church,” Evans said. “He grew up here. We used to do a lot of camping and fishing, a lot of church activities.”

Fowler was “a quiet type of guy,” Evans said. “He was a calculating person. When he was getting married, he figured out his finances, what it would cost him to be married, to have a car, to have a home. He would make a spreadsheet and stick to it.”

Evans said Fowler was both deeply religious and steadfastly determined.

“He was very focused on what he wanted out of life,” Evans said. “He knew what he wanted to be, a doctor, and he pursued that with all his heart. He was very intelligent.”

Why did he want to be a doctor?

“I don’t know if it was a challenge for him,” Evans said. “He just had a love for people and wanted to make them better.”

Listening on was Brandon Foottit, who met Fowler about two years ago and studied with him at USF.

“He was a man among men,” Foottit said. “His desire was to love his wife, and what he wanted was to provide for her the best he could.”

Tiffany Georggi said she wanted to add something to the discussion, standing outside the church, after a prayer assembly in the chapel and just before Brandon Patch was invited inside a smaller meeting room, to witness members of Refuge, the church’s group for college students, praying through their grief together.

“I just want to emphasize the love that Jacob had for his wife,” she said. “It’s very important to know in their one year of marriage they shared more love than some people have in a lifetime of marriage.”

She pulled out her cell phone, in which she has a picture of the couple on their wedding day, at the altar, leaning into each other, smiling widely.

“I look at it every day,” Georggi said.

The couple met as sophomores in high school; she attended Seffner Christian, he attended Riverview High. They both were active at church.

“Jacob is someone who was very involved in the Bell Shoals ministry in lots of different ways,” pastor Rummage said.

Fowler played bass and keyboards, with both the Praise and Refuge bands, and the taught seventh-grade boys at Bible Fellowship.

Rummage said Fowler was a leader as well on the campus of the University of South Florida.

“The thing that was most dominant about Jacob was his faith,” Rummage added. “That was the main thing he would talk about.”

And what would Fowler say now, to the people who gathered in prayer June 29, and to those who will gather in memory July 2, at Bell Shoals Baptist, and to hear Pastor Rummage’s sermon a day later?

“Jake would say that he’s doing just fine,” Evans said. “There’s not a doubt in my mind he’s in the presence of the Lord, that he would praise the Lord, and that’s the way he lived his life. He would say he won, that he got there before the rest of us did.”

Fowler will be buried at Serenity Meadows Memorial Park, Funeral Home and Crematory, 6919 Providence Road in Riverview. Visitation is July 2 at Bell Shoals Baptist Church Chapel, 2102 Bell Shoals Road in Brandon, from 4 to 5 p.m. A memorial service, also at Bell Shoals Baptist Church, is at 5 p.m. Sunday worship July 3 at Bell Shoals Baptist is at 9:15 a.m. and 11 a.m., at which time Pastor Rummage will deliver the sermon, “Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen?"