Religion: Pastor Smothers

Big Lick, Tenn. is not a county, or a city, or a town. It is just a place. Greyhound bus drivers in Crossville, 14 miles away, have never heard of it. The 50-odd families in Big Lick carved their little farms out of the rolling, wooded country of the Cumberland Plateau. Timber used to be their cash crop. When the timber market went bad, there was nothing left but hard scrabble farming.

In 1930 the average family’s cash income at Big Lick was $50 a year, the average house was valued at $250 to $500. For six months a year even the road to Crossville was impassable. By the time a doctor was sent for, it was usually too late. When a visiting preacher came to Big Lick, he used the schoolhouse.

This was the place and these the people among whom Pastor Eugene Smathers came in 1934 to live and work and serve God.

Smathers grew up on a Kentucky tobacco farm. He graduated from Transylvania College in 1929 and from Louisville

Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1932. He is a tall, stoop-shouldered, humble man whose bushy, red eyebrows knot together behind his rimless glasses when he thinks hard.

He saw that his first job at Big Lick was to change a dispirited collection of families into a community of men&women. Their center would be the church. He started with the young folks—dances, socials, and “singing games.” Then he set out to build his church.

Smathers’ old friend Dr. Warren H. Wilson of the Presbyterian, U.S.A. Unit of Rural Church Work helped with the project. Big Lick’s 50 families supplied labor. Smathers was the foreman. Said a grizzled Big Lick farmer last week: “That feller did it all. I seen him a-standin’ out there in the sun, day after day, takin’ holt of the building.” By the time the church was built, the people of Big Lick and their pastor had built more than a church. They had welded themselves into a Christian community.

Since then, Big Lick, and Pastor Smathers have built other things: a small health center which now houses a resident nurse, study clubs to plan and carry out better farming techniques, a cooperative homestead plan to encourage young couples to stay in Big Lick. The state college and TVA have selected Big Lick as a demonstration area to dramatize soil conservation.

In a report to the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen on his mission in the Cumberlands, Pastor Smathers once wrote: “My vocation is practical action rather than philosophical reasoning.” But that same report showed that “practical action” is only the outward and visible sign of his ministry. Said he:

” ‘Man cannot live by bread alone,’ but before the average can have that which is ‘beyond bread’ he must have bread, and helping him to secure this is a religious vocation. But this vocation must not stop with helping meet material need, but proceed to the more difficult task of seeking to provide some help in the solution of man’s interior problems. … In a situation among disadvantaged people, the proclamation of God’s love must take practical form in seeking a solution for pressing economic need. But even among the disadvantaged it is necessary to remember the truth of these words of Jesus: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Poverty is no proof of saintliness! Among advantaged people the emphasis will be placed differently.”