Between my junior and senior year, I was invited to work with the Garden Oaks Church of Christ in Houston. In today’s world I would have been called a youth ministry intern. I was involved with both high school and college age young people. I participated in visitation, and spent the summer trying to learn how to do church work.
When I moved from my parents’ home in Clyde and took up residence in Houston, I thought I had moved to a different planet. I saw many things I hadn’t seen more before – violence, blatant racial hatred, social intolerance, and a fast paced way of living I wasn’t used to. I took a group of young boys on an overnight camping excursion to Lake Houston, and almost got thrown in jail in Humble because we parked incorrectly.
The church was different too. On the one hand, there was an atmosphere that I considered legalistic. Actually I was pretty much a legalist myself, but this form of legalism had some different twists. Many forms of behavior that I had always considered to be sinful, were approved and openly practiced. If you asked why, they would simply say, “The Bible doesn’t condemn it.”
There an atmosphere of suspicion within the Houston church community, and the distrust was primarily directed toward Nashville and Abilene. I gradually bought into their rationale. It was a paranoid response. There was probably a greater concentration of people in Churches of Christ per-capita in Abilene and Nashville than in any other two cities in the country. I came to believe that the people in Abilene and Nashville were seeking to control the Churches of Christ. That was an irrational fear, when you stop to think about just how independent we are as a group of people. It’s almost impossible to get us to cooperate on anything, and if some strong man in a place like Abilene or Nashville had actually desired to crown himself the archbishop of the Churches of Christ, he would either have met with strong opposition, or been dismissed as a crank.
Along with that I developed a certain attitude of cynicism, and I began to view church leaders, my professors, and most members of the church with suspicion. When I returned to Abilene, I was a very different person. I was a rebel, although my rebellion took a very different track from most religious rebellion. I was on a crusade to straighten out the churches whom I perceived to be on the wrong track. I’ll have to also admit that I adopted that I became a racist.
Not all my experiences were negative, however. Later on this same church would support me in mission activities. I met some wonderful people at Garden Oaks and remained connected with them throughout the rest of my life. One of these was Louie Welch, who later would become the mayor of Houston. Louie seemed to understand my difficulties in adapting to life in a big city and a different church environment. He remained my friend until he died when he was about 90. A few years before he died, I received a telephone call from him one day, and it was a real joy to share good memories. One of those involved a sermon I preached at Garden Oaks one time. For some reason I chose to address the topic, “The Christian View of Death.” I started the sermon my saying, “As a gospel preacher I have the solemn responsibility to prepare people for death and the judgment to come.” Later I found out that, Louie and his wife, Iola Faye, were passing notes back and forth during the sermon. Iola Faye wrote, “What’s that idiot doing preaching on death on a beautiful day like this?” Louise wrote back, “It’s his solemn responsibility.”
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