Last week while ministering in the Madisonville/Providence section of Kentucky, something occurred to me. While talking with my hosts Donald and Anna Cole and their longtime friend Thurman Harris (thank you to Barbara Wilcox of Providence who reminded me), they mentioned going to college in Hopkinsville, just down the road. Since their college days were in the 1950s, it occurred to me that they might have studied under Dr. J. D. Franks, who was one of my predecessors pastoring the First Baptist Church of Columbus, Mississippi.

They lit up when I mentioned Dr. Franks and had numerous memories of the lovely Christian gentleman from the classroom. By the time he taught them, he was in his sunset years, having pastored FBC-Columbus from 1921 to 1946, I think, and then serving the SBC Foreign Mission Board in Europe following the war. Some of our leaders will be familiar with the Baptist seminary in Ruschlikon, Switzerland. Dr. Franks chose that site for the seminary in the late 1940s and served as its first unofficial president, then as a teacher and business manager, as I recall. During this period, he led Southern Baptists’ relief work in that part of the world, which following the war was a critical ministry.

Dr. and Mrs. Franks are buried in Hopkinsville. Back in Columbus, the church’s educational building is called “The Franks Building,” named for this pastor who led in its construction during the difficult years of the Great Depression. Oldtimers in Columbus still have numerous stories of this gentleman. I always felt honored to follow him in that pulpit.

Perhaps a year ago, I reported here on the book “Safely Rest” written about Dr. Franks’ search for the body of his son Red who had been a bombardier in the war, and whose plane was shot down over Romania.

Today, Monday, the bulletin from the FBC-Columbus arrived, and inside was a reproduction of the church bulletin of May 9, 1926, which was Mothers Day (that was during Dr. Franks’ pastorate, of course). That church will celebrate its 175th anniversary this October and reprinting a sampling of old bulletins is one of the ways they are commemorating their history.

Dr. Franks’ sermon was entitled “My Mother’s Bible,” and elsewhere we are told that in the 5 years of his pastorate, the church has received 753 new members. Pretty good for a small town in Mississippi! They were calling the bulletin “The Watchtower,” but my guess is they dropped that after they found the Jehovah’s Witnesses used it for their magazine. It’s been called “The Evangel” for many decades.

Just one little item from the back of the bulletin. It shows how times have changed, and then again, how nothing has changed. Here it is, verbatim.

“Mrs. Georgia Bagwell and her sister, Miss Pauline Phillips, were among the first to reach the church last Sunday morning. They were here before the time to open Sunday school. These good ladies live eight miles in the country. They milked twenty-three cows before they came and attended to putting away the milk, besides doing numerous other chores that go along with keeping a home. In addition to that, it was a bad rainy morning, as we all recall. What an inspiration this example of faithfulness is to us and how it should shame many of our people who live within only a few blocks of the church, who have no cows to milk and little to do about the place, but who stayed at home because it was ‘just too bad to go to church.’ Does the little poem below fit you?

“No pelting rain can make us stay

When we have tickets for the play,

But let one drop the pavement smirch

And it’s too wet to go to church.”

That was May of 1926. Calvin Coolidge was president, Babe Ruth was hitting record-breaking numbers of homers for the Yankees, and my wonderful dad, then all of 14, started working inside the coal mines in rural Alabama. The first-born, he had dropped out of school two years earlier to begin earning a wage to help take care of his growing family which would eventually be comprised of 12 children.

Calvin Coolidge is a dim memory, Babe Ruth is a signature on ancient baseballs, but my father still recalls every detail of those days working in the mines alongside his father. Dr. Franks has been gone from us since 1960, I think, but “he being dead yet speaketh” through the lives of his students.