By Mike Ruffin
In the early 1980s, while I was studying at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I was also the weekend pastor of the Beech Grove Baptist Church in Owen County, Kentucky, which was about seventy miles north of Louisville. Southern Baptist churches participate in regional groupings known as “associations,” and those associations usually have at least one meeting a year. If they only have one, it’s usually in the fall. If they have two, one is in the spring and the other during autumn.
Most of the churches in the Owen County Association were small. Many of them used seminary students as pastors, so the association held its annual meeting during the summer to avoid giving its pastors something else to deal with on top of their heavy academic responsibilities.
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