[Granville-Hough] 26 Jul 2009 - Casting Pearls

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 06:51:13 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: CastingPearls -  26 July 2009

The Missionary Baptist Boundary Line.

Mathew 7:6 ôGive not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye 
your pearls before swine, lest they trample you under their feet, and 
turn again and rend you.ö

I am not sure I fully understand what this means, but it always seemed 
to say that there is a limit to what you can do in missionary zeal, or 
in personal witnessing, or in exhortation to others. One must note that 
it follows considerable discussion about the mote in the brotherÆs eye 
and the beam in your own. I found I was not cut out for missionary work 
when a distant cousin, John Carter, and I set about establishing a 
Baptist Church in 1942 in the mill-town section of Starkville, MS. Many 
of the mill workers were proud but illiterate people from the Tennessee 
foothills. They seemed to be the only people desperate enough to work in 
non-union, subsistence pay of the North Mississippi cotton mills.
I drew up the founding statement and creed, and I could keep the 
minutes, but I failed at singing, exhorting, or in even answering 
questions. Consider the question: ôAre you æFree Will Baptists?Æö Later, 
I learned the proper answer was that there were Free Will Methodists, 
but no such identifiable Baptist group. Or the question: ôAre you 
Cumberland Baptists?ö The answer to that was that there were Cumberland 
River Presbyterians, but no Cumberland Baptists by that name. In 
retrospect, there had been a bitter cotton Mill strike in the nearby 
town of Tupelo; and I think some people suspected us of being union 
organizers in disguise. To many illiterate people of Confederate 
heritage, union and Union were all one and the same.
World War II cut short our efforts, as John and I were soon inducted 
into the Army. The cotton mill closed down and the workers moved away. 
The land was rezoned and a new sub-division was built there. I can only 
trust that God had other plans for his mill town workers.
For some reason this discussion reminds me of a famous quote from 
Preacher Manuel Grayson of the Saratoga Baptist Church who finally put 
it to the Merry Hell and Togey Sullivans in his exhortation:: ôDonÆt do 
like I do, Do like I Say Do.ö I believe I knew two of Preacher Grayson's 
grandchildren as high school schoolmates, very fine people.