Story of the Crosses

Story of the Crosses
By Dan C. Boutwell

There are some folks walking the halls of South Hills who remember me; I’m Dan Boutwell. I’m one of your absent members who for some reason is wandering in the suburbs as a prodigal. Linda and I spend our time and effort in Burleson now. Both of our boys live here and we have chosen to focus our attention locally. Unfortunately, we have not fixed ourselves on a local church here, but we have one in sight that will afford us the opportunity of worshipping with one of our boys and his family. That’s what we have been praying for and we’ve been looking for…for quite a while.

We will forever cherish the wonderful family that we knew at South Hills. For years, that congregation nurtured us and accepted us as one of their own. No matter where we go, South Hills will always seem like home to us, even though our true home is deep in the heart of enemy country near the University of Oklahoma. But, that is another story for another time.

Like so many other people in the age of computer technology, I am a regular visitor to the Internet. Undoubtedly, my grandchildren are much more comfortable navigating the virtual highway of the Internet; they are certainly much more talented. Nevertheless, I have stumbled around the virtual landscape and managed to become comfortable with a number of relatively “senior-friendly” sites which anyone over sixty years of age can move around in. One of those is Facebook.

It was through Facebook that I was asked the other day to be ‘friends’ with South Hills. I was honored to respond to the request to be added as a ‘friend’ of South Hills. As you are aware, the ‘home page’ of the South Hills Facebook site has a photograph of the crosses which are located on the face of the building. As I stared at that photo, my eyes misted up as I recalled the significance of the crosses. Now, of course, as a Christian they are the symbol of God’s unprecedented love and sacrifice. But, they also represent more than 50 years of service of a single faithful congregation that could not be bound to a physical location. There is a story behind the crosses that begins much earlier than my day. For that reason, I will deal only with one moment in time that was transitional and important for that reason.

Sometime back in 2004 I was asked to serve on a South Hills Feasibility Committee that was chaired by Lonnie Golsby. The purpose of that committee was to investigate the feasibility of either remodeling the current sanctuary or possibly relocating the church to another location. The effort in fact was the outgrowth of a simple effort to enlarge the women’s restroom in the sanctuary. Through their efforts, the Building and Grounds committee were informed by the City of Fort Worth that our facilities were nonconforming with the exiting building regulations. In order to conform we would be required to bring the building up to code in a number of areas, which ultimately represented a major capital expenditure. The question we were forced to ask ourselves, as a church, was, “Should we invest this amount of capital into a building plant that may be losing its ministry.” It proved to be a very unpopular question to ask.

To say the least, to the unsuspecting congregation, it was a question that was shocking and totally unanticipated. Goodness, we had just celebrated our 50th anniversary at this location. Who would have ever thought our ministry was in trouble? Therefore, to help the congregation fathom the depth of the question the Feasibility Committee was formed to gather information and report back to the church. Being a professional city planner, I had access to the demographic data and was added to the committee.

The findings were sobering. Carefully charting the growth of the church, the change in demographics of the South Hills area, and the projected trends for the future, we discovered that we had reached our peak at the time the new activities building was built and were declining rapidly. It was never publicly spoken, but the conclusion of the experts was that instead of building the activities building, our church should have considered relocation at that time. But, it is what it is, and we found ourselves in a neighborhood rapidly turning Hispanic and no one at the church could speak Spanish or intended to learn.

The conclusion of the church when considering the Feasibility Committee report was that we should actively begin efforts to relocate our congregation, which required selling the current church plant. You can only imagine the turmoil that this had on this stable and proud congregation, of which many had built portions of the current church with their own hands years ago, as would be forcefully confirmed in church meetings to come. All of us had deep emotional ties to the church building. And, that was the difficult thing. It was very hard to separate our commitment to the building and our commitment to the mission of the church. The fact was that we were not able to minister to a rapidly increasing Hispanic neighborhood. Not that we did not want to--but rather we were not equipped to. Many of our congregation could not get past that point. The emotional pull of the bricks and mortar of the structure was tremendous. Many saw any move from the familiar halls and pews as a treasonous act--as abandoning the neighborhood. Others saw an opportunity to bring a Hispanic congregation into the church plant which could successfully continue the work we originally began. I suppose it was all a matter of perspective.

I was also selected to serve on the next committee—the Building Committee, which was in charge of selling the current church plant, finding property on which to build, and hiring a contractor to build the new building. Through untold amounts of meetings and phone calls we eventually sold our church to an Hispanic congregation, found land at a new location to purchase, and hired a contractor to build our new building. Ted Williams was our chairman and was the glue that held us together during difficult times. Someday there will be a bust of his head sculpted to grace the halls of New South Hills.

We moved next into the building phase of the relocation. The next committee was the Architecture and Land Committee, of which Ted Williams was again appointed as Chairman. We would now concentrate on building the building. Again, I was privileged to serve with a number of other members. My expertise was in zoning and site planning of the property. We eventually stumbled through the hurdles placed before us by the City of Fort Worth and received our building permit. It is easy to say, but was a chore to do. This effort also required that we finalize the construction plans of the structure, which had a myriad amount of decisions to be made from paint to floor to gym to chairs or pews. Eventually it was done and we started construction.

Sometime, during all this activity, Mickey Lance remarked to me that it was very important that we move the three crosses which stood at the original church location over to our new location. Those crosses had stood in that neighborhood through much of our ministry. They were a landmark and should somehow be incorporated into the new church building. I agreed with Mickey but knew there was no way to move the original crosses. During our review with the architect, I asked if they could include the crosses on the front of the new building. I was told that they could do that and in fact inserted them into the elevation drawing. Mickey was pleased with the crosses, I was pleased with the crosses, and so was the rest of the congregation.

However, when it got to the time to put them on the building, no one had provided dimensions for the crosses and the workers simply threw three crosses up. Before they were finished out, I received a phone call from the contractor asking me to sign off on the crosses, since I had given them a drawing of what they should look like. When I saw what they had formed onto the face of your new church building, I could not approve them. There were three crosses, but they appeared awkward and, to me, weren’t quite right. I redesigned the crosses dimensioned them carefully and had them try again. This time they worked and are today as I designed them back then.

What was wrong with the first crosses? Well, first of all, they were constructed at the same size, even though they were off-set from each other. My design required the center cross—the one Christ was crucified on—to be larger and longer than the others. It would reach closer to the ground and higher into the air than the other two. That’s what God does; he goes lower and higher—reaches further--for our benefit. The center cross is larger in that it is wider than the other two. There is no doubt that it is the central dominant aspect of the design, just as God should be the central dominant aspect of our lives. Originally, the crosses did not touch each other. The new design had them overlapping. However, the center cross is the only cross that touches all the crosses. It is the one that brings everything together. The other two crosses reach and touch the center cross only, but they are tied to each other through the center cross, which is again what Christ does. It is through him that we are all brought together.

My other contribution to the physical building of the church plant included the design of the sign and the placement of the initial landscaping. I apologize for this long drawn out explanation of a simple design of crosses. But, somehow, to me, it seemed to be pertinent to the story. Those crosses are significant for our Christian experience, but they also represent the heritage of the church planted on Merida almost 60 years ago. I thought it was only proper that you understood how they got there. God bless you.

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