First Pastorate and Being a Part of a Remarkable Work of God

In life one is privileged to be a part of a remarkable work of God. I had that privilege twice. The first was in my first pastorate. This was such a significant time in our lives and was so multifaceted that it will take several blogs to cover.

After the devastating experience at Red Baptist Church, I preached for a month at the Lunsford Baptist Church. They then called me to be their pastor although I was only nineteen and greatly inexperienced. When we moved to Lunsford I did not know what I was soon to discover. The church was in a spontaneous spiritual awakening. God was moving and working in an unusual and powerful way in that little rural church and community.

Let me give the setting. Lunsford was a farming community. Around the church there was a small cluster of houses and everyone else lived on surrounding farms. There were only two establishments in the community, the Red and White Mercantile which sold groceries and dry goods and the Gulf Service Station which had an oil covered dirt floor. The service station was a dark, dank, dirty place where the rough men in the community gathered to gamble.

The Lunsford Baptist Church was a shingled sided, humble church building that sat on concrete blocks and had no underpinning. The church had been built over the years by the people in the community. The whole building was out of plum. A door would be six inches from a corner at the bottom and only two inches at the top. The sanctuary was heated by two stand-up gas circulators and cooled by two window air conditioners. Behind the sanctuary was a kitchen with a quilting rack where the ladies would quilt for money to give to the Lottie Moon Offering for Missions. There were two wings with class rooms, one with a fellowship hall that adjoined the sanctuary with a sliding partition. The fellowship hall would provide important seating during seasons of the spiritual awakening.

The community was a poor community. There were no monied people. The church ran 70 to 80 a Sunday and a good offering was just a little over a hundred dollars. Usually it was much lower. My salary was $50.00 a week and we lived in the little parsonage.

To explain the spiritual awakening that was taking place in such a humble context, there are several areas that need to be described in different blogs:

1. The awakening of a church.
2. Remarkable conversions.
3. A hunger for God and His Word