Have you ever visited any of those sleepy towns?
Last month I was in DingDongDaddy/Dumas, XIT/Dalhart, and Vernon too....
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I have driven through or spent the night in every one of those towns. My grandfather was a Methodist minister in all of them.
The family legend was that he was the VP of the largest bank in Amarillo, back when the sidewalks there were wooden planks. One fine day, he got the call to become a minister and he went to Theological seminary and got himself ordained. Methodists required training back then, but Southern Baptists didn't have to do any serious training. In those days, the middle class tended to be Methodists who sat quietly in church and acted ever so polite, while the masses were Baptists who liked to hoot and holler and make a whole lot of joyful noises. The worst thing that could happen to a Methodist Church was that it was poorer than the local Baptist churches. My grandfather, with his banking experience, rescued churches that had been poorly managed. One thing they did not teach in Seminars in those days was church management. The Methodists liked to move their ministers about, lest they develop an unwholesome personality cult, so the family moved often, and my father attended school in all of those little boring, treeless towns, which were certainly a lot more boring before radio, TV, video games and the Internet.
I am pretty sure all the Ding Dong Daddies of Dumas were Baptists, probably backsliding ones in sore need of a revival.
