Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991 TAG: 9103080181
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: ALONG THE BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY LENGTH: Long
An ex-soldier trying to make a living, he and his brother-in-law were digging a well at Thaxton when their steel derrick struck a power line. Only Falls survived.
It got him thinking.
"The Bible says `Thou knowest not what a day will bring forth,'" said Falls, who for 40 years now has been the pastor at New Haven Baptist Church in Floyd County. `It was bearing on my mind how quickly a person can leave this Earth."
His thinking - prodded by an evangelistic service, where Falls said he was "born again" - eventually led the well digger to the pulpit at the tiny church.
He hasn't left it yet. But he will.
At the end of the month, Joe Falls will retire.
He will leave a country church that has changed completely in four decades. Under Falls, this church beside the Blue Ridge Parkway has been rebuilt and enlarged twice, and has added a fellowship hall and a comfortable parsonage.
But Falls, church members say, has always been pretty much the same.
And they say their pastor, with his booming voice and his unshakable convictions, is going to be hard to replace.
"It's his directness," church member Judy Epperly said when asked what made Falls special. "When you go to him for anything he's going to answer you straight out, and he's going to answer you from the Bible. You won't have any doubt where you stand . . . He's the best."
"He's one of the old-time gospel preachers," said church member Wanda Combs, news editor of The Floyd Press, the county's weekly newspaper. "He has a lot of energy. And he has a loud booming voice."
And he uses it.
That fact is, preaching just comes naturally to the former well driller.
"I'm like the fellow in the 90th Psalm," he told a reporter recently, his voice rising to fill the church's new auditorium. "We live our lives like a tale that is told. And I don't know if mine is worth telling or not."
It goes like this:
Falls was born in the town of Blue Ridge outside Roanoke, son of a foreman at a Roanoke factory.
Growing up - he was one of 12 children - Falls delivered the Roanoke Times and attended Montvale High School. He was drafted during World War II, but he found time to marry his high school sweetheart before going into the service.
Falls and wife Lola Virginia have now been married 47 years.
"I've only had one church and one wife," he joked. "I think I'm going to let that record stand." The couple has three grown daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
When the war ended - Falls served stateside, and saw no fighting - he found work drilling water wells in Bedford County.
It was then that he got a close-up look at mortality, when the derrick he and his brother-in-law, Russell Allen, were using struck a power line on Dec. 7, 1947.
Allen did not survive. "It absolutely consumed him," Falls recalled.
The accident weighed on him, Falls said. And at an evangelistic service at a Baptist church a year or so later, he said he saw the light.
"The spirit of the Lord spoke directly to me through the Word . . . Though I'd been a church member all my life, I was saved," he said.
A year later Falls decided to enter the ministry, and began attending Piedmont Bible College. He preached a guest sermon at New Haven Baptist Church in 1951.
Shortly afterward, the church picked him to replace its former minister, who had left for a church in Greensboro, N.C.
Falls has been here ever since. He finished his course work by driving back and forth between the rural church and Winston-Salem, some 75 miles away.
But after 40 years, he said it's time to go.
"I just think it's time the church got another pastor," Falls said. "Forty years is long enough."
In fact, it is longer than many ministers stay at a single church.
And it is doubly impressive, given that Falls is not one to play church politics.
Far from it.
"Tell the truth and shame the devil," Falls said. He credits his long tenure to "absolute truth and honesty."
Church members pretty much agree.
"So many people when the times get hard kind of back down. But he never has," said Epperly.
"It would be purely fiction to say nobody ever disagreed with him," said her husband, Kenneth Epperly, who has attended the church since Falls' arrival in 1951. "He just stuck to his guns."
Meanwhile, the church mushroomed. Photographs from 1951 show a small clapboard building. The congregation numbered 40 people.
Offerings that first year totaled $2,200, Falls said, and his starting salary was $27.85 per week.
The salary has increased over the years to $23,400, the congregation to 335 people.
And over 40 years, Falls' largely working-class flock has donated some $2.5 million to the church, he said proudly.
"They've taken good care of me through the years," Falls said. In addition to his salary and benefits, the money also has gone to missionary work in Haiti, to a ranch for homeless children and to support Falls' former radio show, which was broadcast around the Caribbean.
The church has yet to select a new permanent preacher. "That's going to be a big job," said Clifton Brammer, a church deacon.
As for Falls, he doesn't know what the future will hold - though he said he won't stop preaching. "I've got a Bible that'll travel," he said with a grin.
But Falls also said he and his wife are moving just three miles from New Haven Baptist Church, and plan to stay involved in church activities there.
The church had a reception for the departing minister Saturday. Falls' last sermon as church pastor will be Easter Sunday.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB