Not All That Deep

My earliest memory of church was my dad baptizing me when I was six. I still remember what he said: "A pastor has no greater privilege than to baptize his own children."

He was right.

I've baptized all three of mine.

As a preacher's kid, there was never a time in my life that I was not involved in church. And unlike a lot of PKs, I don't remember ever being forced to go. I liked it. Church was always the center of my social life. It's where I made lifelong friends, several of whom I'm still connected with today.

My parents began their ministry together in 1957 in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. After graduating from seminary, my dad accepted a call to pastor Fruitland Baptist Church. In addition to pastoring the church, he was invited to teach at the Fruitland Baptist Bible Institute, located directly across the parking lot from the church. FBBI was established in 1946 to assist local pastors who lacked the opportunity or means for theological training. So there he was, all of twenty-four years old, teaching men almost twice his age who had been pastoring for years but who lacked formal training. And he loved it.

Fortunately for me, there was no hospital in Fruitland. Equally fortunate was the fact that my mom did not want to deliver me at home. So technically I'm not from Fruitland. I was born right around the corner in Hendersonville.

From Fruitland we moved to Fairborn, Ohio, where my sister was born. Then my dad accepted a call to First Baptist Church of Miami, Florida. We lived in Miami seven years before transitioning to First Baptist Church of Bartow, forty miles east of Tampa, Florida. We were there only fifteen months when a friend called and asked my dad to pray about coming to First Baptist Church of Atlanta as the senior associate pastor. He wasn't the least bit interested. We loved Bartow. But he assured Felix that he would pray about it, hoping Felix wouldn't call back. But he did. And he kept calling. And apparently so did God.

In