Churches in Houston, East Texas and Central Texas
AUGUST 28, 2007 (TUESDAY) – I started telling you about the churches I’ve attended and/or joined. The first two were the Liberty Road Baptist Church and the Denver Assembly of God, both in Houston.
The Liberty Road Baptist Church , near the corner of Liberty Road and Jensen Drive, was a lightouse for Christ for many years. It was the place where I was saved, baptized, and where I felt called to preach. I preached my first sermon there in 1948. It was a church that integrated young people into its fabric. As soon as I joined as a high schooler, I was assigned a Training Union group of elementary school boys. I was asked to do devotionals in Sunday School, to sing in church, to speak at mission points around the city, like the county home for the aged, and the tuberculosis hospital, near downtown. All the kids my age attended and participated in the main church services, and were often called on to pray, sing, speak, usher, and do anything adults did. After I announced the Lord had called me to preach, I became one of six or seven preacher boys in a church that had a total attendance of about 150. I was asked to sing in the choir before I knew what was happening. I’ve since seen many programs on orientation of new members, and I always think, “that’s not the way they did it where I went to church.” They followed the method sometimes used to teach infants to swim: they are just thrown into the water and somehow, they start swimming. Anyway, it seemed to work for us. By the time we went away to college, we were ready to do whatever we could, anywhere we could. The youth group was so closely bound in Christian love that we have met in Galveston for reunion the last few years – kids in their seventies!
The Denver Assembly of God, which I attended for a year or so as a teenager, was a dynamic fellowship of believers that provided a place of service for members of my immediate and extended family through the years, and meant much to the Kingdom of God. It also got young people ready to go out into the world and serve the Lord in special ways.
The next church I attended after Liberty Road, was the Morton Baptist Church in East Texas, near Marshall. I wrote about the church in a previous blog about Merrell Brooks, the pastor. When I moved to Marshall with my friends to attend college there with them, I never went to church in town. I went with Merrell to his church in the country. They let me teach classes, lead the singing, and sing solos during my brief sojourn of 9 weeks in that part of Texas. Because of severe allergies, I switched to Baylor in Waco. When I got to Baylor, I asked Herb Zimmerman, an older preacher boy from our Houston church who was a student there, if I could go with him to the church he pastored east of Waco, the Prairie Point Baptist Church, just outside of Groesbeck. He enthusiastically encouraged me to go with him to that little country church, and I sang and taught, etc. with him there for about 5 months. I thoroughly enjoyed that church, and the people in it. One family stands out in my memories, the Roy Fitts family. Roy was a tenant farmer, and a dedicated Christian man. He brought his wife and two children, a girl and a boy, to church every Sunday. They walked to church. When possible, they rode the tractor, managing somehow to find a place for all four members of the family on the rig. Sometimes when it rained, the black land wouldn’t allow the tractor to move through it, so Roy came to church on horseback, with one other member of the family riding behind him on the horse. If the mud was passable at all, the other two members of the family somehow trudged through it. The family was truly an inspiration. My education had begun in earnest, watching and learning from the Christians in small Texas churches.
By April of 1950, when I moved to the staff of First Baptist Church of Groesbeck, I had attended two churches in Houston, a country church in East Texas and another in Central Texas. Now I was actually going to be paid for serving the Lord in Groesbeck. This was a totally new idea to me. More tomorrow.
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Preacher boys in the picture above: Charles Fake, Maurice Smith, Herb Zimmerman, Townsend Taake, David Foster, Troy Conner.