Meeting of The Independent Baptist Fellowships of Georgia
April 2, 2007
This meeting honored the life of Dr. Harold B. Sightler
Mikado Baptist Church, Macon, GA
Moderator Dr. Raymond Hancock
Thank you Dr.
Hancock, and thank you all, for allowing me to say a few
words. Most people have an image of my Daddy that is
different from what he really was. My Daddy was the son
of a Packard automobile mechanic and a schoolteacher.
The family was not wealthy and would be seen as
hardworking, plain living, ordinary folks. They were
always present at church, often walking a mile to
attend. His entire life from 1941 when the Bright Spot
Hour was begun was preaching the gospel of grace, in his
churches, in revivals, and on the radio. He lived to
preach and preached to live. He would preach anywhere he
was invited, love offerings only, no matter how small
the church, and most of his meetings were in small rural
Baptist churches. He eschewed hobbies, golf, hunting,
fishing, because he only wanted to preach. He did not
take vacations.
From his parents, especially his
mother, he was given a heritage of very strict probity,
correct behaviour. He was not allowed to play marbles
for keeps, match for a coca-cola, or take part in a
raffle. To him bingo was gambling as much as dice. He
saw to it that his brothers kept to the same rules, and
they testify that he often seemed more like a father to
them than a brother.
He never even thought of leaving
his family roots. These consisted of a love not only of
preachers like Cyclone Mack, R. G. Lee, Joe Parsons, J.
Harold Smith., Oliver Greene, Buck Huntley, and B. B.
Caldwell but also singing by Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, the
Carter Family, Gid Tanner, and Gene Autry, whose records
were collected and often played by my grandparents at
home on an old hand cranked victrola. I remember that on
the way to church at Pelham we always listened on the
car radio to the broadcast by John Lair of the Sunday
Mornin’ Gatherin’ from Renfro Valley Kentucky. In other
words he loved fine behavior but not necessarily the
fine arts. Plain living was his ideal. Once when the
church bus took a trip to a camp meeting in Pontotoc, MS
Billy Kelly and Joe Arthur played the fiddle and the
guitar on the way. One song was “Turkey in the Straw.”
Some folks on the bus murmured because it was an old
time country song. When the church got to the meeting
Daddy, as a gentle but sufficient reprimand to those who
complained, called Billy and Joe to the platform and
directed them to play, Turkey in the Straw, in church.
It should be said here, and this is
only my opinion, that the so called cultural emphasis of
some of our large fundamental universities is not a part
of Baptist heritage or of fundamentalism. Cultural
emphasis has also been singularly unsuccessful in
holding back Calvinism, contemporary worship, and
worldliness among us.
He remained a friend to poor,
uneducated folks from the wrong side of the tracks, and
never even thought about social climbing. Driving home
at night after a revival he would seek out truck stops
and witness to the folks there rather than go to fine
restaurants. I do not remember that he ever ate a meal
in a gourmet restaurant. His bedtime snacks were
sardines or peanut butter and saltines.
He had uncommon wisdom,
discernment, and common sense. He was a man of few words
who listened much more than he spoke. He also had a
genuine sense of humor and loved to laugh, especially at
Gildersleeve and Fibber McGee. One example of his
wisdom, which also was a good warning to me, I heard
when I entered Furman in 1955: “Son, your professors put
their pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.”
He respected his elders, was kind and diplomatic, but
never a politician. He was never apologetic about his
convictions, especially about old time religion. Daddy
never looked at himself as a leader of fundamentalism.
He was uncommonly frugal, both of
money and of time. When he and his youngest brother,
Carey, traveled to Dalton, Georgia in 1940 to buy his
first tent they spent the night in a filling station
parking lot to save the cost of a motel. When he passed
away in 1995 Tabernacle Baptist Church still had rotary
phones and only one office computer, again to save money
and prevent unnecessary calling by the staff. He
answered letters by writing his replies by hand on the
back of those letters to save assistance and time and
paper. We cannot write a full biography because we do
not have that correspondence. He spent most Sunday
afternoons recording Bright Spot Hour programs,
redeeming the time, no naps on Sunday afternoon. He gave
all his love offerings to the Bright Spot
Hour and to Tabernacle Baptist Church.
He believed that revival is God
ordained and that Holy Ghost conviction of sinners,
brought about by the prayer of Christians, is necessary
for salvation. The revival at Pelham Baptist Church in
1946 that preceded his founding of Tabernacle Baptist
Church came after at least six months of daily praying
by Daddy and the church members in the church, no
socializing, no planning, just prayer. His hermeneutic
was literal and dispensational from Genesis 1:1 to
Revelation 22:21.
He loved the old hymns and gospel
songs that were related to his family heritage and often
said you couldn’t have a camp meeting without camp
meeting music. By this he meant the old southern gospel
songs of the 1930’s and 40’s, long before the advent of
contemporary trends. He and Odell Good founded the Greer
Baptist Camp Meeting in 1947 in an old hand made brush
arbor at Pelham. Dr. Percy Ray encouraged them and
helped when the meeting was moved to Greer in 1949.
From the beginning he was a Baptist
with big B and believed that Baptists began during New
Testament times and have never ceased to exist at any
time in history. They may not always have called
themselves Baptist but were so in practice, theology,
and organization. Remember that the word anabaptist,
rebaptizer, a name which Baptists have always rejected,
dates at least as far back as the emperor Honorius in
413 AD. He believed the Baptists were closest to New
Testament church practices. He did not believe they were
ever a part of the church of Rome or any of its daughter
churches. He believed that the local visible church, and
Baptists have always seen themselves as local and
visible, is God’s instrument for spreading the gospel.
In 1992 he preached a sermon at the Southwide in which
he detailed the history of the old time Separate
Baptists in the South before the American Revolution.
Several of the slides you will note show a church bus
trip to Baptist historical sites in our region made in
1991
Daddy majored in Greek at Furman
University, graduating in 1946, but he never once used
an alternative meaning of a Greek word to correct the
KJV. He did explain that baptize was a transliteration
of a Greek word but did not say that it should have been
translated immerse. He had to study from a copy of the
corrupt Westcott Hort Greek text in college. But he
remained devoted to the King James Version as scripture
to the end. In 1943 he wrote a term paper for his second
semester freshman English class, titled Early Bible
Translations. He here made the point that the Vatican
and Sinai manuscripts did not have the last 12 verses of
Mark but that a space was left for them so that the
scribes who copied these manuscripts knew of these last
12 verses but were perhaps instructed to omit them, thus
doing damage to the text and wasting valuable vellum.
Daddy’s mother was his most loyal
radio supporter. I have here in my hand three pamphlets
which Daddy’s last living brother, Carey, last year
found among her effects and gave to me. I had not known
she had them. They date from around 1952. She had
ordered two of them from the Bright Spot Hour. One is
The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible by Dr.
Carl McIntyre. It was offered when the Bright Spot Hour
was on only 10 stations and strongly condemns the RSV,
which had translated Isaiah 7:14 as young woman rather
than virgin. Another is The Truth About The New Bible,
by Rev. Dick Cimino. It was a 45 page pamphlet which
gave a more detailed listing of the problems of this
version. And the RSV is generally very close to the NASV
and NIV of our day.
Mr. Cimino came to the United
States as a child from Sicily in the 1920’s, to Ellis
Island. He had polio and was on crutches. He was raised
a Catholic but got saved, graduated from Bible College
in Binghamton, New York, and came to be song leader for
the great evangelist J. Harold Smith. Daddy found about
about his book through Dr. Smith. His wife and daughter
in law are still publishing his books and tracts at
Wonderful Word Publishers in Harlingen, TX, most in
Spanish. The address is P. O. Box 2583, Harlingen, TX
78551, phone 956-425-2010
The third pamphlet was obtained
from Dr. Oliver B. Greene and was called The RSV
Alongside the King James. It dealt more fully with New
Testament changes than either of the others. It is an
unfortunate mistake on the part of conservatives that
real opposition to the RSV was not begun until after
1952 when the entire version went on the market, showing
the liberal higher critical boldness of the National
Council of Churches trying to deny the doctrine of the
virgin birth.
Actually the New Testament of the
RSV was first published in 1946. That New Testament,
according to written testimony sent to me by a man who
was a student in those days, was sold in the bookstore
of Bob Jones University in Greenville from as early as
1949 until at least 1952, and only 11 years later in
1963 the Lockman Foundation brought out the NASV and Bob
Jones University professors helped with that. They were
unmoved by the opposition of McIntyre, Cimino, Oliver
Greene, my Daddy, Maze Jackson, J. Harold Smith, and
many others. Both the NASV and the RSV omitted I John
5:7, the last 12 verses of Mark, Acts 8:37, and changed
I Timothy 3:16 to obscure the fact the Lord Jesus was
God manifest in the flesh. They both included thousands
of other significant changes in the New Testament and
should be, along with the NIV and all other modern
translations, rejected by all believers. Informed
opposition to changing the scriptures has been present
for a very long time, at least for 200 years, and is not
a modern phenomenon.
May I read to you the inscription
from the Shubal Stearns Monument at Sandy Creek Baptist
Church. Sandy Creek was organized in 1755 by Shubal
Stearns and Daniel Marshall, who with their families
came down a mountain trail in the wilds of the Blue
Ridge Mountains, traveling here alone and without
protection from Connecticut. They are the source from
which we have sprung, and now we also have separated
from the sad trends in Baptist fellowships which have
become so clear to us since Daddy passed away. He
anticipated the problems. Please show again on the
screen the picture of Daddy at the Stearns marker.
“It (that is Sandy Creek Baptist
Church) is a mother church, nay a grandmother, and great
grandmother. All the Separate Baptists sprang hence, not
only eastward towards the sea, but westward towards the
great river Mississippi, but northward to Virginia and
southward to South Carolina and Georgia. The Word went
forth from this Sion, and great was the company of them
who published it, in so much that her converts were as
drops of morning dew.”
Let me recommend two websites to
you. First www.sightlerpublications.com my website, with
articles on Baptist History, the KJV, music, the New Age
movement, and evolution. Second
www.thebrightspothour.org. Dr. Ben Carper, my sister’s
oldest boy, my nephew, is still carrying on the program
and is a full time evangelist. Have a look at these
sites and try to hear Dr. Carper.
How many of you have heard of
Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall? (about 10 hands
shown in a crowd of perhaps 200). Daniel Marshall,
brother in law of Shubal Stearns, established Kiokee at
Appling, GA and Horn’s Creek at Edgefield, SC in the
1760’s. There is a great new book on Baptist History in
this country, America in Crimson Red, by James Beller of
Arnold, MO. It would be worth your while to read it.
Thank you very much.
James H. Sightler, M.D.
