By Sue Ann Jones
It’s not easy to leave a thriving church congregation you’ve pastored for nearly 27 years. Just ask Gale Wooten, who said good-bye Sunday to the congregation at Mammoth Assembly of God, where he’s served as pastor since 1989.
“How blessed I’ve been,” he told the Times last week, reminiscing about his decades at Mammoth, where he first preached as a fill-in minister in 1984. “God laid that church on my heart, and then I waited five years for Him to open that door,” he said.
It happened on Nov. 18, 1989, when the church “voted me in, and the deacons asked me to come and be their pastor,” he said. At the time, about 40 people attended most Sunday morning services at the Mammoth church. Lately, Sunday services have been bringing more than 150 people into the building that has been remodeled and expanded four times since it was rebuilt in 1994 after a 1993 fire destroyed the original 1939 building.
Wooten didn’t grow up thinking he would be a minister. He was one of three sons born to a Missouri Pacific Railroad section crew chief and his wife in Calico Rock, Arkansas. Gale graduated from Calico Rock High School and then, as he tells it, he “won the lottery” – meaning he was drafted into the Army.
After serving two years in Germany, he came home and got a job as a technician with Baxter Lab in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Then, one Sunday night in 1980, he attended a service at a small Calico Rock church and listened intently as the preacher spoke about the call of God. “About five of us guys went forward into ministry that night,” he said. “As far as I know, all but two of us are still in ministry today.”
He didn’t go to seminary, didn’t take Bible courses. “It was just me and God. I learned everything the hard way,” he said.
He found he had a lot in common with the apostle Peter. “I like to fish and always have something to say,” he quipped.
Wooten started preaching in area churches, filling in for absent pastors. He spent some time pastoring a couple of small churches in Arkansas but then went back to being a fill-in preacher. “I filled in for five years – Mennonite, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, just about every kind of church you could think of. That’s how I got acquainted with Mammoth. I filled in here as a supply minister before they invited me to come full-time.”
He has married, buried and baptized countless Christians in his three-plus decades in ministry. He doesn’t know how many. “I started out thinking I would keep track,” he said. “I wrote down the first three. And then I remembered the passage in Malachi that says God keeps the books on us. So there’s no use for us to keep them. His records are more accurate. What does it matter how many I’ve baptized or dedicated? He knows.”
Recently, he burned two boxes of his old sermons. “I write them down on paper. No one can read my writing but me, and I can’t read it after a week or two. So no sense in keeping them. Besides, it [insight from God’s Word] is new every day. There’s no need to keep the old stuff,” he said.
During his career at Mammoth, he has also served as head of the West Plains section of the Missouri Assemblies of God, helping churches in the section work through difficulties. And he was a member of the Gainesville Lions Club and served as president of the Ozark County Ministerial Alliance and the Interagency Council. He’s also served on the Ozark Action board, the Head Start Policy Council and the White River Valley Electric Co-op’s Operation Round-up board, helping decide how donated funds are used from co-op members who “round up” their bill to the next-highest dollar. He loves talking about the two days he spent with the Missouri State Highway Patrol in its community outreach program. He’s also donated 14 gallons of blood at Red Cross blood drives here. “I like to give blood to make sure I still have a heart,” he said.
The best part of ministry
The best part of being in ministry, he said, is “seeing lives change.”
And the hardest part?
“Dealing with people’s problems,” he said. “Oh, the things I’ve heard – secrets I’ll take with me to the grave. There’s so much hurt out there, so much.”
He especially saw a lot of people’s problems during his years of working with other area pastors in the “prison ministry” they offered to inmates in the Ozark County Jail. But even there he saw lives changed. Occasionally he still hears from someone who may call to “say thank you that their lives got straightened out,” he said.
Wooten refuses to take credit for anyone’s life changes. “It’s a God thing,” he said.
And then there’s that other problem pastors must deal with: death.
Despite his unshakable belief that Christians will live forever in heaven, “when someone in the church dies, a part of you dies too,” he said. “You get so attached to people, and you love them. It hurts when they die.”
It also hurts to leave a congregation you’ve grown to know and love, but for many pastors, that time eventually comes. And it rarely works for pastors to step down from the pulpit and sit in the same church’s pews. So next Sunday, Wooten and his wife, Linda, who has served as his co-pastor since their marriage in 2008, “will be sitting in a church somewhere else,” he said.
They also have tickets for a Caribbean cruise later this month.
And before long he’ll most likely be preaching again, stepping back into the pulpit to serve in churches around the area, including Mammoth, when a fill-in pastor is needed. “Old ministers never retire,” he said. “They just keep on filling in.”
Ron Felker will be the fill-in pastor at Mammoth Jan. 17.
Tears and laughter
Tears fell when Wooten told the deacons of his decision about two months ago. More tears fell as his last Sunday morning as Mammoth’s pastor got under way, although it was hard to sense the sorrow. In fact, a few days earlier, Wooten had jokingly insisted that Mammoth was “a great church with a sorry pastor.” And he had playfully argued with someone who had suggested his congregation would be sad to see him go. “I don’t know,” he joked, faking skepticism. “They’re throwing a celebration potluck.”
Some of Gale and Linda’s family members were at their last service Sunday. They each have two adult sons from previous marriages. Gale’s son Chris Wooten lives in Calico Rock with his wife Ann and their daughters Keely and Kimberly; another son, Michael Wooten, lives in Mountain Home but works at Century Bank in Gainesville. Linda’s sons are Nathan Connelly in Republic and Seth Connelly in Ozark.
As church members assembled Sunday, the music was loud and spirited, and Wooten set a happy tone for the gathering as he happily joined in singing the chorus of a special old-time hymn, “Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now,” performed by songleader Jack Sellars. He preached a sermon urging his listeners to be “overcomers” and do whatever they had to do to “make it to heaven.” He told them, “I don’t care whether you run full open over the finish line or whether you walk in, crawl in or fall in. But whatever you do, make heaven.”
After the service ended, Patrice Wells announced that the potluck lunch was ready and the Wootens would go first, prompting Gale to do a little happy dance to show how he felt about the idea.
He seemed determined to keep the mood light. But during an interview with the Times a few days earlier, he had wanted to make sure his true feelings were honestly shared.
“What a joy and a privilege and an honor it’s been to serve God, this church and this community,” he said. Ozarkcountytimes
