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An Interesting Neighbor

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David Pickard is a man divided.

A longtime Baptist minister, one foot has led him to the pulpit at Sunray Baptist Church in Purcell where he has taken on the title of interim pastor.

His other foot is solidly in the secular world or maybe just a different kind of ministry.

David is a McClain County native. He grew up and graduated from Blanchard High School with the Class of 1980.

And he played center for the Lions when the team won the state football championship in 1979.

Back then, the ministry was the farthest thing from his mind.

His wasn’t a religious upbringing. In fact, his parents didn’t attend any church.

And his introduction to what you might call organized religion came when he was 12 or 13 and a kind relative made it possible for him to attend a Church of Christ summer camp at Norman.

An uncle owned a lumber yard at Blanchard and David started working there when he was 12. 

After graduating from high school, he was employed full time at the lumber yard.

Life seemed pretty much set.

He built a house with his own hands and in 1982 when he was 20, he married Cheryl Lampkin, then a 17-year-old senior at Blanchard High School.

In 1984, they were expecting their first child, Jennifer, now 36. Their other adult children are Joshua, 33 and Jessica, 29.

“I was really searching in my life for deeper meaning,” he said.

On the Saturday before Easter Sunday, David and Cheryl drove to Holy City of the Wichitas for the annual passion play.

At the time, the drama of Jesus’ life, crucifixion and resurrection was an all-night presentation.

Tired, David drifted off to sleep sometime before sunrise and the play’s dramatic finish.

“OK, I missed the best part,” he thought when he finally awakened. “We got up, went home, changed clothes and went to church.”

It happened to be Pleasant Hill Baptist Church outside Blanchard.

It didn’t take long before David was saved and Pleasant Hill deacons saw something in the newly devout David.

They said they wanted him to become the youth director, but David shied from that at first.

“I knew very little about the Bible,” he said.

In fact, he knew next to nothing compared to the church’s youth who had grown up quoting Scripture.

He loaded his family into a wheat truck and moved to Conway, Ark., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in the Bible from Central Baptist College.

After two years in Arkansas, they moved back to Blanchard in 1988 and he became youth director at Pleasant Hill.

In 1990 he became youth director at First Baptist Church in Carthage, Texas, and also enrolled in the Baptist Missionary Association Theological Seminary at Jacksonville, Texas.

It was while he was at Carthage that David felt the need to get out of youth work. He resigned from First Baptist and accepted a call to the pulpit in a Baptist church in Clayton, Texas.

He stayed there as pastor for three years and then was pastor for a year at Stoneridge Baptist Church in Kilgore, Texas.

Then a call came from Pleasant Hill. They needed a pastor and wanted David.

He accepted the call and stayed 16 years.

He would resign again to take over a church for an old friend back in Texas.

He went to Fort Worth as pastor of South Fork Baptist Church. He stayed there six years before returning to Oklahoma.

He and Cheryl saw good things happen in Texas, but David  “missed home and not being around family.”

Plus his parents were having some health issues.

And truth be told, he was experiencing a little burnout.

David stopped in his narrative to share the time many years ago when their daughter, Jennifer, was small. The family attended a Blanchard-Purcell football game.

An Oklahoma City news station was there and got footage of Jennifer waving her red pom-poms. The shot made the news and Jennifer was identified as a “future Purcell cheerleader.”

It was one of those moments when David wonders “if God was going to call us to Purcell.”

Well, the call when it came was from Dennis Clark, pastor of Sunray Baptist Church, who had some medical issues and wanted to resign.

He called David, a longtime friend and in short order David became the interim pastor.

But by then, he had another job working for B&H Construction in Goldsby.

The firm started him doing data entry and shortly added dealing with disputes to his job description.

He learned a lot about the company and willingly took on the task of making videos of different processes. That evolved into a new title – training coordinator.

At the height of the COVID-19 shutdown, the company had a problem – how to conduct mandatory 15-month employee testing on polyfusion.

The answer was to test remotely and use David’s videos as tutorials before the test.

“B&H is awesome,” David said. “They work with me and they are a Christian company.”

Many of the employees are men David calls “second chance guys.”

He’s thought about resigning from B&H, but “they have invested so much in me.”

“And I really enjoy helping those guys pass their tests. It’s kind of like what pastoring is about. I’m kind of a chaplain there”

Plus Sunray can’t afford a real lucrative salary.

And that is a dilemma for David. 

Sunday worship attendance is about 30.

“It’s really hard to take a church that needs to grow and survive,” he said. “It takes a lot of time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that again. I would like to come here and jump in with both feet, become very involved in the community.

“I always wanted to start churches, but that hasn’t worked out.”

David and Cheryl live in Newcastle. She works for The Blanchard News.

If there is a yardstick to measure his ministry, this would be perhaps the high point of a career in the pulpit.

Remember his parents who never went to church? Well, David brought both of them into the fold and his father later became a deacon.

It’s little wonder then that David chose Ephesians 2:8-9 as one of his favorite Scriptures:

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

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