A candid interview with Ray and Lissie Turnage...

People of the People

By Bill and Brenda Evans

The Greek word laikos from which we get our English word laity simply means people. So it is appropriate to call Christians like Ray and Lissie Turnage people of the people because they are laity who committed themselves to serving others for 65 years. Now in their mid-80s, they still influence people for Christ. We talked with them in Edmond, Oklahoma, on a surprisingly warm February day.

BILL: Dr. Ed Stetzer recently said that lay church folks tend to think their job is to pay, pray, and get out of the way. You two don’t seem to believe in just being spectators. Have you had a special call to lay ministry?

RAY: Not a call, really, just opportunities and open doors. I never looked for positions; they seemed to find me. In college [Welch] I worked at a drugstore on West End Avenue. President Johnson came in one day and saw me running the lunch counter. He said, “Come see me, Ray.” So

I became the college’s dietician, ran the dining hall. Master’s Men the same, as well as volunteer music director at Cofer’s Chapel and East Nashville Churches in Nashville.

After college, I was asked to direct the League Board and did that for seven years, then became superintendent of the Tennessee Children’s Home in Greenville, Tennessee. Many times, it was just a hard situation that somebody needed to do something about, so they asked me.

BILL: Sounds as if your determination to do what you could was greater than your concern about the challenge. Did you get special leadership training for any of that?

RAY: (laughs) No. I’ve always just called it OJT—On the Job Training. Henry (Pop) Melvin was an influence on me, as was C. F. Bowen. I went to Peabody there in Nashville for my teaching certification then later to Middle Tennessee State University for a Masters in education. But that was the extent of it. No real mentorships.

I already knew how to work. My very first job, when I was nine, was pumping gas at a Gulf station. Then during WWII, when I was 12 or 13, I worked at a Pure station, accounting for the gas we pumped and the rationing stamps we collected. People called me Little John.

LISSIE: In League Board days he would run seven youth camps during the summer, be gone all week, and still have League work to do when he got back to Nashville on weekends.

RAY: But I had time to start a youth camp and originate the Engineers Program in White Bluff, Tennessee. Floated bonds to buy land and moved a discarded 4-H Club dining hall 100 miles to the site. That was something. Sam and Jane Johnson worked with me and later developed the camp.

BRENDA: In the middle 1960s, you were approached about heading up the Tennessee Children’s Home. How did that come about?

LISSIE: Ray can tell you about that. I just want to say that I’ve always been amazed at the Lord’s hand, how he has put us the places we needed to be. After high school, my parents, especially my father, didn’t want me to go to college in Nashville. But I had been on my knees, and I knew I must. He said, “You’ll be home in two months.” But he was wrong. Later, I did go home, but to get married, and Ray hitchhiked from South Carolina to Oklahoma just to marry me.

RAY: Well, that hitchhiking trip is a whole other story! The Children’s Home was about need. They needed a superintendent, and they needed money. I’d been leading and raising money at the League Board, so I went.

LISSIE: Before we got there, I had a dream about paint falling off the walls. But the reality was not just paint. The home had broken windows, no screens, curtains blowing in the wind; one bathroom had a terrible odor from a rotting floor. Split couch covers. Cast-off beds. I remember praying, “Lord, what are we doing here?” But there we were, and we had to do something. There were more than 100 children, so all the staff took in children. Three lived with us, and Ray hit the road to raise money.

RAY: One week, I brought seven children from one family back in our Pontiac station wagon. Their father had been killed in a drunken brawl; their mother had cancer. Two older brothers had joined the military. The other seven, ranging in age from three to 18, came to the home.

LISSIE: In another family of five children, one had seen her father kill her mother and then shoot himself. She’s now in her sixties and keeps in touch. Some still come all the way out here to Oklahoma to visit us.

RAY: When I left the home eight years later, we had done repairs, built and paid for three new buildings, had new beds and chests for the children, worked 500 acres, and ran a Grade-A dairy. We put up 5,000 bales of hay and 5,000 quarts of green beans each summer. In the fall, Rob Morgan’s father brought us a truckload of apples from his orchard.

BILL: Lissie, you showed me a closet full of photo albums from your years of ministry. I counted 27. You must love people. Has that been the motivator for your work?

LISSIE: It has, and the Lord, of course. Our verse is Psalm 16:8: “I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”

RAY: The Lord’s work is always about people. You have to like them and have no hidden motives. We’ve just met a new couple, a lawyer and judge who live nearby. We want to influence them for the Lord.

LISSIE: We also play Rummikub™ with an ex-military couple once or twice a week. They’re in assisted living. They told us, “We need friends; we don’t have any.” We still see needs and opportunities.

BILL: What did you do after the Children’s Home?

RAY: I was an English teacher and high school principal. The last 25 years of employment, I was supervisor of special education in Greene County, Tennessee. Lissie taught children for 29 years, part of that with mentally handicapped children. You never know what people can do. Like the girl at the Children’s Home whom we helped buy a car so she could finish nurses’ training. When she finished and paid it off, she was so proud. So were we. One of the boys had an alcoholic family, but he earned three degrees and is now retired. Another was a real cut-up. One day he told me, “If I hadn’t gone to that home, I’d have been a juvenile delinquent.”

BRENDA: He must have gotten his sense of humor from you, Ray. We’ve laughed until our sides are sore, especially when you kept talking to your suspenders and saying, “Hold on, I’ll get to you in a minute.” (laughter) You’ve also used music for the Lord. I see keyboards, a piano, and a beautiful, Seybold reed pump organ. Is music in your soul?

RAY: I guess it is, and I miss what I did for so many years—going room to room in nursing homes with my two-octave keyboard. My health won’t let me. I taught myself to play. My father’s sister had an old piano, so I plunked and plunked until I learned. Never had lessons. Was in the Freshman Quartet in college with James Earl Raper, Gene Waddell, and Bobby Jackson. We still get together, and Robert Picirilli, too, of course, who came along the next year.

LISSIE: Ray’s got two more pump organs that we don’t have room for here. Sometimes at night, we play music together for an hour or more. I’m at the piano. He’s at one of his keyboards.

BILL: I’ve been wondering what brought you all west to Oklahoma after all those years in East Tennessee.

RAY: Stupidity, I guess, and our daughters. One lives nearby.

LISSIE: It was not easy, but it is okay, because it’s what we’ve always done: go where we need to be, and we need to be here.

Summing up our conversation with Ray and Lissie is not easy, except to say that they are octogenarians who are willing, as they always have been, to be people of the people…wherever the need is.

About the Writers: Bill and Brenda Evans live in Catlettsburg, Kentucky. Bill is former director of the Free Will Baptist Foundation and Brenda is a retired English teacher. Visit www.fwbgifts.org for more information on planned giving that benefits your favorite ministry.