Track and Field

I decided to preach when I was 17, but I didn’t become a mental 50 year old just because I decided I would be a preacher. I was still a teenager, and I was pretty much interested in all the things that teenagers are interested in.  One of those was sports.  Actually I’ve never outgrown my love for sports, but as a teenager I actually entertained the dream of being an athlete.

Many males seem to think they have to prove themselves on an athletic field to prove they have a reason to exist in the world.  I was one of those. Unfortunately I wasn’t gifted with an athletic body.  As I look back on it, I think it wouldn’t have been a good thing had I succeeded in sport.  Many years later I got acquainted with retired professional football player.  He was a likable guy, but the only discipline he ever displayed in his life was in what happened on the football field, and he didn’t know what to do with himself when his career was over.  He made a mess of domestic relationships, and tragically he died while he was in his forties. Had I been a star athlete, his story might have been mine.

But you couldn’t have convinced me of that when I was a teenager.  I sat on the bench for most of my football career.  I got cut when I went out for basketball.  I was too scared of a fast ball to make a serious effort to play baseball, but then there was track.  I wasn’t fast, but I didn’t think you had to be if you ran the mile.  So that’s what I went after. I wanted to succeed so badly that I pushed my body to the limits of endurance.  I did everything the coaches told me to do.  Somehow they had the idea that I could improve my endurance if I would drink milkshakes with a raw egg mixed up in them.  I did that.  I don’t know that it helped.  I also was told that on meet days, my diet was to consist of soup and hot tea.  I did that too, and I don’t think it helped.  Somehow I got the idea on my own that eating bananas would help, so I always ate a banana on track meet days.  I liked the banana and it didn’t hurt my performance.

Nobody expected me to do anything, but I won the district championship two out of the three years I participated in track. My real claim to fame came in a meet in which I finished in third place.  It was the regional meet, and it was held at Brownwood.  I had qualified for regional by coming in second in the district meet.  A boy named Charles Barnard from Cross Plains, beat me in district that year.  The regional meet was run in heats against time.  

Like my 4-H enemies from Fisher County, Charles became my personal enemy.  He was the original trash talker, and worked his mouth pretty hard to convince me that I couldn’t beat him.   But there were a couple of other guys who provided even stronger competition.    In my heat, I led the race until the last step.  A boy named Caton, from Wylie passed me at the finish line.  His time was good enough for second, and I won third.  Caton got to go to the state meet in Austin, and I didn’t even though me beat me by only a tenth of  a second.  I was a little bit gratified when I realized Barnard had finished fourth. 

The next day the picture of Caton and me crossing the finish line appeared in the Abilene paper. All of a sudden I became an instant celebrity at school. I had a degree of respect that I had never experienced before.  Coming in third won me a lot more notoriety than winning would  have.   I won the district meet the next year, but I didn’t do as well in regionals.  It was a little funny that year.  On the first day of track practice, at least a half a dozen boys announced that they intended to try out for the mile.  I guess they thought that it would be easy if I could do it.  They didn’t know I had been training since the end of football season.  Within a week they had all given up their quest.  Maybe they found out that it wasn’t quite as easy as they had thought.      

And then there was Charles Barnard.  In the summer following my graduation from high school I attended a Sunday afternoon singing at a rural church.  Guess who the song leaders were?  One was Charles Barnard.  The other one was me. I had to stop thinking of him as an enemy.  Somehow the thought had never cross my mind that we might be spiritual brothers. Later we attended Abilene Christian together, but he never became a close friend. 

Political Changes

How Eisenhower Altered the Political Landscape in Texas

On my Facebook Profile I list myself as “apolitical as I can be” under political preferences.  Insofar as my public persona is concerned that’s true. I’ve been an election official for the past several years.  Theoretically we are not supposed to be political activists.  I try to honor that.  However, I don’t think that prohibits me from recording historical observations about politics.

During my teen years, the political landscape of the country changed significantly, especially in places like Texas.  From the time of Reconstruction until 1952 Texas was a part of the Solid South.  One preacher was instructed, “If you want to get along in this church keep your mouth shut about politics and vote a straight democratic ticket.”

Eisenhower started a trend that altered the political landscape drastically. Of course he was a war hero.  Truman had not been particularly popular in Texas.  Adlai Stevenson was considered a liberal intellectual and that was bad in the eyes of many people.  A controversy developed about who would receive revenue generated by The Texas Tidelands, which by that time had become quite valuable because of offshore drilling.  Stevenson argued for federal government ownership, but Eisenhower sided with Governor Allan Shivers and others in claiming state ownership.  The issue was so popular in Texas that Shivers was nominated for governor by both the Democrats and the Republicans.  Democrat Allan Shivers defeated Republican Allan Shivers.  Either way he served as governor.

Of course Eisenhower won and for the first time since Reconstruction, Texas went Republican.  Prior to that time all local elections were decided in the Democratic Primary.  The Eisenhower election turned everything upside down. Texas has elected more Republican governors than Democratic governors in recent years, and most of the time the Republicans control the legislature.

During this time of change members of my family felt quite a lot of inner turmoil.  My Grandfather was a strong Democrat.  He broke with the Democrats in 1928, and figured he got a Depression for his disloyalty to his party.  My father was a union man.  As a union man he was loyal to the Democrats. He also thought Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Depression.   In this day and time, it’s hard for us to realize the fact that many, maybe even most people were convinced you could trust the government completely.

Well, maybe not completely.  Daddy had been a farmer before he was a carpenter. Under Truman, the Democrats had imposed acreage controls.  My father may have been a Democrat, but he did not have a good opinion of the Secretary of Agriculture. The feds would actually come to the farm and measure your crops and if you over planted you had to plow them up.  To compensate for this, the government paid the farmers not to raise crops.  Supposedly that kept the market prices up.  A lot of the farmers didn’t see it that way.  They resented being told what they could and couldn’t plant.  They would rather have taken their chances with a free market economy.

So my Dad was torn.  On the one hand he thought Mr. Roosevelt ended the depression, and he was convinced the Democrats favored the union.  If I ever criticized the union, he would remind that it was union money that enabled me to get a college education.  Nevertheless he hated being told what he could and couldn’t raise on his farm.  He thought those rules drove him out of farming.   He had an interesting political philosophy.  He thought Nixon got a bad deal.  On the other hand he really liked Tip O’Neil, Democratic Speaker of the House from Massachusetts.  

My Dad gave me only one piece of political advice.  He said, "Don't ever run for office.  They'll prove you stole hogs in Arkansas even if you've never been to Arkansas."

The Decision to Preach

How does one decide to become a preacher?  In evangelical churches the idea of “call” is extremely important.   During my development years, most people within our faith community didn’t think much of the idea of calling.  That doesn’t mean they thought that deciding to preach could be made without serious soul searching.  I don’t ever remember anybody encouraging a young man to preach by saying, “It’s a good line of work to get into, and you don’t have to get your hands dirty.”  A young man approached me one time about wanting to enter a preacher’s training school.  He said that he was a mechanic, and he would like to do something that wouldn’t require him to crawl under cars and get grease all over his hands.  I told him to forget about preaching.

As a matter of fact I remember people saying, “If you can do anything else, don’t preach.”  By that they meant that you felt such a high degree of urgency that you couldn’t see yourself doing anything else.  Not a whole lot different from being called.

I’ve already mentioned our Wednesday night “sermonettes” in West Texas churches, and that experience began to weigh heavily upon my mind.  I may well have exaggerated my ability, but I received so much encouragement that I came to believe that God had gifted me to be a speaker.  Since I generally saw preachers in a speaking role, I figured that’s what they did.  I would find out about the rest of it much later.  I eventually came to the conclusion that since God had gifted me to preach, that’s what he expected me to do.  I guess you could say it was a feeling that I had been called.  I saw no cloud formations.  God didn’t speak in a still small voice (or a loud one either).  I had no dreams or visions.  Those were the things I associated with calling, and I didn’t experience any of them, nor did I expect to.

But there was this overwhelming thought that this was what I was put on the earth to do.  I eventually made my decision, and I’ve never backed away from it.   That was in the summer of 1952.  I was getting ready to enter my senior year at high school.  John Estes asked me if I would like to prepare a full length sermon for a Wednesday night.  I don’t recall the exact date, but one Wednesday night in August of that year I delivered my first full length sermon.  I couldn’t tell you what my topic was.

I wanted to tell somebody about my decision.  Don Rutledge was one of my best friends, so I went to his house and said, “Don I’m going to enroll at ACC when we get out of school next year, and I’m going to become a preacher.”  Don’s response was classic. He said, “You can’t do it. You’re too dumb, and you’re too poor.”   If he wanted to discourage me, he never should have said that, because I was determined to prove him wrong.  I have him to thank every time I’ve thought about throwing in the towel.   When you tell me that I can’t do something, that’s exactly what I intend to do. I think it’s genetic.  There’s a family characteristic known as “Bales Stubborness,” and I’m either blessed or cursed with it.  I’ll let you figure out which one.

Influences to Preach

Up until the time I was a teenager, preaching was the last thing I ever wanted to do.  Sometimes it was suggested to me, and I always responded negatively – not just negatively, but with a great deal of hostility being expressed toward the person who offered the suggestion.

After about a year of the training class, Marion decided that he wanted to start a second class for boys who wanted to learn how to preach.   He used material from Cogdill’s book to help us develop five minute talks.  There were eight of us.   We went to several congregations around West Texas and presented Wednesday night programs.   Of course, they were all amazed to see these young men, not dry behind the ears, speak from God’s word.   I enjoyed every one of those sessions.   I was the last speaker in each one of those programs and I was also the oldest.   

From that group I’m the only one who actually became a full time minister.   Jack Goble became a children’s home director.  His brother Tommy became a deacon at the Southern Hills church in Abilene.   For years Gene Foster has been active in the church at Gorman, Texas where he runs a flower shop.   Gene probably became an elder. I really don’t know what happened to all of the others.  Some were quite talented, but chose not to use those gifts in the work of the Lord.

Two things happened along the way that stand out in my memory.  Gus Nichols, one of the old pioneer preachers from Alabama came to ACC to deliver their annual lectures on preaching.  Marion took us to hear him.   Old Brother Gus was captivating.  The next year we went back again.  This time we heard John Banister, long time pulpit minister for the Skillman Avenue church in Dallas.   He was equally captivating.  Years later I formed a friendship, of sorts with John Banister.  His son, Bill, was one of my classmates at ACC.  John Banister was a prince of man.  I always looked up to him.

We would also attended the ACC lectureship.   I still remember sitting in the balcony of the College Church in Abilene during the lectureship.  They had just completed the present building.  The church been in existence for nearly fifty years but had never owned a building until 1952.   It was an elaborate structure for the time, and still is.  Churches of Christ usually like plainness and the College Church building was not plain.  The students at ACC, like students will do, loved to poke fun at what they considered ostentatious decisions.   At the time, the late Glen Wallace preached for the College Church, so the students nicknamed it, “St. Glen’s Cathedral.”

For me the proximity to ACC and the experiences with the Clyde church were extremely valuable.

I had not made the decision to preach yet, but I was extremely interested in spiritual matters, and I was exposed to some powerful influences.  I remember hearing G. C. Brewer.  He was one of the best known preachers in the Churches of Christ.  There were others who were not so well known, but I heard some outstanding preachers during my high school days, and I came to admire them.  In my next posting I’ll talk about how I came to decide that I wanted to be a preacher.

Spiritual Development During Adolesence

Young Boys Learning About Church at Clyde

I consider it a blessing to have grown up in Clyde, Texas.  From the depression years and for many years past my time, they maintained a youth ministry that was second to none.   They didn’t have a youth minister.  They didn’t know what a youth minister was, and probably wouldn’t have believed in it if someone had suggested hiring one.   But they had two things going for them – zealous parents and a tradition of success.

Back in the Depression someone came up with the idea of training young boys to make short talks about the Bible.   They frequently let those young mean speak from the pulpit on Wednesday night.   Some of them decided they wanted to be preachers.   At least 13 or 14 young men eventually became preachers over a span of about twenty or thirty years.   I inherited that tradition, which was well established by the time I started to high school.

Marion Hays, father of Bob, whom I’ve previously mentioned, was a deacon in the church and he decided to start a young men’s training class.   He started out working on our concept of the church.  For about a year he took us through a thin hardbound blue book titled, The New Testament Church.  The author was Roy E. Cogdill, Jr.  I kept my copy until I gave most of my library to Abilene Christian University.   Cogdill later became a leader in a protest group that broke away from mainstream Churches of Christ over congregational cooperative efforts in evangelism and benevolence.   The primary targets were Childrens’ Homes, especially  those operated by a board of directors, and the “Herald of Truth” – an  International Radio and television program which was sponsored by the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas with the support of churches around the nation.   They objected to this “sponsoring church” arrangement.   Eventually they would break off and form a completely different fellowship, often referred to as the “non-institutional movement.”  

Cogdill’s book was written before all that.  It set forth his understanding of the nature of the church.   Strangely enough, it was revised and reissued after the controversy gained full steam.   In the copy I have Cogdill supported the arrangement he later condemned.   But at that time I knew nothing of church politics.   My view of the church was entirely positive.  I wanted to learn everything I could about it.