My first permanent assignment after finishing OTS and Aircraft Maintenance Officer Course (AMOC), was at Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. We arrived there in the late summer of 1980 and attended the Fort Walton Beach Church of Christ. I taught a Sunday morning Bible study class for retirees and helped Russ King with the youth group during the almost three years we lived in Florida. After about a year I heard that the Destin Church of Christ was without a preacher. It seems their preacher left on very short notice and they were looking for a new one. I talked with the elders of the Destin church about filling-in until they found a full-time preacher. I would have loved to have applied for the job but couldn’t because of my military responsibilities. They said they’d like to hear me teach and preach once or twice before making a decision to let me fill-in until they found a preacher. After one or two weeks of “trying out” they asked me to continue to teach Sunday morning adult Bible class and to preach on Sunday mornings and evenings. I told them I wouldn’t be able to come out on Wednesday nights but they said the men of the congregation would take turns with those lessons. After a month or so it seemed to me as if they had stopped looking for a full-time preacher. They even listed me as their preacher in an ad they put in the local newspaper. After about six months I told them they really needed to find a full time preacher as the twice-a-Sunday drives to Destin and the lesson preparation were just too much for me. They soon found a full-time preacher. Many of the members of the Destin church were either active military or retired military. This was a very good time of Bible teaching and preaching experience.

After a couple of years at Eglin AFB I began thinking about my next assignment. The good thing about being an officer is that you have more control over your assignments than enlisted members. I knew I was “hot” for an overseas assignment so I wanted to give my input before the military just decided where it wanted to send me. I wanted to go on an accompanied assignment (one where my entire family could go as opposed to a remote assignment where the family isn’t allowed to go) in a country where I could get close to Bible history. We didn’t have any bases in Israel so that country was out. We could go as a family to Italy, Turkey, or Greece. I decided I’d like to “walk in the footsteps of the Apostle Paul” in Greece and inquired into the possibility of being assigned there. I was told there were no positions for an Aircraft Maintenance Officer anywhere in Greece. There was, however, a slot coming open for a Munitions Maintenance Officer at Hellenikon Air Base in Athens in the summer of 1983. As Munitions maintenance and Aircraft maintenance were sister fields, I was able to take a “crossover” course at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver to take the Munitions Maintenance Officer position. Prior to moving to Athens I got the address of a member of the American military Church of Christ that met in a rented storefront just outside the main gate of Hellenikon Air Base. I wrote asking about the church and he replied very quickly. He asked if I had any teaching or preaching experience. I wrote back about my degree from LCC and the experience I’d gained at the Fort Walton Beach Church and at the Destin Church. He again wrote back quickly asking if I’d assume some of the preaching and teaching responsibilities when I got there as most of the men had little or no experience. I replied enthusiastically that I’d love to do that and we headed to Greece.

The American Military Church of Christ at Hellenikon was a vibrant young group. There were more than 70 in attendance every Sunday in the early 1980s. Most of the families were young military families. There were only one or two couples who were older and who worked as civilians for the military or the US government in Athens. The good thing about the congregation was their youth, energy, and enthusiasm. The not-so-good thing was the inexperience of most of the young Christian men who attended there. Before I arrived they had a policy of rotating the preaching and teaching duties among the men. Every Christian man in the congregation took his turn. A few of the men could do a pretty good job of teaching and preaching. Some of the men wrote out their lessons/sermons and simply read them. One guy just read sermon outlines out of a sermon outline book when it was his turn. He didn’t add anything to the outlines—he simple read the outline! Clearly, everyone isn’t cut out to be a preacher/teacher. I started teaching Sunday morning Bible class and preaching the first Sunday we were in Greece.

I was very excited about being a part of this young group. I knew I had much to offer and I knew I could also gain valuable experience. There were no men old enough to be elders in this group so we operated on the “men’s meeting” system of congregational leadership—a system in place in Ephesus where Paul left Timothy to help “mature” the church, and Crete where Paul sent Titus for the same purpose. There is no doubt young churches and young Christians need to mature and sometimes need help in the maturing process. One early experience with the group in Greece points this out very clearly. The men met one Saturday every month at the NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) Club for breakfast and to talk about the work of the church. We had been there just a few weeks when the men invited me to the monthly men’s breakfast. During the meeting I brought up an idea to change something in the meeting times. I don’t remember exactly what my suggestion was but it was something I thought would make our assembly times better for most people. I was shocked by the response of the men. When I suggested changing meeting times the other guys just sat and looked at each other. After a couple of seconds one of the guys said something like, “We need to ask our wives before we change anything like that.” I told them that we were the men of the church—in lieu of having elders—and we had the biblical authority to make decisions concerning the operation of the congregation. Again, the men told me they could make no such decision without first clearing it with their wives. I stressed our authority to make decisions for the church but I saw I wasn’t getting through to them. The downside to this story is that a couple of the more forceful wives in the congregation (I’m trying to be polite here) had it in for me the rest of the time we were in Greece. I often felt they tried to undermine me as they clearly undermined their own husbands. A couple of months before I moved from Greece to Germany (after we’d been in Greece for about a year) some of the men came to our apartment one evening with the local American missionary (who worked with a Greek-speaking congregation). They told me they thought I had too much “power” in the congregation and they wanted me to step aside and not preach or teach any more. This was like a punch in the gut to me and I believe to this day that the weak Christian men and some too-forceful wives were behind it.

I have had considerable experience with overseas congregations of the Church of Christ. I spent over twenty years in the U.S. Air Force and I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly (Sorry Clint) of Church of Christ military congregations. This is my story.

I was not a baptized member of the Churches of Christ when I first entered the military in October 1969. I was stationed at Craig Air Force Base in Selma, Alabama, (my first permanent assignment) for almost two years when I married Deborah (June 17, 1972). Deborah had been raised in a strict (dogmatic) segment of the Church of Christ. I grew up attending the Evangelical United Brethren Church which joined with the Methodist Church in 1969 to form the United Methodist Church. Although I attended regularly as a child, I was not what you would call a devout Christian when I met Deborah in April 1972.

We were engaged on the third weekend of knowing each other. Her father was in the Air Force in North Dakota and she was living alone in Atlanta at the time. I had not met her parents before we got engaged. He mother was very faithful in attending church services. Her father, although baptized, was an alcoholic and provided no spiritual leadership in the family. On the day we got engaged Deborah said, “I’m not sure how my mother will take our marriage.” I probed for further information and she said, “Well, ours will be a mixed marriage—I’m a Christian and you’re a Methodist.” This floored me and challenged me. I was determined to learn as much as I could about the Christianity and the various Christian denominations. So, when I went to Thailand six months after we got married (Korat Royal Thai Air Base) I spent much of my free time in the base library (Korat Air Base had a wonderful library) reading about religion. I read about the various Christian denominations, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, and etc.

After we got married I attended a local Church of Christ with Deborah in Selma. This was my introduction to how things were done and what people believed in the Churches of Christ. When I got to Thailand I looked for a congregation of the Church of Christ on base. I found that a group of men met on Sunday afternoons in the Base Chapel. There were only about 5-10 young men who met but they seemed serious about their faith. I attended a couple of times but no one from the group asked about my religious background. On the second or third visit they were talking about a schedule of preaching. The men took turns bringing lessons. They asked me if I’d like to be on the schedule. I told them I understood that they expected people to be baptized as adults in order to be considered members of the Church of Christ and that I’d only been baptized as an infant in the United Brethren Church so I declined their offer. I’m sure they would have changed their minds about allowing me to bring a lesson after my “confession.” I didn’t attend much after that. I just continued to study on my own.

I continued to attend worship services with Deborah when I returned from Thailand. I was baptized by Gray Bortz, the Youth Minister of the Greenlawn Church of Christ in Lubbock, Texas, on October 27, 1977. I was convinced that although I’d seen and heard some things in the Churches of Christ that I believed were more denominational dogma than biblical doctrine, this group was closer to the teaching of the New Testament than any other Christian group I’d studied. Besides, I put my faith in God through Christ and not in the particular or peculiar beliefs of the Churches of Christ. I immediately let my family and friends know that I wanted to dedicate my life to working for Christ. To that end, I began making plans to leave the military after just nine years to enroll in the Bible Department of Lubbock Christian College (LCC). I got out of the Air Force in August 1978. As I already had several years of college credit from night classes in the military I only had to take classes for 18 months to finish my BA degree. I graduated in early December 1979.

My plan was to get my BA degree from LCC and to get a position with a congregation of the Church of Christ as a preacher. Reality began to set in during the summer before I graduated. I had already begun to look into possible preaching positions and found that churches weren’t very keen on hiring a relatively “new Christian” with four children (Deborah was pregnant with our fourth at the time) and no experience. Although I was carrying a straight “A” average at LCC, I couldn’t find a church willing to take a risk on me. Dr. Charles Stephenson, head of the Bible Department at LCC, helped me get an offer from the Northside Church of Christ (where he was the preacher) to be the assistant minister. They were only able to offer me a small, three bedroom house and about $700 a month in salary. That wasn’t nearly enough to support my family. I decided the best course of action for my family would be for me to go back into the military as an enlisted airman. In July 1979 I went to an Air Force recruiter and asked about going back into the enlisted force. The recruiter asked questions about my background and education and told me that I could probably go back through Officers Training School (OTS) and become a Second Lieutenant. He scheduled me to take the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) in Amarillo, Texas, at the end of the first week of August. Our fourth child, Jessica, was born in Lubbock on August 8, the day I was taking the AFOQT in Amarillo. I scored well on the test and was accepted into OTS the first week of January 1980. I decided that if I couldn’t be a preacher as a civilian I’d take every opportunity to preach and teach while I finished my military career. That way I could support my family, gain experience, and help churches wherever I happened to be stationed.

When I got to K-town I asked the elders if there were any specific topics they wanted me to preach/teach on. They said, “Dave, just preach Jesus!” As that has always been my preference, I was very glad to hear them say it. I immediately began preaching through the Gospel of Mark on Sunday mornings. I continued to preach through Old and New Testament books during my tenure at K-town. For the first Sunday morning adult Bible study series, I presented a series of lessons I’d developed while at the Christian Campus Center at Grayson County College, titled “Who is my brother?” I took the title and theme from a book by the same name, by F. LaGard Smith. However, my series did not follow Smith’s book.

I was quite surprised as well as pleased when a number of adults were baptized as a result of the “Who is my brother?” series. What I found out was that some of people who attended the church did so because of their spouses. It seems that this was most true of wives attending the “church” of their husbands. Many of the women who we baptized during this time had never been immersed for the remission of their sins. Most had come out of other fellowship backgrounds and were baptized as infants. The really surprising thing to me is that they said they’d never heard a clear explanation of the purpose, mode, and necessity of believers’ baptism. I think this speaks volumes about a short-coming in our teaching and preaching. Either we believe a person must be baptized as a mature believer, or we don’t! That so many wives could attend churches of Christ for years and not understand that astounded me and still does.

Soon after arriving at K-town I started a community English reading program. I posted announcements on the glassed-in bulletin board on the front of our building which offered free English reading and speaking classes using the English Bible as the text. This is a system used very effectively by groups such as “Let’s Start Talking” and individual missionaries in various countries. I led a “Let’s Start Talking” group to Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1995 (while I was a campus minister in Texas). It was very successful. The following year I led another group to Athens, Greece, but not under the direction of “Let’s Start Talking.” Without the backing and support of the tried and true “Let’s Start Talking” administration we had very little success in Greece. I had also participated in a similar six-week program in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, in 1993 (while I was the evangelist at the Wolfforth, TX, Church of Christ), which was very successful. Several people from the K-town church volunteered to help me with the English reading students. Most notable for her willingness to help was Daphne Ciufo. We had some German high school students who came to the classes regularly for a couple of years. Also, some of the foreign students from the International University in Kaiserslautern came to improve their English using the Bible. Several baptisms took place as a result of these classes.

When I got to K-town there were one or two Indonesian students who attended the church. They came because they wanted to fellowship with other Christians and they understood English better than they did German. The International University in Kaiserslautern had many programs for people from foreign countries and they offered many of the classes in English. The Indonesian students who were already attending began to invite other foreign students because they liked how I taught and preached and they liked the warm acceptance they received from the members of the congregation. Soon, we had a number of foreign students who attended regularly. About a year after I got to K-town, three of the Indonesian students, Hanna, Shanti, and Mira, asked if we could start a week night Bible study just for the international students. We did and it became very popular. The program continued until I left in 2006. At its height, we had as many as 20 students in these in-depth studies. They represented Indonesia, Germany, China, Africa, Russia, Georgia, America, and other countries. Several baptisms resulted from these classes. Several of the deacons of the church helped organize and teach these classes. Mike Powell was instrumental at the beginning and then Steve Wolfe took over when Mike was transferred. Not only did these guys help with the group, they got valuable Bible teaching experience.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent six weeks in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, in 1993 as part of a four-man team teaching English using the Bible. The program had been set up a couple of years earlier by Royce Sartain and Nat Cooper, who were both associated with the Sunset International Bible Institute. They enlisted college students to go to Blagoevgrad in the summer to teach the classes. The program became so successful that they didn’t want to stop it during the winter months so they recruited four men to go in January and February of 1993. We were followed by two married couples from the Monterey Church of Christ in Lubbock, TX. While I was in Bulgaria I was asked to travel to Sofia (the capital) for the first three or four Sundays to preach in the place of the missionary, Tom Black, who was in the States having surgery. I met Tom and his wife, Sheryl, on my last trip to Sofia to preach. After I started working at K-town I contacted the Blacks and they invited me to come to Sofia to preach and teach for a couple of days. I also contacted friends from Blagoevgrad and planned a visit with them. The Christians in Bulgaria asked if it would be possible for me to come back to preach and teach from time to time. They always liked hearing preachers from America and it was much cheaper and easier for me to travel from Germany than other preachers from America. I discussed the request with the elders in K-town and they agreed it would be a good mission work for us. Starting in November of 2000, I made two or three two-week mission trips to Bulgaria every year. More about those trips in another post.

I believe the six years I spent as the evangelist of the K-town Church of Christ were good years for the congregation. We witnessed numerous baptisms and we reached out to people from many countries. Many of the American Christians who attended during those years were strengthened in their faith and learned how to become more effective and involved in the work of the Lord.

Grandson, Corbin, and top of head of granddaughter, Riley, in renovated preacher apartment living room of K-town church building. Taken in 2005.

Kaiserslautern Church of Christ. We completely remodeled the preacher’s apartment in the K-town church building at 34 Muhlstrasse, in downtown Kaiserslautern. The American preacher’s apartment was on the third floor (in Europe the ground floor is not counted, the next floor is called the first floor, the next is the second floor, and etc.). The apartment had a kitchen/dining room (really too small to consider it for both—we ate in the living room most of the time), a rather large living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.

There was linoleum on the floors of the kitchen and bathroom. Actually, there were several layers of linoleum on the floors. The underflooring was poured cement. There were several places where water had seeped under the old linoleum and the cement had dissolved. One of these places was right in front of the sink in the kitchen—one stood in a bit of a depression to wash dishes! It felt as if there was water under the linoleum when you walked on it because of the several layers that had been added. The windows in the entire building were the original wood-framed, single glass type. They leaked air and every sound from the street below came straight into the apartment. The hallway, living room, and both bedrooms had a very old, stained, and nasty beige wall-to-wall carpet. Someone had tried to clean some stains in the living room with bleach so there were a couple of large white spots that couldn’t be covered by furniture. The kitchen furnishings were ancient! The sink wasn’t securely fastened to the wall. The cabinets had doors that wouldn’t stay shut and drawers that didn’t open easily. The fridge was an antique and the lighting looked original. The spigot wouldn’t shut off and the drain under the sink dripped onto the bottom of the cabinet under the sink. I think you get the picture.

The first thing the elders agreed to do was to replace the original windows with modern, two-paned PVC ones. Next, they put tile on the hallway, bathroom, and kitchen floors. They also had new tile put on the lower half of the bathroom walls and the lower half of the kitchen walls. In order to install the tile we had to remove (and throw away) everything from the kitchen. We decided to keep the sink, toilet, and tub in the bathroom to keep the costs down. They were old and a bit stained, but they were functional. We bought all new kitchen furnishings from IKEA. We had to put assemble all the IKEA furniture, but it was very sturdy and an amazing improvement over the old, broken junk we threw out. We also bought a new fridge (that we transported from Mainz-Kastel furniture store (near Frankfurt) in the back of Ford station wagon that Ray Willcox let us borrow until our Honda Passport arrived in port.

After the windows and tile were installed, I began to paint and paper the walls. I first had to remove several layers of old wallpaper. I don’t know what kind of paste they’d used to apply the old paper, but it was almost impossible to remove. I had to soak it with water and then slowly scrape it off, layer by layer. After removing all the old paper I had to fill in holes and rough places before painting or putting on new paper. The entire process (we did every room in the apartment) took a couple of years. I also installed new wood flooring in the living room and both bedrooms. I used synthetic wooden-styled flooring in the bedrooms but opted for real wood for the living room. The elders allowed me to buy a small, portable table saw to make the installations easier. It came in very handy.

When we finished, the apartment looked pretty good. I left all the new kitchen furniture, most of the new bedroom furniture, and some new living room furniture in the apartment when I moved back to the States in 2006. The church had bought the kitchen furnishings but I had bought most of the other stuff and couldn’t afford to ship it home.

While I worked with the church we also raised funds to replace the roof over the auditorium and the extremely inefficient and unreliable oil-burning heater which heated water for the whole building (for heating as well as washing/bathing). We converted to city-supplied hot water just before I moved away.

For the first four years at K-town, I used a small classroom on the fourth floor as my office. It was really too small and it badly needed updating. I asked the elders if I could renovate a larger room across the hall and use it as an office. It had been used as a guest bedroom as well as a classroom in the past. I stripped off the old wall paper, removed an old sink and heater, installed a real wood floor, papered and painted the walls, installed new lighting, and bought new furniture for the room. It served me very well the rest of the time I was at K-town.

New paint job on front of K-town building. Taken June 2010.

Kaiserslautern Church of Christ. Our move to K-town was interesting, to say the least. We owned a house near Sherman, Texas, that we let our oldest daughter Jennifer and her family rent. I also let them use the 1993 Buick that I’d bought from my father, when he became too sick to drive. We had a very large workshop/garage on the property where we stored all our furniture and anything we didn’t want to take to Germany.

The elders of the K-town church gave us a $5000 moving allowance, in addition to our airplane tickets. When we visited the church in October 1999, we saw that the preacher’s apartment hadn’t been upgraded since we’d lived there for a few months in 1984. Much of the same furniture was still in the apartment. As a matter of fact, there was a large, adjustable table in the living room that was broken (you couldn’t adjust it up and down as designed) when we first lived there. The same, broken table was still in the apartment when we move back in February 2000. I have no idea how long it had been in the apartment before we first saw it in 1984! We didn’t want to ship any furniture to Germany so we asked the elders if we didn’t use all the $5000 for moving our possessions if we could use any remaining money to upgrade the apartment. They agreed to this. We shipped a 1995 Honda Passport SUV that Deborah used in Texas. We shipped it from Houston to Zeeburgge, Belgium. Then, instead of packing a shipping container with our stuff which would have cost most of the $5000, we mailed over 70 boxes of clothing, books, family photos, and other small things we thought we’d need. Layne, the treasurer of the church, let us mail the boxes to his military address, which saved us lots in postage fees.

We flew into Frankfurt on February 3, 2000. Thom Hackett, one of the elders, picked us up at the airport in his Jeep Cherokee. I remember him driving over 100 mph most of the way back to K-town while looking over to the front passenger seat to talk to me. I knew of the high-speed Autobahns of Germany but I wasn’t used to traveling at over 100 mph and it made me nervous—especially since it seemed that Thom wasn’t keeping his eyes on the road. I remember telling him of my nervousness and asking him to slow down just a bit. He did. After we lived there for just a short time, I was driving at those same over-100 mph-speeds myself!

A shot of the auditorium of the K-town Church of Christ building from the "preacher's viewpoint" taken sometime around 2005. The antiquated seating has been in the building since we first lived on Ramstein in 1984.

Kaiserslautern Church of Christ. I moved to Kaiserslautern, Germany, to work as the evangelist of the Kaiserslautern Church of Christ on February 3, 2000. My wife, Deborah, moved there with me. I worked there until the end of May 2006.

We had been living in Gun Barrel City, Texas, where Deborah worked for the city in economic development. She had taken the job with high hopes but quickly became discouraged because of the small-town political fussing. I saw an ad for a preacher for the Kaiserslautern church on Edward Fudge’s webpage. I called to see if the job was still open and when I was told it was, I applied. We were invited to Kaiserslautern at the end of October of 1999 to meet the church and to preach. We stayed a week. At the end of the week the elders asked us to move there to work with the church. We told them the earliest we could get there would be the first of February. They said that would be OK. We returned to Gun Barrel City and Deborah gave notice that we’d be leaving after the first of the year. The elders who hired me were Dennis Cherry, Thom Hackett, and Ray Willcox.

I had been stationed at Ramstein Air Base near Kaiserslautern from 1984-1986. We worshipped at the K-town (what all the Americans call Kaiserslautern) church while we were stationed there. We even lived in the preacher’s apartment in the church for a couple of months after we moved up from Athens, Greece. It was difficult to find a house large enough for our family and there were no open houses on base. There was no preacher at the church at that time so we asked the men of the church if we could stay there until we found a place. It was a small, two bedroom apartment, but it worked for a short time. Carl Kallus and his wife lived in the apartment below us. He was the preacher for the German congregation that also met at the building at 34 Muhlstrasse. Our five little ones (ages 3-11 at the time) made lots of noise, stomping around on the floor and it bothered the Kalluses more than once. There were no elders or deacons at the K-town church during our time there in ’84-’86. I volunteered to work in the area of evangelism. I have many good memories of the church from those first two years in the mid-‘80s. It was those good memories, and a desire to return to Europe after having been stationed in Greece, Germany, and Belgium, from 1983-1989, that drove me to apply for the preaching position at K-town in 1999.

Another truth is that military guys always complain. They’ll complain about anything and everything. One of the favorite things for crew chiefs (guys working on the open flightline) loved to complain about was the weather. When it was sunny and hot, they’d say it was too hot. When it was rainy and cool, they’d complain about it being too wet and too cold.

One clear sunny day I was on the flightline waiting for the pilots to come out the the T-37 I was scheduled to launch. The T-37 was a very short airplane with flat wings. While I was waiting for the pilots I climbed onto a wing, put my hands under my head, and looked up into the almost cloudless blue sky. As I was looking at this perfect sky I thought about how we always complained about the weather. I was inspired to poetry. This is the only poem I’ve ever composed, but I’ve remembered it and the moment I composed it for almost 40 years:

Who am I?

by David Emery — 1971

Who am I

to curse the sky

for bringing the rain and the hot?

For the rain will fall

and the sun will shine

whether I am here or not!

Cut and paste this link: http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/thai.html

Then click on “The text” under David Howard Emery.