Late yesterday night, as I was winding down and attempting to sleep, I received the following message from one of the local elders I know in one of the Church of God groups in the Tampa Bay area, giving a death announcement of the man who served as my pastor from 1995 to 1999 during my teenage years in the UCG-Tampa congregation: “A long-time, faithful pastor of God’s church, Don Waterhouse, died peacefully early Tuesday morning, May 10, 2016, from heart failure. Mr. Waterhouse was first ordained as an elder in the Church of God in 1965. He is survived by his wife, Donna, four children, and ten grandchildren. Though saddened by this loss, we rejoice in the comfort of the resurrection, which Mr. Waterhouse taught and believed for many years. More details will follow.” As someone who blogs a great deal about the dead [1], I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a eulogy for the man considering I knew him at a particularly interesting time of life.

I first became familiar with Mr. Don Waterhouse in the summer of 1995 when my mother, younger brother, and I officially joined United right after Pentecost. We had attended at least occasionally at the Bible Study group before the official founding of UCG between the Days of Unleavened Bread and the Indianapolis Conference on May 1-3, 1995, but these Bible Studies were led by unpaid local elders rather than either of the pastors in the area who would later join up with UCG. I was, of course, familiar with our new pastor’s elder brother, Mr. Gerald Waterhouse, he of the notoriously long sermon messages that would go three hours or more in length and his fondness of showing slideshows of international trips after his message. Mr. Don Waterhouse, younger than his far more flamboyant elder brother by about fifteen years or so, was a man of duty, somewhat old-fashioned and temperamentally conservative in his ways, and not someone who enjoyed being a lightning rod for controversy. He seemed more than a little bit shy, and was the sort of local pastor who could be trusted to do his job without drawing a great deal of attention to himself.

As might be expected, I had some humorous interactions with him because of our somewhat different personalities. While I was in high school, I watched the Passover twice as an observer (I had done so earlier as an eighth grader in 1995), and the second of those times, in 1999, a friend and I were watching the footwashing ceremony when we were asked to help hold the basin for a gentleman who was in his 90’s and very frail, who did not have much life left. I remember being somewhat touched by being asked to help out despite being an unbaptized teenager not quite 18, and I wrote a short note to the pastor afterward thanking him for the opportunity to observe (as in watch) the Passover and help out with the footwashing ceremony. He seemed to take umbrage at the suggestion that I had observed (as in participated in) the Passover, given that only baptized members are to take the unleavened bread and wine. Here, as in many cases in my life, there was disagreement and division because of different senses of the word that were meant and taken. It was not the first, nor would it be the last time, that my written words would be mangled in translation from sender to recipient.

While I was still in high school I began baptism counseling, and it was fairly obvious that my pastor in Tampa did not think that many teenagers were mature or serious enough to consider baptism. His way of testing my seriousness was particularly noteworthy, in that he assigned me a great deal of reading—the largest of the correspondence courses and a somewhat older booklet, older than I am at least, called The Plain Truth About Water Baptism. If he thought that a few hundred pages of reading would deter me from my efforts, he was quite mistaken, an easy mistake for others to make who are not aware of my passion for reading, but although his approach to baptism counseling, being heavy on making sure that I had the intellectual knowledge to commit myself to God’s way, did not really answer the concerns about life I have tended to have, it is quite likely that he was not quite sure what to make of me, or how to turn my obvious enthusiasm and energy to useful and constructive purposes. He was not the first or the last pastor to have that sort of difficulty either.

After high school, I moved first to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California, where I attended the Eagle Rock congregation and was baptized slightly more than halfway into my freshman year on February 26, 2000, in the baptismal font behind the stage of where the congregation held services at the time, in an experience that was nearly an actual death. By the time I moved back for several years to the Tampa area, he had been moved to serve the congregations of South Carolina, and I did not keep in touch with him, and only heard about him through mutual friends who lived there. We were not, after all, particularly close friends. Nevertheless, it is fitting and proper to honor those who have served their entire adult lives, and sought to do so as much as possible without controversy. How much being the much younger brother of a celebrity traveling evangelist affected him is hard to say—he was a much more quiet and introverted man than his ebullient and exuberant brother. But he was faithful to his duty as he understood it, careful and cautious, and as temperamentally conservative as it is possible to be. If we did not see eye to eye on everything, and if we had our share of misunderstandings, I wish to give comfort and encouragement to his surviving family concerning our mutual hope in the resurrection and in eternal life to come for God’s servants, however scattered we are.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/obituary-jacob-franklin-snyder-koontz/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/the-funeral/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/22/he-didnt-have-to-be/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/i-never-had-the-chance-to-say-goodbye/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/rest-in-peace-david-ekama/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/sudden-death/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/to-dust-we-return/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/requium-for-a-rapper-nate-dogg/