| MEMPHIS, TN —
As people quietly filled row after row of the big sanctuary
of Idlewild Presbyterian Church Jan. 4 to attend a memorial service
for the Rev. Dr. Richard Baldwin, III, it was not surprising to
see so many of them, even on a holiday weekend. Idlewild pastor
Steve Montgomery estimated there were 700 in attendance.
Many were from Memphis and west Tennessee because he had made
his home here in recent years, serving as Executive of the Presbytery
of Memphis and as pastor of Evergreen Presbyterian Church. But
many friends from a previous pastorate at Trinity Presbyterian
Church in Nashville had driven 200 miles to be here.
They had been with Dick and his family during his final illness
at Vanderbilt Hospital, where he died of congestive heart failure
on December 30. He was 67.
Others from the Synod of Living Waters and the presbyteries
within it came long distances to honor Dick as a friend and colleague
in ministry. Those who traveled the greatest distances were fellow
officers in the Naval Reserve, where he served 41 years as Chaplain
with the rank of Captain.
If there had been a roll call of those in attendance, it would
have been a testimony to the far reaching influence Dick had in
his ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA). All who knew him
were aware that he cared deeply about the Church.
Synod Executive David Snellgrove said, “As a parish minister,
as a presbytery executive, as stated clerk of the synod, as chair
of the General Assembly’s Advisory Committee on the Constitution,
he was always involved and engaged in getting the Word rightly
preached and the Constitution accurately interpreted.”
In an altogether affirming memorial service, the Rev. Dr. Denton
McLellan said in the homily that he could sum up what he had heard
in a conversation with Dick’s family by using the word “good.”
He said he was using the word to describe Dick “not in a
goody-goody sense, but as a truly good human being who helped
to make this world, this presbytery, the Presbyterian Church.
a better place because of his presence and influence.”
McLellan had known Dick since they came fifty years ago as fellow
Mississippians to Southwestern (now Rhodes College) and then went
to Union Seminary in Richmond and later served as ministers in
Memphis.
Dick’s immediate surviving family are his wife, Mary Allie,
three children and eight grandchildren. Mary Allie told a reporter
from the Commercial Appeal that Dick was “a people person.”
And 700 people in the sanctuary at Idlewild Presbyterian Church
on Jan. 4, 2004, could say, “Amen.” |
