Our family attended First Baptist Church – Sunday School and Sunday morning worship, Training Union and Sunday evening worship, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and missions emphasis organizations. From time to time we attended special or joint worship activities at the Methodist and Presbyterian churches.
[Simon
Peter attended First Baptist.
Interestingly, however, Simon Peter wasn’t a man; those were the given
names of one of the adult ladies. As I
remember the story, her parents failed to name her at birth, so she selected
Simon Peter’s name for herself after hearing it at church as a toddler.]
Brother Newell Clark was our pastor when we moved to La Feria, but
he left for another pastorate within a year or two. The church then called Brother Joe Amerine, who was
pastor when I joined the church and was baptized – and was still there when we
moved from La Feria.
Persons involved with ministries of First Baptist who were influential
and helpful as I grew up included the following:
Sword
Drill contests were sponsored by BTU; state finals were a part of the
Training Union Convention held during Thanksgiving week each year. Three memories stand out from the year we went
to Austin:
- Dr. George W. Truett spoke at one of the meetings. I don’t remember anything he said, but was
well aware of his legendary status as pastor of First Baptist Church, Dallas.
- I really liked the words and melody of the
chorus of the convention theme song, “Follow, I Will Follow Thee,” a song I’d
never heard before (Follow, I will follow Thee, my Lord/Follow every passing
day/My tomorrows are all known to Thee/Thou wilt lead me all the way). The hundreds of convened Baptists must have
included some good singers, for the harmony was great.
- Twila and I, with several other
acquaintances who were unfamiliar with Austin and the University of Texas
campus (the convention site), went to the top of the 27-floor University tower
to look over the town. M.E. O’Neill
(another Valley resident, several years my senior) and I decided to walk down
the fifty-four flights of stairs (two flights per floor) instead of taking the
elevator; the girls and ladies thought we were crazy. “ME,” as I called him, must not have been too
crazy, for he became a career missionary.
[Twila and
I participated in Sword Drill competition even after we left the Valley. I competed in the sixteen-year-old category
in 1942, going to State again. Twila
also went to State that year; the convention was in Dallas, so we had to travel
only thirty miles from our Fort Worth home.]
Autumn
trips from La Feria to Austin and Fort Worth took us through parts of Texas
populated (though sparsely) with “scrub oaks.”
Mrs. Amerine expressed pleasure at seeing “fall colors.” I thought little of her comments at the
time, but in later years, after I’d seen the verdant forests of Alabama (her
home state) and East Texas (Brother Amerine grew up in Livingston), I was
surprised she’d even noticed Central and South Texas scrub oaks.
[The
Amerines’ yard demonstrated their appreciation of beauty; it always looked
nice, with attractive flowerbeds in appropriate places. They regularly hired me to mow their San
Augustine lawn; I was paid fifty cents for mowing (with a reel-type push mower)
the parsonage yard and the lot to its north (upon whose lush surface other boys
and I often played football).]
◊◊◊
I became aware of theological “modernism,” or liberalism, during my early
‘teens. Brother Lovern, newly
assigned pastor of La Feria’s Methodist church, was said to disbelieve
supernatural biblical events, the divinity of Jesus (including, of course, His
miraculous conception, virgin birth, and resurrection), and other “fundamentals
of the faith” most Christians accepted.
I don’t know how much of what I heard was true, but I learned about
reputed modernism in the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, where he had earned his divinity
degree.
I don’t know what La Feria Methodists thought about the theological
differences between Brother Lovern and his predecessors, but those differences
caused a problem among the Baptists, who usually attended one Sunday service at
the Methodist church each year. (They,
likewise, joined us for one service per year.)
Some Baptists questioned the propriety of attending services conducted
by a modernist, but I don’t remember whether the interchurch visitations
ceased.
◊◊◊
Our family visited La Feria’s Presbyterian Church on special occasions,
and I played with the pastor’s two sons occasionally; they loved rubber gun
wars. Their dad, Brother Edgar, became
a part of my life several years later, during real wartime, while he was the
senior chaplain at the Gulfport, Mississippi Naval Training Center and I was a
student in the Navy’s electronics program.
Commander Edgar’s rubber-gun shooting
sons probably weren’t old enough for real fighting during WWII, but they might
well have been caught up in the Korean conflict of the early ‘50s.
◊◊◊
A Pentecostal church was located around the corner from our second La
Feria apartment, sixty or seventy yards away (we were in the middle of a large
block, facing south; their church faced west, in the middle of the same
block). Their evening services started
about the same time as ours each Sunday, but they were still going strong long
after we got home. I suspect the
Wohlfords could hear their activity even better than we could, for they lived
in the western half of the duplex, between the church and us. Few churches had (or needed) electronic
amplifiers, but those folks certainly sounded as if they were using
amplification.