How in the world would a person be able to describe seven years of his life on just one blog? It isn't possible, so I don't know when I will quit writing about Levy.
How we loved that church! We were just kids and I didn't have sense enough to know that I had no business being their preacher. I remember one day riding down the road to a funeral at Beebe, Ark. for Lindy Beaver's Father. I had a car full of people. One of the fellows in the back seat asked, "Ted, how old are you?" "Twenty-Six", I said. Brother Mel Landers was in the front seat with me and he said in sort of a startled way, "You told us that you were Thirty!" I replied, "No, I didn't. You guys asked me if I was thirty and I said NO." Barbara was Twenty-Three and we had two babies and here we were with a congregation of 400 people to work with. They were so patient and loving to us, especially the elders...Harry McCorkle, L.T. Blevins, Mel Landers, Guy Stewart, and Ted Sorrells.
One day about two weeks after moving to Levy my office phone rang and the voice at the other end said, "This is Al Jolly", who was the preacher at Sylvan Hills. We had a good visit and a few days later Al called and asked me to go visit the Green's with him and I agreed to go. I thought that we were going to visit a family named Green and when he picked me up and drove to the Golf course I learned for the first time about greens. I had never been on a golf course, used a golf club, and never dreamed that I would be crazy enough to go out there and hit a ball and then walk to it and hit it again, over and over again. I am a left handed swinger and they rented me a set of clubs and off we went to the greens. I like it pretty well and Al and I played often for several years. I remember one day that he had hit a ball out of the fairway and was over there trying to hit it and was not having much success. Suddenly I heard him say to himself, "Well, Arnold Palmer can't preach either!" One time Al and I were asked to help with a funeral service for a man that neither or us knew. The only special request that the family had was for us to sing, "The Great Speckled Bird." I told Al that I could Roy Acuff's part if he could get Brother Oswald's." But, we didn't do it of course. Al became a great influence in my life and I learned so many things from him and still love him even if he did move to Texas many years ago.
Our work at Levy prospered. We had a lot of good things that happened there through the years. We had some of the greatest gospel meetings that I have ever been associated with. In 1967 there was a State wide television program called, "Journey To Eternity" presented by churches of Christ all over the State. The campaign on TV was followed by a one night meeting in Barton Coliseum and thousands attended the service to hear brother Mid McKnight preach. We had scheduled a city wide campaign for the same dates so we moved our campaign to one week following the television presentation. Brother Harvey Starling was our speaker. A couple of nights before our campaign started we had 153 of our own members who assembled and went from door to door inviting people to come to our building for the campaign. We had workers every day out in the field studying the bible with people. At the end of the campaign we had baptized 22 folk and 73 others came to be restored to their first love or asking for prayers of the church. The attendance averaged 496 per service which probably still stands as the highest average attendance for a gospel campaign in Pulaski County.
We had other great campaigns with men like E.R. Harper, Jack Gray, Glen McDoniel, Cleon Lyles, V.E. Howard, Alan Bryan, Charles Lemons, Ira North, and others. No one was there to tell us that gospel meetings do not work. I wish that we could have so many more of those meetings today and we could if brethren would work as hard as our brethren did then to help them succeed.
The need for additional men in the leadership of the church was very great. In October 1966 we added several men to serve as Deacons in the Levy church. Then, in 1969 J.J. Pace, Jack McGee, and Roy Brown were added to the eldership.
Brother Mel Landers had a serious heart attack shortly after retiring. One Sunday the other elders and I went to visit him in a hospital in Pine Bluff, Ark. It was during that time that I mentioned to the elders that I would like to someday go into full time evangelism and mission work and them get someone else to fill the pulpit. We talked about it several times. But, in the beginning of 1973 I decided to resign my work with Levy and did so the first Sunday in February. I had no idea where my family and I would go but we knew that God would take care of us. We had no idea how it would be done or when it would begin, but here is what happened.
Following the service when my resignation was read, L.T. and Dorothea Blevins took us out to eat at Bowen's restaurant in Conway. During our lunch Brother Henry Jones, an elder in the Robinson & Center Street congregation in Conway came over to our table to visit. I must have told him that I was making a change in our work. About two hours later I got a phone call from Brother Arless Murray, one of the elders of the Hillcrest church of Christ in Oklahoma City, Ok. He told me that he had just had a call from someone recommending me as a preacher for the Hillcrest church. My resignation had not been made known more than four hours earlier. I told Brother Murray that we would come and discuss the work with them, then I turned to Barbara and told her about the call and laughed and said, "I will go and talk with them, but there is no way that I am moving to Oklahoma City!" My ignorance and arrogance all came out at the same time. I'll tell you where the Herman Junction boy moved in the next post.
Monday, January 10, 2011
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