Hundreds Pay Tribute to Dick Baldwin
at Memphis Memorial Service

by Jane Hines

Memphis, TN — As people quietly filled row after row of the big sanctuary of Idlewild Presbyterian Church Jan. 4 to attend a memorial service for the Rev. Dr. Richard Baldwin, III, it was not surprising to see so many of them, even on a holiday weekend. Idlewild pastor Steve Montgomery estimated there were 700 in attendance.

Many were from Memphis and west Tennessee because he had made his home here in recent years, serving as Executive of the Presbytery of Memphis and as pastor of Evergreen Presbyterian Church. But many friends from a previous pastorate at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Nashville had driven 200 miles to be here.

They had been with Dick and his family during his final illness at Vanderbilt Hospital, where he died of congestive heart failure on December 30. He was 67.

Others from the Synod of Living Waters and the presbyteries within it came long distances to honor Dick as a friend and colleague in ministry. Those who traveled the greatest distances were fellow officers in the Naval Reserve, where he served 41 years as Chaplain with the rank of Captain.

If there had been a roll call of those in attendance, it would have been a testimony to the far reaching influence Dick had in his ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA). All who knew him were aware that he cared deeply about the Church.

Synod Executive David Snellgrove said, “As a parish minister, as a presbytery executive, as stated clerk of the synod, as chair of the General Assembly’s Advisory Committee on the Constitution, he was always involved and engaged in getting the Word rightly preached and the Constitution accurately interpreted.”

In an altogether affirming memorial service, the Rev. Dr. Denton McLellan said in the homily that he could sum up what he had heard in a conversation with Dick’s family by using the word “good.” He said he was using the word to describe Dick “not in a goodygoody sense, but as a truly good human being who helped to make this world, this presbytery, the Presbyterian Church. a better place because of his presence and influence.”

Quoting the poet Robert Browning, McLellan assured the mourners that day, “There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before.”

“That astounding thought was not original with Browning,” McLellan said. “Did we not hear it first from the lips of Jesus himself as he came to comfort those sisters of Bethany? … Jesus spoke these gracious and reassuring words to Martha and to us: I am the resurrection and the life; those who believe in me, even though they die, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. (John 11:25-26)”.

“What does (Scripture) say about Dick as well as about us? Just this. The earthly body is dead and finished. But never has Dick been more alive than he is now. And all that was noble and loving and true and good that we knew and loved about him in this earthly life is a part of that risen spiritual body which he inhabits in that grander life beyond. And in that heavenly land, there is no lost good.”

McLellan had known Dick since they came fifty years ago as fellow Mississippians to Southwestern (now Rhodes College) and then went to Union Seminary in Richmond and later served as ministers in Memphis.

Dick’s immediate surviving family are his wife, Mary Allie, three children and eight grandchildren. Mary Allie told a reporter from the Commercial Appeal that Dick was “a people person.”

And 700 people in the sanctuary at Idlewild Presbyterian Church on January 4, 2004, could say, “Amen.”

Dick Baldwin Will Be Missed