ALTON – It doesn’t take more than five minutes of talking to David Case to learn three things: he loves Jesus; he and his wife, Rosemary, are an inseparable team; and he is passionate about passing the leadership baton to young people in the church.
High school sweethearts who grew up in Oregon County, Mo., David and Rosemary got married right after high school in 1966, ready to start their lives together with promising jobs lined up. Just two weeks later, David got his draft notice. They spent their first two years mostly apart while David served in Vietnam. “It didn’t hurt us too bad,” he says. “We’ve now been married 58 years.”
After he got out of the Army, they moved to St. Louis but later decided to settle in Oregon County when they found out they were expecting their first of three daughters. David went to barber school, got his barber license, began working for Rosemary’s father in his barber shop, and bought a farm.
For ten years they focused on raising their family and serving faithfully in their church. David had grown up in church and surrendered his life to Christ at age 13 during a revival. He was part of a different denomination that didn’t hold to security of salvation.
But when he started attending Rosemary’s Southern Baptist church after they got married, he began to do the research himself in Scriptures. “I found that Southern Baptists were a lot closer to the teachings of the Word of God,” he says. That – along with the unique strength of the Cooperative Program – are the two reasons why he’s remained a Southern Baptist for over 50 years.
As he studied the Word, he saw security of salvation written all the way through. “I realized there’s nothing we can do to earn or merit salvation, so I knew I couldn’t hang onto it myself. God had to do it for me,” he says.
He had every intention of simply being a husband, father, and faithful church member as he served in their church under an older pastor who mentored him. His pastor kept telling him that God had called him to preach. Rosemary agreed. David, however, denied the call.
“God kept hammering me, calling me to do something. I finally surrendered to him and the ministry,” he says. They sold the farm and moved to town. The fifth time a church asked him to fill the pulpit, they called him to be their pastor.
He pastored at Chapel Hill in Thayer, Mo., for 10 years, then pastored Riverton Baptist for another 23. He resigned from Riverton when caring for both his and Rosemary’s aging parents became too much to manage both.
After their parents had passed away, the Cases were ready for what the Lord had next. “Even though our service was altered, we never lost our passion for serving our Lord and the commission given to all Christians,” David says. He began mentoring and assisting a young pastor at Shiloh Baptist.
Meanwhile, their association, the Eleven Point River Baptist Association, had been without a DOM for a while. David had barely gotten home from an executive board meeting when someone on the search committee called and asked him to consider serving as the DOM. He said, “No, I don’t think so,” feeling like they were busy enough with Shiloh.
He and Rosemary prayed about it anyway. “We decided maybe we ought to do that because we had a vision,” he says. The vision was simple: “We want to try to train young people to be future leaders because that’s what we’re going to need. That’s where we started with the DOM job.”
He agreed to serve without pay for two years on one condition: the association had to commit to budget for a salary so that they could call someone else when his two years were up. With only seven churches in a rural area, it was difficult to provide a livable salary for a DOM.
He took the position, and he and Rosemary got to work putting their vision to reality. “We began to talk in our meetings about what will happen to this association if we don’t have our younger families develop a burden to carry on,” he says. In response to that, he and Rosemary developed a leadership Bible study targeted at teenagers – and their parents.
“We included the parents because we saw families doing a lot of activities but not in the home and not with a Bible around the kitchen table. That put the burden on the parent’s back because they became the Bible Study teachers. Rosemary and I outlined it, sent it home for them to dig deeper and explain and then we all came together, parents and students once a month. We were the organizers and encouragers, but the success of that effort totally rested on the parents,” he wrote in the associational missionary report.
They wanted the families to develop a generational burden to shepherd their teenagers to hunger for God’s Word so that those teenagers would grow up to gather their own children around the kitchen table to discuss the Word.
Two teenagers went on to teach Sunday School at their churches after the leadership study. Another is helping keep Sunday school and children’s church records at her church. Seven later went on a mission trip with One Team International to St. Louis.
“Rosemary and I pray that one day they will say that they grew spiritually these two years while they were challenged, and they will all serve in a Baptist church and maybe this association,” David says. He encourages churches to involve teens in their Sunday school. “Take the student in with you to observe you teach,” he says. He advises giving them opportunities to teach and inviting their parents to help them prepare. “Then the student teaches, and the teacher observes and assists. The goal would be to let them teach alone with the class at least once a month.”
His advice to pastors who want to see the next generation of church leadership raised up is simple: “Don’t have two churches in one,” he says, where the youth are separated from the adults all the time. Passing the leadership baton to young people involves equipping parents to disciple their kids and letting all generations learn together.
David finished his DOM tenure in June. But he and Rosemary are far from finished investing in young people. After the first of the year, they started attending FBC Alton, which was going through a tumultuous time. “We felt like God would want us to go down there,” he says.
David and Rosemary started knocking on doors inviting people who weren’t already in church to come. Three weeks ago, they had a baptism. Five weeks ago, they had five baptisms. David is mentoring the new interim pastor, and the church is moving in the right direction. David and Rosemary will keep pouring into young people, training them to be future leaders. “It’s always been in my heart for that,” he says.
When prompted to speak to the way Rosemary is woven throughout his stories, he chuckles and says, “Rosemary is a really dedicated servant of the Lord. She is also very good at holding me accountable for different things. We do that for each other. We are a team. I believe the pastor and his wife ought to be a team.”
In the face of the deteriorating family unit and the attack on biblical marriage, David and Rosemary shine as a bright beacon showing young people the way to vitality in the life of the local church – and to the beauty of God’s design for the partnership of a one-flesh husband and wife team.