In Sutherland Springs, looking back and ahead
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS — Sitting among an overflow crowd during the dedication service of the handsome new First Baptist Church building in this tiny South Texas community, listening to Gov. Greg Abbott, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and other dignitaries congratulate the congregation for its faith and fortitude in the face of unspeakable horror, I got to thinking about the congregation’s humble origins. I know about those origins, because in 1996, on the 60th anniversary of the church’s founding, a member compiled a brief church history that included delightful reminiscences from a few who had been there almost from the beginning.
A woman named Joe Faye Hudson, for example, reaching back “into the hinterland of my memory,” recalled that the church’s only “air conditioning” came from cardboard fans a funeral home had donated. “Every time we met during the abysmally hot summers, the little white fans would be fanning furiously,” she wrote.
Hudson’s sister Vada recalled that a member would provide the preacher a large pitcher of ice water and a glass when he launched into his sermon; the rest of the congregation would sit and “salivate.” She said he would “rear back and hold our feet to the fire, then stop and pour a glass of water and drink it while the message sunk in.”
Joe Faye Hudson was 13 when she committed her life to Jesus at an outdoor summer revival. She was terrified of walking down the aisle, so her friend Esther went with her as “my morale support.” Sister Vada followed.
“Phew! What a relief it was to know I would not be going to that place ‘where the worm
dieth not’ and you burn forever and ever and ever eternally,” Hudson recalled.
“I was almost drowned in the Cibolo when I was baptized. To this day it’s a terrifying thought. As we were baptized, the preacher would say, ‘buried to sin and raised to walk in the newness of life.’ Only when I was raised to walk in newness of life I came up strangling and coughing with water in my nose and lungs, and I thought I was about to die. And I was embarrassed as I went flappety, flop up the hill with my wet clothes clinging to me. I’m sure I looked like a drowned cat.”
Hudson recalled ice cream suppers, “dinner on the ground” during the summer and church domino parties. Playing dominoes, she noted, was not considered a sin in those days.
“Back in those days, very few people had radios much less televisions,” charter member Virginia Baker recalled. “So, most of the time, there was as about as big a congregation on the outside as there was on the inside. Men that would never think about darkening a church’s door would stand out there and listen to the preaching and the singing.”
Those recollections are of a time long past, and yet many of us have had a least a passing acquaintance with humble, unassuming rural churches like the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. The little white, frame building where 50 or 60 good, salt-of-the-earth people gathered every Sunday morning for years resembles my grandmother’s little church in Bigfoot, not far from Sutherland Springs.
I remember summer Sunday mornings, my brothers, cousins and I hurrying along a dirt-path shortcut past an abandoned cotton gin to get to church early. If we were to distribute the worn paperback songbooks and the cardboard fans from a funeral home in nearby Devine, we had to get there before the arrival of the elderly church lady who normally performed the godly chore.
I remember Woodrow Thomas leading the singing. Dark hair slicked back, he wore a white dress shirt buttoned all the way to his prominent Adam’s apple. (This was a Church of Christ, so the music was a cappella.) I remember the preacher who drove out from Devine every Sunday; I can almost remember his name.
I remember the story my mother told about how, when she was growing up, the preacher would come home for dinner (lunch) with a family and how it was customary for the adults to eat first. That meant the only pieces of fried chicken left on the platter for the kids were scrawny wings and backs. She laughed recalling a “mean, old boy” who crawled under the house one Sunday and moaned loud enough for the preacher to hear, “Oh, Brother Kelly, come rub my belly.”
The Bigfoot Church of Christ still meets in the frame building around the corner from where my grandmother’s general store used to be. It’s still a small, country church — not unlike the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs was until that Sunday morning 18 months when 26 people, half the congregation, were gunned down.
In Sutherland Springs, the congregation that met in a small frame building — now a memorial next door to the new church — was intimate, a little bit insular, something of an extended family. Its people prayed together, ate together, played together. They supported each other during times of trouble, even before the massacre.
That small country church is no longer a small country church. From “the remnant” that remained, membership has more than doubled. Last Sunday, more than 500 people sat in the new sanctuary and an adjacent overflow room. The new structure, clad in beige Texas limestone with two towers reaching toward the sky, sits on a hill beside busy state Highway 87. It’s visible for miles.
Last Sunday was a milestone for a church that continues to endure pain and suffering from that horrific Sunday. The congregation’s challenge in the months and years to come will be to protect and nurture its sense of community and family connectedness while using its new visibility to reach a wider audience. With mass shootings continuing in this nation at a distressing rate, we need the hardwon wisdom and insights of these good people trying to get on with their lives.
Three hundred or so miles northeast of Sutherland Springs is a little town near the Louisiana line called New London. About the same size as Sutherland Springs, it’s known beyond the Piney Woods — if it’s known at all these days — for one thing: On a March afternoon in 1937, a gas explosion destroyed the New London public school. Walls collapsed and the roof fell in, burying victims in a mass of brick, steel and concrete debris. Of the 500 students and 40 teachers in the building that afternoon, nearly 300 died. To this day, the town commemorates its loss.
Chances are, the little town of Sutherland Springs will be remembered eight decades from now, a century from now — if it’s remembered at all — for what happened on a Sunday morning in the fall of 2017. Travelers in their self-driving cars on Highway 87 will repeat the story as they pass by. Reporters now and then will offer up anniversary retellings.
Pastor Frank Pomeroy expects more. The new building will be “a beacon on a hill to Wilson County,” he likes to say. The venerable congregation will be known for turning evil into good, for its good works among the community. When he speaks — prophesying, if you will — his people say “Amen.”