Tear drops turn to hope as they mix into mud with time honored dust.

At the beginning of today, I would never have imagined the sadness I felt as I locked the door and walked away to wash my children’s hands with the jug of Ozarka water we purchased in Pecos for that purpose on the way.

We drove to Barstow, TX today in order to peruse the building that once housed First Presbyterian Church in that small and dying community.  I had been there during the June 2009 Presbytery meeting in El Paso when we voted to finally dissolve that little church.  Members of the Black family who find their roots in Barstow were there.  That experience is recounted far better than I could tell it here:

http://sun.pnnews.org/view/articles/18908?page=1

I got the email last week that invited all of the Presbyterian churches in the area to go through and take a look at the furniture in the building.  If there was anything that could be of use, we should pick it up.  As it turns out, the entire building will be moved to a museum in Lubbock.  I can’t wait to see it restored because today ended rather melancholically.

Admittedly, I felt a little like one of these west Texas buzzards that have recently returned after the long, cold winter.  I couldn’t very well imagine going through this old building where people had worshiped for so many years.  According to the cornerstone, it was erected in 1900.  Picking through their building just seemed foreign to me but there is something about the mystery of the sacraments that made it seem all right to go.

The church I serve is just about as old.  Established in 1888, our ancestors worshiped without a building for the first 16 years, first in homes and then in the Methodist sanctuary and finally in the old fort chapel until our building was completed in 1904.  The difference between our church and the one in Barstow is that we are growing.  New members are joining and visitors are visiting.  The average age of our congregation continues to decrease.  We are growing and alive and vibrant.  Our building is used weekly by different groups.  Boy scouts and girl scouts meet there.  A group of quilters meet to sew bright colored cloth into useful and beautiful things there.  We worship in that building every week and still hang our Christmas greens and place our Easter lilies during the appropriate seasons.

The first task of our day was to drive out of our way.  I managed to get the key from our Midland offices into the hands of my father an hour and a half closer to home.  Dad (another Presbyterian minister who grew up 4 miles from Barstow in Pecos) met us for lunch in Fort Stockton and told me that the building hadn’t been used hardly at all for the last many years,  to be careful of the children in the dust and to watch for snakes if we went into the basement.  Good advice!  Trying the key unsuccessfully in one door on the north side of the portico entrance, I turned to the south door which opened to a foyer where folding chairs speak of the last two or three worshippers who met faithfully in that tiny room until they just couldn’t do it any more.

Our task?  Find communion wine trays!  The Fort Davis church has had what my friend Tom Koger would call a “high class problem” several times in the recent past.  That is, during special times of the year, we have run out of communion cups before we have run out of worshipers.  Our session has been struggling with the best course of action and had decided to look into something other than the old style silver plated trays that go back to the beginnings of our congregation.  Something had to be done but it seemed poor stewardship to spend so much money on something that would only be used a few times each year.  So we had looked into less expensive solutions which sounded better but never quite felt right.  When I forwarded the email concerning furniture in the Barstow church to the session, I immediately got a note back from Linda, our clerk, suggesting that we seek out a communion set in that building.  A marvelous idea.  There were also some other suggestions for actual furniture we might need.  I promised to take a camera and snap some pictures if I found anything.  I didn’t.

As we turned right into the sanctuary from that foyer, my wife said, “It looks like they all left worship and just never came back.”   She was right.  So was Dad.  Years of dust was layered on everything in site.  Hymnbooks were in the racks on the backs of pews with the Bibles.  A few of those old books were left on pew seats as if the person who last sat there forgot to put them in the proper place when they left for lunch after the benediction on that last Sunday.  A large Pulpit Bible still held several bulletins from services in the 1960‘s.  The sense of loss was overwhelming.  The 1904 Pecos River dam break that flooded the land around this little town of a little over 1200 had begun the downward spiral until there is nearly nothing left.  A couple of old bank buildings are boarded up.  The fire station no longer has a bay door out of which to drive a truck.  All around, the once fertile farm land is grown over with mesquites, cedar, and no grass at all.  The town has died and with it, this place where the faithful gathered for worship.

My twins are soon to become seven.  Our youngest just turned three.  I wonder how many generations have passed since the silence in this behemoth of a building was broken by the rumblings of tiny feet pounding across the floor?  Remembering the warning about snakes, I left the children with their mother and, flashlight in hand,  wondered down the rickety stairs into the darkness that was the basement.  It was divided into three areas, more reminiscent of cubicles than of rooms. Obviously I had entered Sunday School territory.  Scribblings low on an old blackboard tell of the presence of small hands holding chalk.  Old crafts and curriculum, piled on floors and tables and in closets mean that Christian Education was once important to the saints who roamed these halls.  It’s all memory to some folks a long way from here.

But I had seen those communion trays, still on the table upstairs in the sanctuary, covered with decades of dust... and maybe... maybe there is a way to honor those memories.  The Black family who had been at that presbytery meeting to honor and close the church where most of them were baptized continue to come to the Davis Mountains each year from the scattered parts of the world where they have all found places to eek out a living.  They all come to celebrate with us one week out of each year at Bloys Camp Meeting. And so those trays from which many of them have tasted the blood of Christ will return to this county and to the church that Dr. Bloys began and together we will remember the body of Christ and “proclaim the saving death of our Lord until He comes again”.  And we’ll do that together with all the saints of the Barstow church and the ones who warm the pews in Fort Davis today.

And so I locked the door and walked away to wash dust from the hands of my children and to carry these old trays back to share with a new generation that must be reminded that churches die... unless...