Southwesterner Bob Ray marks 60 years as pastor of Fairy Baptist
Bob Ray has seen a lot in his years as pastor of Fairy Baptist Church, located in the small Central Texas community of Fairy, but when the congregation was planning to celebrate his 60th year in the same pulpit, he didn’t know what to expect.
The only thing his son Richard, associate pastor of the church, had told him about the Aug. 31 celebration was, “‘You’re not preaching that Sunday morning, so just show up and we’ll take it from there,’” Ray said.
What the church had planned was a day of sharing memories of and appreciation for Ray’s six decades of service. Recognitions came from his alma mater Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), and others.
“The church put on a fantastic program,” Ray said. “It was a pretty amazing day, all day long.” Among the highlights were six of his great-grandchildren singing, he said, adding the biggest surprise was the announcement that the congregation had voted to name the fellowship hall in honor of him and his late wife, Rosalind, who died from pancreatic cancer in January 2024.
“I give her lots of credit; maybe most of the credit,” Ray said of his late wife. “She knew I should be a pastor before I was willing to answer the call.”
He and Rosalind had met during their senior year of high school in Wichita, Kan., and graduated together in 1959. They married in December 1960 and moved to Lawrence, Kan., where he studied engineering. He surrendered to preaching at First Southern Baptist there and was going to quit the university and “just go to a Bible college or something, and that’s what all my preacher friends told me to do,” he said.
A Baptist Student Ministry director friend suggested that maybe God was calling him to be a working pastor.
“The word ‘bivocational’ wasn’t used,” Ray said, adding he and Rosalind prayed about it and decided to stay at the university and “see where the Lord led.” After graduating in 1965, the couple moved to Fort Worth where he would attend Southwestern Seminary. He began preaching at Fairy Baptist that same year while also holding a full-time job working nights at a manufacturing company. He earned his Master of Divinity degree in 1975.
“Those were good years,” he said of his time at Southwestern. “I learned a lot. … [I] didn’t know much, and I needed a good education, and I got one.”
Ray retired from his manufacturing job in 2001 and began working for the BGCT, directing the organization’s Bivocational and Small Church Department. Though he enjoyed the work, eventually “the Lord laid it on my heart … that we needed to move down to Fairy and concentrate on the church,” he said.
Ray said he’s had several opportunities to move to a bigger church, but neither he nor Rosalind felt led to go. They had agreed that “she’d pray about something by herself, I’d pray about something by myself, and unless we both felt the same, we didn’t do anything,” he said. Offers would come, but either he or Rosalind didn’t feel comfortable with them, so they stayed in Fairy.
“I know it’s weird because that’s my first church and I’m still here,” he said before clarifying. “The truth is, I’ve been in the same location 60 years. Churches, you know, change multiple times in 60 years.”
One of the primary changes has been in church membership. When he first came to Fairy, he said, the people attending the church were almost exclusively farmers and ranchers. Today, many in the congregation are white-collar professionals who moved from the cities to the country. He also noted that people are more isolated today, living behind locked gates, making them more difficult to reach.
And while the church today uses technology to broadcast its services and has incorporated electronics and security devices into the building, “We are basically, I’ll be honest with you, a very conservative church,” he said. “We have deacons. We sing out of hymnals.”
Another thing has not changed.
“I have not changed my message,” Ray said. “The Word of God doesn’t change.”
As for preaching his sermons, Ray said, “I know I do them better than [when] I first came. I couldn’t preach a lick when I first came … because I hadn’t even gone to seminary then. Going to seminary improved my ability to develop messages and ability to preach immensely.”
After 60 years in the pulpit, and despite some health issues, Ray says he’s not finished preaching.
“God’s keeping me patched up so I can keep serving Him, if that’s what He wills, and seems like He does, so I’m going to keep going that direction,” he said. “I’ve been blessed immensely.”
