Grandpa Mackey's Spiritual Influence

I got special attention from him when we visited.   He started molding me to preach.  In fact, he called me, “The Little Preacher.”   Grandpa Mackey was active in the life of the Church of Christ in Clyde.   He was a long time subscriber to the Firm Foundation, a weekly Christian periodical published in Austin, Texas.  It had been founded in the late nineteenth century by Austin McGary, a militant polemicist, who disagreed with David Lipsomb’s views on “rebaptism..”   Lipscomb was willing to accept what McGary called “sect baptism”, i.e. he was willing to accept candidates for church membership who had initially been baptized in some other church fellowship.  McGary considered these views heretical and started the Firm Foundation to argue against Lipscomb’s views as they were presented in the Gospel Advocate.   

By the time I knew Grandpa Mackey, both Lipscomb and McGary were long dead.  rebaptism was not a hot issue.   The Firm Foundation was much more tolerant of the Gospel Advocate.   For Texans in the thirties and forties, it was the Church of Christ equivalent of The Baptist Standard.   Church leaders subscribed to it to keep up with what was going on.   McGary had given way to a more irenic editor, G. H. P. Showalter, although many of his writers were not.    Showalter’s stable of writers included  people like R. L. Whiteside, Foy E. Wallace, Jr. and the colorful, though sometimes crude Texas preacher, J. D. Tant.   Tant was popular among rural Texas churchgoers.  Tales of his debates and encounters with those who crossed him were legendary and were often repeated within our family.

Grandpa’s interest in me had nothing to do with church politics, the papers, the debaters,  or the preachers.  He wanted to do his best to give me a head start in Bible studies.  I was assigned memory work.   I got the passages that were most prominently used as texts by preachers in the churches of that day – Mark 16:16 and Acts 2:38 among others.   When we came to visit, he would take me into his bedroom soon after I came.  I was then asked to recite passages he had assigned me.  When I had successfully done so, I was given a tiny Bible storybook that he had purchased from the Firm Foundation Publishing House in Austin.  The books were less than two inches tall, about an inch wide and perhaps a half an inch thick.  Each one contained some Biblical story, usually from the gospels.   I worked diligently on my memory work.