K.B.’s stories

By Devin Thomas

I ask Dr. K.B. Hoover to tell me a story and he smiles, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head. He begins with perhaps his earliest memory, from age three or four. He and his family were attending the Zion Brethren in Christ church in Abilene, Kans. “We had the story of David and Goliath in Sunday school,” recalls K.B.. “The teacher brought in a slingshot along and gave it to my brother and me. I was playing with the thing, swinging it around”—he pauses to twirl an invisible slingshot above his head—“and hit my brother with it.” He erupts in laughter, rocking forward on his chair and slapping his knee.

I ask him more about his childhood and he tells me about how, when he was six years old, his father bought a farm and the family started to attend the now-closed Bethel BIC Church in Kansas, which was located on the same property as the farm. “That’s quite a famous cemetery at that church,” notes K.B. “It’s one of the earliest cemeteries out there. My one great-grandfather is buried there, all of my grandparents, both my parents, and I have a brother and sister buried there. So of course I grew up on the farm, then. We farmed right up to and all around the cemetery. It was just after the automobiles came in. I remember before my father had an automobile, and when he bought his first one. It seemed to be always breaking down…it was a Chevrolet,” he recalls with a grin. “We moved there, and as a result my father was a janitor and caretaker and we used to go to church right there. The Bethel church. That was where the first five dollars for missions was given. Do you know that story?” he asks me.

When I say that I haven’t ever heard it, he begins the tale of a young congregant who was so moved by a visiting missionary’s testimony that, shortly after she finished speaking, he marched up to the front of the sanctuary and laid five dollars on the altar. The young man wanted to start a Brethren in Christ world missions fund. K.B., again, finds the humor in the story: “Everybody’s thinking, ‘Now what are we going to do? We’ve gotta get a treasurer!’”

K.B. loves to tell these stories. With his trademark laugh, he readily observes that “after 95 years, I have too many stories”—an observation reflecting the reality that, after over almost a century of life within the Brethren in Christ church body, K.B. has acquired quite a bit of knowledge.

Yet he recognizes that, no matter how much time he’s spent learning about the world, he can never know everything. When speaking about faith, K.B. says this: “You must have a good understanding of what it means to be walking with Christ . . . but be willing to be obedient, which means being willing to learn and knowing that the actual working out of these things can take on a lot of different forms. I’m not smart enough—and I’ve never met anyone else who is—to always differentiate between right and wrong. Now, I’m much more tolerant than I was at one time. But hopefully no less Christian.”

« Back to the Winter 2007 In Part Online