This Little Life Of Mine - Chapter 42 A Small Church of Hard Workers Thomas M Parsons

42. A Small Church of Hard Workers

First Baptist Church of Oglesby was a little church, in more ways than one. The church was small in numbers. I didn't record the attendance for the first morning service on December 1, 1974, but I did record the evening attendance. It was 29. In the morning service I preached from I Corinthians a message entitled "The Ministry of the Local Church".

At that evening service where 29 people were in attendance (remember, two of those 29 were Linda and me), we had communion. I preached from Hebrews 12. At the first Wednesday night prayer meeting on December 4, we had a business meeting and I began a series on the book of James. We had 19 in attendance, two of whom were Linda and me.

During that first month of December, our highest attendance was 60 at the morning service on December 8. The lowest was 10 at the mid-week service, held on Thursday, December 26, the day after Christmas.

But the church was small in other ways. There was a real lack of conviction in many areas in the lives of some of the members. I do not write this with any animosity toward them. Some of them were very sincere and very committed. But some, too many, in fact, were careless about church and attendance. I suppose that is true of just about every local Bible-believing church. There are always those who let the cares of this life crowd out their involvement with other believers rather than letting them be the occasion of ministry from others.

As I write about people who were part of that church in the early 1970's, I am not writing to discredit them in any way. I am simply conveying the problems these people had that the Lord had sent Linda and me to help them solve. Some of the men at the church were weak spiritually. They didn't think they were weak, but they were. They did not understand some of the basic Scriptural concepts of how the local church was to work. Many of them were saved from Roman Catholic backgrounds and had serious problems with that church's method of leadership by absolute control. That's okay. I didn't trust the Roman Catholic way of doing business, either. I still don't.

But the men of First Baptist took their distrust of leadership too far. And some of the "leaders" of the church were spiritual babies.

The women were more mature spiritually, at least more of them than the men. But they had their problems, too. Because many of them had weak husbands, they had taken leadership away from the men. You might say they were forced to do this by their husbands' weaknesses. But it weakened their marriages and their families. It also weakened the church. This would remain one of the major problems I would have to deal with over and over again in the twenty-one years I stayed at that church.

That's right. Twenty-one years.

In spite of the spiritual problems that some of the families struggled with, the people were hard workers. That was evident when we had our Sunday School Christmas program that first Christmas we were in Oglesby in 1974. The people had put the program together and were practicing it with the children before we got there. The date must have been December 22, the Sunday before Christmas. We had our highest attendance for the month that night with 68 people present. That was the way it was always to be. If there was something special, the attendance would be high. But for regular services, attendances would almost always be low.

But the people had worked hard to prepare for the program. The children all did well in saying and singing their parts. The accompanists were flawless in their piano and organ playing. And one of the men had designed and built a huge Bible out of wood as a backdrop to the presentation. When the people had a mind to work, they did.

We spent Christmas day with my family in Lincoln Park, celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary three days later, and anticipated the

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new year of 1975 which arrived right on schedule at midnight, Tuesday, December 31, 1974. Or was it Wednesday, January 1, 1975? You decide.

And what a year it would turn out to be. I had my first funeral in Oglesby in January, as well as the church's annual meeting. I remember one lady I had asked to run for an office had refused, and later I asked her to reconsider, and she refused again. There were not many people available to fill the various required offices. Like many small churches, First Baptist had constitutional requirements for a certain number of offices to be filled. But often there were not enough qualified people to run for those offices.

I asked this lady a third time. She refused again. Later I heard through the ever present church grapevine that she had said, "What is it with this pastor? He won't take 'no' for answer!" But I did accept her answer. These people were hard workers, but only when they wanted to be.

In February, Linda was asked to speak to the Ladies' Fellowship at First Baptist in LaSalle, just across the Illinois River from us. There were three GARB churches in the area in which we were located. Our church, the one in LaSalle, which later left the association, and the one in the small town of Utica a handful of miles down Interstate 80 from us. The three churches usually had Good Friday services together. We did that year, 1975, on March 28, at the LaSalle church. I think the pastor of the Utica church preached. I read Scripture.

A really big event took place in April, but it had nothing to do with the church. My parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. My sisters planned a dinner and invited many old and new friends to celebrate the fact that they had been together for fifty years. They were married on April 2, 1925 in the parsonage of a church in Windsor, Ontario.

A few years earlier, while we were in Flint, Dad had major surgery to correct a failed Dacron tube placed in his body to repair an aneurism in his aorta. As a result of that failed tube, Dad had lost his left leg, amputated from just below the knee. While in the hospital, his roommate was an African-American gentlemen who became a close friend. He and his wife celebrated the anniversary with us, the only black faces in a sea of white faces. I don't remember the man's name, but I appreciate the fact that he encouraged Dad through some difficult days in that hospital room after the amputation.

That summer, the church sent us to the GARB annual meetings in Winona Lake, Indiana. Also that summer I performed a very special wedding. My younger sister Lynne married her husband Phil at a ceremony held in the Mary-Martha Chapel at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The chapel is an historical building, as are all the buildings at the Village, assembled by Henry Ford as a gift to the world. It cost Phil and Lynne a lot of money, but it was a really nice place to have a wedding and a reception. The Village had its own wedding planner, so all I had to do was lead the couple in the "I do's" and pronounce them man and wife. I didn't have to be a hard worker to do that.

And before we knew it, it was December again and we celebrated the first anniversary as the pastor at Oglesby, and our seventh anniversary as man and wife. That anniversary was a Sunday, so we spent it leading the usual Sunday services at First Baptist. How romantic.

The year ended. Preaching. Teaching. Counseling. Calling. Baptisms. Weddings. Funerals. They were all a part of the year. I guess I was a hard worker, too.

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