Sentimental Ramblings

Jonah S. Murphy (1867 – 1951) was the pastor of Leading Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Montrose, West Virginia until the day of his death. He was also my great, great grandfather.

I know little about him, but was told that he learned to read using the King James Bible, and he read it continuously throughout his life. He was a “man of one book,” and he knew his book well.His father, James Murphy (1834- 1903), and grandfather, David P. Murphy (1806 – 1885) were also pastors of the same church. Today the church is still there, and is pastored by a distant cousin of mine, V.B. Linn.

The building itself is a one-room white frame house warmed by a wood stove in the winter and cooled by opened windows in the summer. My mother says that electricity was added after she became an adult. The church does not have indoor plumbing.

My great grandfather’s funeral in 1997 was the only time that I know of that I visited Leading Creek Primitive Baptist Church. Elder Linn preached the sermon and lined the hymn, “Jesus, Thou Art the Sinner’s Friend.” That is, he read each verse prior to the congregation’s singing of it. Hymn Lining is a tradition that was born of necessity in a time when churches couldn’t afford hymnals, or the members couldn’t read. At any rate, if you’ve never heard it you are missing something.

After the service we carried my grandfather across the church yard to his grave on that beautiful West Virginia hillside. At the grave we sang an untitled hymn by Isaac Watts:

How did my heart rejoice to hear
My friends devoutly say,
‘In Zion let us all appear,
And Keep the solemn day.’

Here’sthe rest of the hymn.Sometimes, though I’ve never lived there, I feel homesick for Randolph County, West Virginia. Maybe it’s a longing for heaven that I really feel — a place where worship will be pure and uncorrupted by the world, surrounded by God’s beauty and presence. And a place where we will be with those for whom, though they died generations before us, we feel a kindred spirit.

“There my best friends, my kindred dwell,

There God my Saviour reigns.”