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Kyle Childress

On the floor of the little church building where I served my first pastorate were three spots on the floor along the second pew where the varnish and polish were worn down to the bare wood. It was where Dude Templeton, Olga Blair, and Irene Calhoun rested their feet during the church service. These three women, three dear friends, sat on the same pew together every Sunday for forty years. Dude Templeton, who was in her mid-eighties about this time, had been sitting in the same place for forty-two years in a row without ever missing a Sunday.

I was a young and new pastor, but I knew what I was looking at as I gazed at the worn slick places on that floor. Fidelity.

Woody Allen had a point when he said that 90 percent of life consists in just showing up. I’m convinced that a large percentage of faith as a Christian consists in showing up. Dude Templeton, Ms. Blair, and Ms. Irene had been showing up every Sunday, usually twice, not to mention weddings and funerals and Wednesday night prayer meetings, for a long time.

Over its 125 years that church, like many in that part of Texas, had Baylor student pastors who served those churches for two or three years before going off to seminary or to a larger congregation somewhere. In that short time, these churches knew their calling was to train and teach these youngsters and prepare them for mature ministry. With profound patience, Dude, Ms. Blair, and Ms. Irene endured the enthusiasms of post-adolescent pastors, sat through the rock bands and revivals, gimmicks and creativity sometimes bordering on and other times crossing the line of the ridiculous. During the week this trio of elderly women quilted together and went down to the federally funded senior citizens center where they ate lunch in fellowship with other elders of the community. What all these seniors—white and black—enjoyed doing the most after the meal was sitting around the piano and singing hymns, reading and reciting Scripture to one another, and discovering friends for the first time in their octogenarian lives of another race who, surprise of surprises, were just as Christian, if not more so, than they were. At church suppers these three women were legends. Dude taught the younger women that in cooking for church suppers it was imperative to practice two things: cook your very best because it is for the Lord, and cook a lot because it is for the church. My testimony is that she knew how to do both.

Dude had been in church all of her eighty-five years and was raised just down the road. She had married a good, quiet man who farmed nearby. Between the two of them they had and raised ten kids during the Depression, World War II, droughts and hardship, and through it all, they never wavered. They never missed church—except for a couple of times when she was giving birth on a Sunday.

The first time she missed church after forty-two straight years was while I was her pastor and she had to go into the hospital to have her gall bladder removed. While the young doctor visited with her as she entered the hospital, he asked her, “When was the last time you’ve been in the hospital? She said, “I’ve never been in one.” He asked a little indignantly, “Well, didn’t you have any children?” She reared up in the bed, “I’ll have you know that I’ve had ten kids but I didn’t have to go to the hospital to have them! I had them at home!”

Dude Templeton and her friends were “out of the old rock.” The phrase comes from the Texas writer, J. Frank Dobie, who used to say that the settlers of Texas, the pioneers were the “old rock.” They were the ones with the tenacity and perseverance to settle this country and make a living, put down roots and raise families. Dobie said that then there were those who were “out of the old rock.” He meant those who embodied the same determination, faithfulness, and long-haul perseverance exhibited by those who had gone before them. These three elder women were not settlers but close. It was not simply a matter that up into the 1940s Dude still had a dirt floor in her house or that she and her husband drove a wagon, and not a car, up into the 1950s. “Out of the old rock” means that Dude, like her friends, had that faithful steadiness, that sheer dogged devotion—to God, to her church, to her family, indeed, in everything in her life.

Fidelity.

The church has long known that we need to be people of fidelity over a long time and we need to train our young people in this way. Theologian Walter Brueggemann said, “The people of God were the sort of culture who loved their young enough to tell them what they had heard from God. They loved their young enough to say, ‘you don’t have to make up the way as you go. You don’t have to reinvent the path to God on your own. We’ll tell you. We’ll show you the way.’”5 And we’ll point you to others who have been walking this way a long time and you can learn to walk with them.

Author Bill McKibben suggests that many of our generation have been good at many things, but tenacity or faithfulness is not one of them. Perhaps we are good at the novel and the innovative, and the good Lord knows I sought to be both when I was the young pastor in that rural church. But when we look at those who have gone before us, sometimes we can see that on most days, it’s enough to be living faithfully together, adding another increment of quotidian devotion to God and each other, everyday faithfulness, giving one another the benefit of the doubt, being patient, and never, ever giving up.

A sign on the Winchester Cathedral in England says as you enter the church, “You are entering a conversation that began long before you were born and will continue long after you’re dead.”

One Sunday morning I watched young parents Bill and Tammy pass their six-week-old daughter Kara along the row to that trio of elder women. All three were born toward the end of the nineteenth century and here they were sweet-talking to a baby who would likely live well into the twenty-first. This was a conversation of fidelity that had begun a long time ago and by the grace of God would continue on.

5. Turner and Malambri, eds., A Peculiar Prophet, Kindle loc. 899. The quote from Brueggemann appears in a William Willimon sermon, “Surrounded by a Great Cloud of Witnesses.”