White’s Ferry Road School of Preaching in West Monroe, Louisiana, marks 50 years

The White’s Ferry Road School of Preaching in West Monroe, La., opened in 1970 and graduated 875 ministers during its 22 years of operation, according to the Christian Chronicle’s account of the school’s 50th anniversary. The Chronicle featured the school in a special Inside Story column.

The original instructors were Lynn Campbell, Dub DeLoach, Leonard Gray, Bill Johnson, Bill Smith, J.J. Turner and Jim Young. Carl Allison served as the director.

Deanne Middlebrook recalled that she and her late husband, Tommy Middlebrook, were married for nearly 55 years. He attended the White’s Ferry Road Preaching School from 1974 to 1976. Before his death at age 75 in 2017, he preached for four Texas churches and served as an elder for another. Middlebrook said the couple both held master’s degrees in education, but that his time at the school was the most intensive study he had undertaken. “The students who were there when we were there received a total immersion study of the Bible,” she said, adding that she valued the ladies’ classes held on Monday nights.

Britt Farmer, minister for the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, graduated in 1987. He spoke at the 50th anniversary reunion about his church’s experience with a deadly shooting that claimed the lives of two members. Asked what he remembered most about his studies, he said, “The workload.” He also described the instructors as diverse and said they accepted one another’s differences on matters of opinion. “I never felt forced to follow a specific line of theology or doctrine outside of the written word of God,” he said.

Lori Allison Easterly, a ministry assistant for the White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ, said her father, Carl Allison, was the school’s director and her mother, Barbara Allison, taught several of the wives’ classes. She has worked at the church for the last 19 years, including alongside her father and Bill Smith before they died. Easterly said that during the school’s more than 20 years, 900 students took what they learned to people across the United States and around the world, a figure that differs from the 875 graduates cited earlier in the article. She described the impact as one “that only God can measure,” a sense of continuing the faith into the next generation (Psalm 78:4).

Alan Robertson attended the preaching school from 1988 to 1990. He then interned at White’s Ferry Road for two years before beginning full-time ministry there.

Source: Read the original report