Betty Coble remembers exactly when she preached for the first time at Arcadia Church, where she has been a member for more than 50 years.
It was Easter Sunday, 1978. She was teaching Sunday school to the adults, when someone suggested, “Why don’t you come out and preach?”
The church had no pastor. No one was scheduled to preach.
“This was a little country church, and nobody wanted to come,” she said. That day, “the church was full of people” — a crowd of about 30, compared to the usual 17 or 20.
She prayed, “Lord, you’ve got to give me something.” She went out and preached the Sunday school lesson she’d prepared, “and it went really well. You never know.”
Today Coble, at 85, is Arcadia’s commissioned lay pastor.
The congregation has not had a full-time minister, she guesses, in decades.
Arcadia has 43 or 44 members, she’s lost track, in what used to be a coal-mining town. “It’s the only church around here,” Coble said. “The Catholic church has quit, the Episcopal church has quit, the Methodist church has quit. Everybody has quit.”
That leaves Coble and her Presbyterian church to run the local food pantry, distributing food and clothing every month and toys to the children at Christmas. When other Presbyterian congregations ask what they can donate, Coble gets specific. She’s asked for 75 jars of spaghetti sauce and 75 boxes of spaghetti. She’s asked for toilet paper and 500 pounds of potatoes.
Each family gets a bag.
Coble writes the lessons for Vacation Bible School, because buying curriculum is too expensive. She runs the youth group, to which several older women come because they like the banana splits and the Bible studies.
She prays with the sick and visits people in the hospital, but won’t drive, she said, more than 30 miles from home.
The training to become a CLP was difficult, Coble said, “but I just felt the pulling of the Lord on my heart … I studied hard.”
She was in her 70s then, a high school graduate and the mother of six children who went to night school to learn bookkeeping and typing when her husband, a truck driver, died at age 53.
“To be able to stand in front of people and not be ashamed, it’s just really a miracle,” Coble said. “The Lord made a way for me.”
