Within a month this summer, I preached at the three churches that Linda and I have been members of in the D.C. area. First, I preached at Montgomery Hills Baptist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland at the invitation of their current pastor, Rev. Emmitt Drumgoole. I was called to Montgomery Hills as associate pastor early in 1977, shortly after I had graduated with my Master of Divinity degree from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Southern was a very different seminary in the 1970s than it is today. It was far more progressive and academically renowned back then, with some of the most distinguished faculty members in Baptist life.

Rev. Don Harris, the then pastor of Montgomery Hills, was an American Baptist, a graduate of Colgate Rochester Divinity School. He came to Louisville to interview recent Southern graduates, because the church was dually aligned with the ABC and the SBC.

The D.C. Baptist Convention was aligned then with American Baptists and Southern Baptists and would become aligned with Progressive National Baptists as well. This was before the Southern Baptist Convention was taken over by fundamentalists in the late 1980s.

I joined the staff of Montgomery Hills in April of 1977, and after Linda and I were married in July, she and her young daughter Amy moved from Louisville to Silver Spring to begin our life together. We were welcomed at Montgomery Hills, and Don Harris and his wife Norma became two of our closest friends. Another two of our closest friends were Joel Hawthorne and his wife Terri. Terri served as my secretary, then church secretary, and Joel succeeded me as associate pastor, and succeeded Don Harris as pastor.

In 1984 I received a call from Leslie Parreco, who identified herself as a member of the Pastor Search Committee at Village Baptist Church in Bowie, Maryland. Leslie told me that Dr. James Langley, the Executive Director of the D.C. Baptist Convention, had given the Village search committee my name as a possible candidate to consider for their new pastor.

I was called to Village later in 1984 and began my ministry there on January 1, 1985. We moved to Bowie a few weeks after that, along with our son Marc who was born in 1980, and our cat Izzy, who was a gift from two of our other close friends at Montgomery Hills, Gay and Karan Israel.

It was the beginning of 33 years of ministry as pastor of Village Baptist Church, until I retired. My successor at Village, Rev. Emily Holladay, invited me to preach at Village on the first Sunday of July, just a month ago.

After I retired in 2018, Linda and I had to find a new church home. The irony is that three of my best friends--Lynn Bergfalk, Joel Hawthorne, and Bob Parsley—were pastors of local Baptist churches, and we could have gone to worship with any of them. But I wasn’t choosing one of them over the other two! So, we had to find a “neutral” site to go to worship.

The first Sunday after I retired, we went to First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., primarily because Dr. Jim Langley was a member there. We sat with Jim that first Sunday, and we continued to sit with him in worship at FBC/DC for about five months, until he unexpectedly died in June of 2018.

Jim had asked me to give his eulogy when the time came, as I had done for his wife Jean after she died unexpectedly in 2002. I led the family in a graveside committal service for Jim in June, then gave the eulogy at the memorial service at FBC/DC the following month. Linda and I joined First Baptist Church the next day. I told our pastor, Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell, that we were joining the church, in part, in tribute to Dr. Langley.

Julie invited me to preach at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C. on the second Sunday in July, less than a month ago. So, over the course of a month, I preached at Montgomery Hills, then at Village, then at First Baptist Church, Washington, D.C. I preached three different sermons, based on three different Lectionary texts, but we were warmly welcomed by many friends at all three churches.

What does all of this have to do with “spelunking scripture”? Just this: it is possible to preach at churches where you have preached before and still have something “new” to say, because the Bible continues to speak to us as we delve beneath the surface to explore important passages of scripture.

We have been blessed to be members of three churches in the D.C. Baptist Convention—Montgomery Hills, Village, and First/DC—and to get to know some amazing ministers along the way, including Don Harris, and Jim Langley, and Joel Hawthorne, and Emily Holladay, and Julie Pennington-Russell, and Emmitt Drumgoole.

We were saddened when Jim Langley died in 2018, and we were saddened again when Don Harris died earlier this year. But we give thanks for our friendships with them.

And we give thanks for our friendships with Joel and Emily and Julie and Emmitt and their spouses and children. In fact, just over a month ago, we shared dinner in our home with Emily and her husband Scott and their son Franklin, Joel and his wife Terri, Julie and her husband Tim, and Emmitt and his wife Kristen and their children Langston and Maya.

Montgomery Hills and Village and First/DC are special to us because the people in those churches are among our closest friends.