Index | Maranatha Ministries | Bookstore | Family Place | Stories | Statement of Faith
31. Set Apart for Gospel Ministry
But soon the Bowens made their move, and we were ready to move into the parsonage. Emmanuel hired a local moving company to move us from Crapo to Broadway. Now that in itself had to be an improvement. For several months any time we had occasion to give our address to someone, a clerk in a store, for example, we had to deal with the built-in comedy of the name of our street. It was so much better to be able to say we lived on Broadway.
The parsonage was a huge, old house next door to the church. It had four bedrooms and two bathrooms. It had a large front porch running across the entire front of the house and a smaller porch on the side facing the church. It had a detached garage. So, Linda, Nikki and I moved into the four bedroom home.
The Bowens had some furniture they could not take with them to their new place, since it was considerably smaller. Specifically they had a dining room set, a table, four chairs, a hutch and a buffet. These were well-made of cherry wood, and had been in the parsonage for many years. We made arrangements for them to stay in the parsonage. We purchased them from the Bowens for a few hundred dollars. We are still using those items of furniture today.
It was fun living in such a large house with just the two of us and one cat. There was a small room downstairs that could serve as a small bedroom. We decided to make it our family room. We put my small desk in front of the window that overlooked the driveway. We put an old and ugly couch we had picked up somewhere along the wall to the left of the window. Our television set we placed opposite the couch.
The cherry dining room set occupied the large dining area outside the entrance to the small room. A wide open arch separated the dining area from the living room at the front of the house. We put two old couches we had facing each other in front of the wide window that looked out on the porch. On cold winter nights we enjoyed the fireplace that was centered between the couches at the far wall of the room.
We made the largest bedroom, the one in the back over the kitchen area, our bedroom. Across the hall was another bedroom which became Nikki’s room. Not that a cat had a room all to himself; we used it for storage also. But we placed the items necessary for a cat in the room. The large bedroom on the same side of the hall as our room became our guest room.
It really was a lot of space for just two people and one cat, so we decided to change that and add another life to the house. One day in May we drove down to the outer limits of the metro Detroit area and at a pet shop in a strip mall there, we purchased a West Highland White Terrier. We brought him home to Flint and named him Laddie, which certainly suited a breed of his distinction. His home became the kitchen, at least until he was potty trained. Actually, we never did get him to use the potty. We had to settle for housebroken instead.
Our work at the church went well. The people seemed to like us and we certainly liked them. One of my duties as the Assistant Pastor was to work with the young people. I was not called to be a youth pastor, and Emmanuel did not expect me to serve in that capacity. We had several couples in the church who provided that work. But I was somewhat of an overseer of the youth operations. And I was put in charge of the quiz teams.
Emmanuel had several young people on the quiz team. Competitions were held with other GARB churches in southeastern Michigan, as I related in the last chapter. It was all part of the Talents for Christ competition held annually by the GARBC. My job was to help train the members of the team, and to be their coach.
We met once a week and I would ask questions from the appropriate Bible text, questions I had written expressly for the purpose. The first team member to stand up got to answer the question, just the way it would be in the real competitions. But it was sometimes difficult to judge who had stood up first when two or three jumped up at the same time.
So I got permission to order a quizzing machine. The machine had pads which were placed on each quizzer’s chair. The pads were wired into a central control box which sat in front of me. Each quizzer had a red light on the box. Whoever stood up first turned on his or her light. Once a light was lit, no other lights would go on. This was the same quiz box used in the competitions, so it was good for us to have our own quiz box.
Emmanuel was also part of an area youth group that served the GARB churches of southeastern Michigan. It was called Gen-O-Shi-La. You will have to go back to the last chapter to see why we called it that. We had a rally at participating churches once a month during the school year. We had special speakers come in, or we showed a Christian film, or had some well-known Christian musician come. In the early 1970's as it was, we were not yet facing the challenges contemporary Christian music would bring to conservative churches in about fifteen years. The music was still mostly traditional.
Once a month the youth pastors of the churches who were part of the governing council of Gen-O-Shi-La met at area restaurants to make plans and have lunch together. I really enjoyed those lunch meetings. Although I was not actually a youth pastor, I did serve with youth pastors on that committee.
I also had opportunities to teach adult Bible classes, call on the sick and even bury one or two of the dead. Occasionally, Pastor Bowen would ask me to preach.
One day early in my Emmanuel ministry, Pastor Bowen tossed a bunch of 3x5 index cards on my desk and said I should call on the people named and addressed on the cards. So I began, a few each week as I could
NEXT CHAPTER
fit them in. It was really a useless venture, however. The people on the cards were people who had not attended church for years and probably would never attend church at Emmanuel again. A few of them had unpleasant experiences either with the church or with Pastor Bowen. At least they had experiences they interpreted as being unpleasant, although in most cases the church or Pastor were simply trying to minister to them. But those index cards did not represent opportunities for church growth. I got to hear a lot of the popular excuses people use for not going to church. One man sat in his living room and told me about his serious foot problems that often kept him up at night and especially seemed to bother him in the morning. “I have planned to come to church several times,” he told me, “but these old feet just wouldn’t let me.” As we continued our conversation, he began talking about what was obviously a topic more near and dear to his heart than church. That was golf. He loved to go out golfing. Why, just recently, he told me, he had scored the lowest score of his golfing career. Funny, I thought, how those foot problems did not seem to hamper golfing, even though they made it “impossible” for him to come to church. The evidence of one of the more significant things that happened to us while we were in Flint is still with me today, hanging on the wall behind me here in my study. It is a certificate that states We, the undersigned, hereby certify that upon recommendation and request of the Emmanuel Baptist Church at Flint, Michigan which had full and sufficient opportunity for judging his gifts, and after satisfactory examination by us in regard to his Christian experience, call to the ministry, and views of Bible doctrine, Thomas M. Parsons was solemnly and publicly set apart and ordained to the work of the Gospel ministry by authority and order of the Emmanuel Baptist Church at Flint, Michigan on the fourteenth day of September, 1971. It was not easy to get that certificate. On that fourteenth day of September, 1971, I had to stand in front of a group of experienced ordained men and answer a variety of questions on subjects both theological and practical for most of the morning and part of the afternoon. And these men had a lot of experience in asking the profound and difficult questions, some of which have no definite answers. Like dichotemy and trichotemy. Are human beings made up of two parts, a body and a soul, or three parts, a body, a soul and a spirit. Some argue that the Scriptures use the terms spirit and soul interchangeably. Others argue that these terms apply to different things. Those who argue that the terms mean the same are dichotemists, which refers to a Greek word which literally means cut in two. Those who believe the terms mean different things are trichotemists, or those who believe the human being is cut in threes. And wouldn’t you know it. My ordination council consisted of some who were two parters and some who were three parters. And this had always been one of those matters that escaped me in seminary. It always seemed to me that it was a matter of semantics. Both groups were saying the same thing. To me it didn’t matter if one were a trichotemist or a dichotemist. But it did matter to some, to many of the men who were examining my doctrine that day. I don’t remember what I said. I would like to think I offered some carefully worded answer that would satisfy both sides, like Jesus sometimes did with the Pharisees. But these were not Pharisees I was dealing with; they were men of God who loved and served the Lord Jesus Christ. Since I am writing this narration, however, let me write what I should have said, even if I didn’t actually say it. “Well,” I began. I was beginning answers with “well” long before President Reagan did. “Well,” I said. “There are some who believe in the two-part nature of man, body and spirit or soul, and there are some who believe that man’s nature consists of the body, the soul and the spirit. I believe the Bible uses all three terms to describe the nature of man.” The di’s could not disagree with that because all three terms are used, and the tri’s would not disagree because that is they way they often expressed their view. Whatever I said, it must have worked. I do have the certificate, after all, signed by both dichotemists and trichotemists. Some of those pastors had good pens with them that September day. Others did not. I can tell today by looking at the certificate whose signatures have faded because the signer used a cheap pen, and whose signatures are still strong more than thirty years later because the signer used a good pen. The moderator of my council, Pastor Donald K. Olsen, used a good pen. But the clerk did not, as Pastor Charles Alber’s signature has faded over the years to where it is now just barely visible. Pastor Dean Wheeler and Pastor N. A. Weins also used a good pen that day. But my friend from seminary, Rev. David McClintic, and my teacher from seminary, Dr. Jerome Casner have signatures that are very faint today. And there are three signatures I cannot read. One pastor I particularly remember may be one of those with a bad pen that day, since I cannot find his signature on the certificate. He asked me a question I was not prepared to answer. I do not remember what the subject was, but I remember having no idea what the man was talking about. Let me call him Pastor Smith, because Smith is a good generic name that has no connection whatsoever to the man’s real name. When I could not answer Pastor Smith’s question, and admitted it, he proceeded to give me a lengthy lecture, teaching me the importance of this obscure matter he had chosen to ask about. Pastor Olsen, the moderator, came to my rescue. “May I remind you, Pastor Smith, that it is Mr. Parsons who is being ordained today, not you.” And Pastor Smith did not ask any more hard questions. That evening, the church met to vote on my ordination. Since they had planned a fellowship time with food after, I was pretty sure what their vote would be. After Linda and I had been at Flint for two years, Pastor Bowen retired. He and his wife were honored at the last service led by Pastor and at the fellowship time which followed. The Bowens had led that church for more than twenty years. Pastor Bowen had indicated to me on several occasions that he hoped the church would extend a call to me to be the new pastor. I was not convinced it was going to happen. This was a big church in a big city. I had only two years experience serving as an assistant pastor. I did not think this church would call an inexperienced man. They needed someone who knew what he was doing more than I did. Besides, neither Linda nor I cared much for Flint, Michigan. We loved the people; do not misunderstand that important fact. But we did not care for the big, noisy and somewhat grimy city that was famous for manufacturing Buick automobiles, especially because we were driving a Plymouth Valiant at the time, a car we had to go out of town to purchase since we could not find a Plymouth dealer in Buick City.
The photo shows Tom and Linda and Laddie in their home, the parsonage of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Flint, Michigan in 1972. The church family has since moved to nearby Davidson, Michigan, and the parsonage where we lived has been torn down.
