pastor at Briar the final two years of my seminary days
AUGUST 31, 2007 (FRIDAY) – Additional information about the churches of which I have been a part.
In 1955, when we went back to Fort Worth, we joined the Polytechnic Baptist Church where Woodson Armes was the dynamic pastor. We loved hearing him preach. While we were there, we saw his son, Paul, as a little boy seven years old, give his heart to Christ and we watched as he was baptized. Many years later, we would come to know him as Dr. Armes, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Corpus Christi, and now President of Wayland Baptist University.
If you have been reading these blogs, you know we moved from Fort Worth to Briar, a rural community north of Azle, in 1956. We rented a house. We then joined the Briar Baptist Church. Without being unkind, but simply stating the facts, the pastor made clear he did not want us as members. (That experience was called to mind many years later when after our retirement Walter welcomed us as his members with open arms and heart). We then joined the First Baptist Church of Azle, which was a new congregation (not really “first”) that took the name because it was not in use. The big Baptist church in Azle was the Ash Creek Baptist Church.
A funny thing about Ash Creek: the congregation sat in Tarrant County, and the preacher preached from Wise County, because the county line ran through the church building. The pastor, education director, one of the members of Ash Creek church, an area pastor and I all commuted to the seminary campus in a car pool. We all became good friends. A serious incident occurred one day as we drove into Azle: we saw smoke coming from a house, so we turned off the highway and made our way to it. Smoke was thick and we couldn’t see, but as we called out and searched in the darkness, the area pastor I mentioned found a man lying on the floor. We carried him outside and firemen worked with the man but could not revive him. How very sad we were.
Back to the church we joined. Wanda and I joined the new, smaller congregation named “First Baptist” because we felt led of the Lord to do so. In 1957, the Briar church became pastorless and called me as their pastor. I gladly accepted, and was pastor there for the next two years, the final two years of my seminary days.
Wanda was still teaching school, but she had to quit at mid-term that last year, because her third pregnancy was affecting her abilities to stay on her feet and work. She needed time to rest. With the cessation of her income, we learned to do without a lot of things, even terminating our telephone service at one point. I was learning more and more about car repair, because our old car had to keep running. Many nights I stayed up late, using makeshift tools and used parts, and I stayed up all night at least one time. There was a high hill on the road to Briar, and as the the forward speeds of the transmission failed, I turned around and backed up that hill to get home. Must have been a funny sight. The next day I did it again from the other direction and made it to a transmission place, where I got a rebuilt one for $75.00. I don’t remember how I managed to pay for it. Probably one of the reasons it had failed was that I had taken a short-lived job of delivering telephone books for three days in Fort Worth. That’s when I found out how heavy a carload of telephone books is. It’s a miracle the suspension held up, but it probably was the death blow to the old “power glide” Chevy transmission. The car required a valve job every 10,000 miles, and I learned to do that myself the old-fashioned way. One night I was sure I had put out my eye, when working on the master cylinder under the car my pliars slipped off the spring and went right into my eye, brake fluid and all. So it went. We were determined to let nothing keep us from completing the seminary; we were ready to leave it behind.
We made a lot of friends in the Briar Baptist Church. The people were good to us, and showed a lot of appreciation to us for our ministry. As with all the churches we served, we learned a lot as we served there. The community, near Eagle Mountain Lake, has grown through the years and the church has grown larger and stronger. As soon as I graduated from the seminary in May, 1959, I let it be known that I was ready for a full-time pastorate, and soon moved to Kosse, Texas, not far from Groesbeck and Oletha, where I had begun my ministry nine years before. More on Monday.
Tomorrow’s blog – Memorial Service for Garrett McLead