The Baptist church in Brewton was decked for a funeral. Men wore ties. Women wore dresses. The occasional elderly woman in a floral hat was seen wandering the premises.

You don’t see many floral hats anymore.

We were burying the preacher today. The white hearse sat parked out front. People filed into the sanctuary with sober smiles.

Most visitors were elderly. They gripped the rail with both hands as they ascended the steps.

The sanctuary was quiet. A piano played “Nearer My God to Thee.” The receiving line was long, but not that long.

“Wow,” whispered someone in line. “I thought there’d be A LOT more people here.”

“Where IS everybody?” whispered another.

An old woman replied. “They’re all dead.” She gestured toward the casket. “Because HE already buried them all.”

The man in the casket was their preacher. Although he refused to be called “Pastor.” They would only know him as “Brother.”

He was meek. Soft spoken. Quick to laugh. Children and dogs followed him around.

He had cotton hair. Ice-blue eyes that were bad to water up whenever he got to talking about Mercy.

I first met him when he was supposed to officiate my marriage, some 23 years ago. He had been my wife’s childhood minister, but had long since retired. We were instant friends.

Even after his retirement, he still preached. He preached in a country church, way out in the sticks. Sepulga Baptist, it was called. A place so far from town they had to mail order sunshine from Sears, Roebuck & Co.

I visited Sepulga a few times. I played piano for his services. The first time I visited, there were nine members in attendance. The next time I visited, the church had grown exponentially to a congregation of nearly eleven.

There was no microphone. No sound system. No projection screen with a bouncing ball over the lyrics. Only a wooden room, with antique pews that were louder than the piano.

“He always visited the shut-ins,” said an elderly person in the visitation line.

Someone else agreed. An older woman leaning on a cane said, “He spent more time visiting folks in the hospital than he did in the pulpit.”

Said another: “I remember when he baptized a man in our town who was bad into drugs.”

An elderly man nodded. “I remember that, too. We lost church members because of that. But that young man sat in the front pew every Sunday till he died.”

The old preacher delivered hundreds of sermons in his day. Maybe thousands.

And more than that. He held hands with drunks who had fallen off the wagon, and cried with them until the wee hours. He went fishing with thieves and liars.

He befriended wayward young men who couldn’t figure out who they were. He visited inmates, the sick, the lonely, and the shut-ins.

Until he finally became a shut-in himself.

During his last days, the old preacher was alone in house. There were sheets of plywood on the floors, duct-taped together, so he could use his wheelchair indoors. His home was littered with medical equipment.

My wife and I visited him. I played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on a banjo. The old man sang louder than anyone else in the room. His eyes closed. Tears rolling down his face. And mine.

When the song finished, the frail man gripped my arm and said. “Can we sing it one more time?”

We did.

And today, I have no doubt that’s exactly what Brother John is right doing now.