HALF CENTURY OF SERVICE: After 51 years in ministry, Doyle Turner now waits to see what God has next for him

On Sunday, July 11, Doyle Turner left True Hope Baptist Church in Theodosia a little differently than he’d left it almost every Sunday since September 1987. That Sunday a couple of weeks ago he and his wife, Peggy, left the church without locking the door and with the building key missing from his pocket. After nearly 34 years, Doyle had stepped down as the church’s pastor. For one of the few times in all those years, he wasn’t the last one to leave the building after the Sunday morning service. It was no longer his job to lock the door.

“Usually, I was the last one there to lock up, unless some were staying to do song practice or something, or if we had to go somewhere that day,” he said last week by phone. “That particular day, there was a lot of hugs and  a lot of tears. Then I gave the key to one of the people at church. This guy, Arnold Jennings, is very special because I had worked with him on the county [Road and Bridge Department], and he and Donna – she plays the piano at church – ended up getting married on the deck of our house.”

Arnold and Donna Jennings were one of many couples Doyle married during his  decades as a pastor. He’s also preached a lot of funerals, he said, including the service for his dad, Leslie Turner, who died in 2013. 

Now settled in a home he and Peggy have bought in Bolivar near their daughter and only child, Regina Gooley, and her family, Doyle said the Scripture he used for his final sermon at True Hope was 1 Corinthians 10:15: “But by the grace of God I am what I am . . . not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”

He knows it’s hard for a congregation to move on after a longtime preacher moves away, and he wanted the members of True Hope to remember that what they shared there was “not about me,” Doyle said. “It’s something greater than I am. I kept telling them to look beyond me to the One who is greater than all of us.”

A call to ministry

Doyle’s life as a devoted Christian should have started after he went forward to be saved at Piland Youth Camp when he was 12 and was baptized in nearby Little Creek.  

Afterward, “I called myself a Christian, but I didn’t always live it,” he said. “I done things that weren’t Christian – typical stuff teenagers do.”

Then, the summer after he graduated from Bradleyville High School in 1970, he went back to camp as a camper one last time and went up front again at the evening service to rededicate his life to Christ. He felt something he hadn’t felt before that night, something that caused the self-described “shy and backward” teenager some concern. He discovered what it was on the evening he got home from camp.

He and his parents, the late Leslie and Mavie Turner, and their six children lived on a subsistence farm in Thornfield. They “always had a couple of gardens plus a potato and corn patch, and usually a watermelon patch too,” he said. “Mom home-canned. We butchered our own hogs and beef,” Doyle said. 

And they milked cows. “One of my duties was to go down in the afternoon and get the cows and bring ’em up to the barn for milking. Coming back with them, I felt such a heavy burden it seemed like I couldn’t go on any farther. I sat down right there in the cow path and started praying,” he said. “I told the Lord I didn’t know what was wrong, but if there was something he wanted me to do, I would do it. I didn’t have a clue what God had in mind for me. If I had of, I don’t know that I would have made that statement.”

Then he prayed the words that would direct his life for the next 50-plus years: “Lord, if you want me to preach, I’ll preach,” he said.

With that, he suddenly felt his mental burden ease. “All that load I was carrying was gone,” he said. “I felt such relief.”

That night he told his mother he’d been called to preach. He doesn’t remember her response, but she may have been a bit skeptical. Later, when Doyle told his longtime Sunday school teacher, Norene Pellham, he’d been called, she replied, “I could have told you that.”

“Well, why didn’t you?” Mavie Turner asked in reply. 

15 double first cousins 

He felt relief at knowing what God wanted him to do – but that didn’t make his initial foray into public speaking any easier. He had agreed with some friends from camp to go to Salem Church the following Sunday night. That year’s camp director, Jim Kyle, was preaching at Salem that night, and the campers wanted to go. 

Doyle wanted to announce to his friends at Salem Church that he’d been called to preach, “but I was so bashful, I wouldn’t stand up and tell it.”

 He did confide in Elmer Wray, a pastor who was also at Salem Church that night. 

“Elmer stood up and told it,” Doyle said

The custom when a new preacher is called to ministry, he said, is that churches in the area send invitations to the new preacher to fill their pulpits for occasional Sundays. Those invitations came in, but Mavie Turner wanted her son’s first sermon to be preached at Igo Church, which the Turner family had attended for years.

Doyle nervously prepared a “great big long sermon” for his first time in the pulpit. “It lasted five or 10 minutes,” he said, laughing. 

Mavie Turner told her son if he was going into the ministry, he needed to go to college. So he dutifully enrolled in what was then Southwest Missouri State College in Springfield. “I went up there, and in three or four weeks, I got all the college education I needed and come back home,” he said.

His social life might have been one reason he wanted to come back home. His dad, Ozark County native Leslie Turner, was one of three brothers who married three sisters from western Douglas County. “And all these families moved to Ozark County to raise their families; we went to church and school together. There were 15 of us double first cousins, and we would all get together at our grandparents’ house.” 

One of his double cousins started dating a girl he’d met at Piland Youth Camp, “and this girl was best friends with Peggy [Merideth],” Doyle said. The cousin arranged a double date at the Theodosia rodeo on the July 4 weekend in 1970. 

Doyle told her right away that he’d been called to preach. “She was also raised in church. That was a point right there that helped our relationship,” he said. He began driving his ’62  Chevy to Cedar Creek in Taney County regularly as they began dating. At one point, he said, Peggy’s mother, Lucille, told her husband Glen, “I don’t think we’re gonna get rid of him because the first thing he does when he comes is head for the refrigerator,” Doyle said, laughing again.

Peggy was still in high school when they met. They were married about a year later, on June 6, 1971; that was a year before she graduated in 1972 from Bradleyville High School. For their honeymoon, they served as volunteers at Piland Youth Camp. For Doyle, it was the beginning of a decades-long commitment to the camp, including several years as director.

Moving home to the farm

Their daughter, Regina, was born Sept. 17, 1972, shortly after Mavie Turner died of cancer.  Growing up, “it was church any time there was church. Sunday morning, Sunday night, revivals, fifth Sunday meetings, and Piland Youth Camp every summer,” Regina told the Times. “Most might say my parents were strict. I just know (now) they were instilling in me the values they wanted me to have as an adult. Being raised by Christian, godly parents doesn’t always seem good as a kid, but as an adult, I am extremely grateful and blessed. Plus our kids and now our grandkids have their influence as well.”

Regina and her husband, Mike Gooley, moved to Bolivar after their three sons graduated from Lutie School, where Regina taught during the time her boys were there.

For six years in the early 1970s, Doyle worked in retail businesses, including Town & Country Supermarket in Gainesville and other towns, at Walmart and then at Ramey’s in Seymour. He pastored different churches in Douglas and Ozark counties during that time. He and Peggy built a home on the family farm, and in 1976, he left retail to help his dad and uncle there full-time.

“Dad and Coy were doing all the work, and . . . it just got to be too much for them. They decided they were going to stop milking,” he said. “My youngest brother Kent was a senior in high school. Me and Kent and our brother Gaylon decided we would help on the farm doing all the heavy lifting and hauling the hay so they could keep milking.”

At times during those 20 years, they milked as many as 100 cows, he said.

Leslie Turner, a World War II veteran, had started the farm with his brother, Coy Turner, after returning home after the war. Leslie and Mavie raised their six children there, and when Mavie died in 1972, Leslie was left to single-parent his youngest children while continuing to run the farm. He and Coy added to the farm as the years went by. 

In September 1987, after preaching steadily at different churches in the area, Doyle accepted the job as preacher at True Hope Church on Highway 160 in Theodosia. He also continued to work with his dad and brother Kent on the farm, and every summer for many years he also took time off to work at Piland Youth Camp, most years as director. 

When Leslie Turner’s house burned during that time, Doyle built him a new one. 

That family farming continued for several years. Then Gaylon and his wife, the former Karen Keathley, left to go to college, and Coy Turner stepped down from dairy farming. 

“It ended up being me, Dad and Kent,” he said. “We milked cows until 1994, then we went to raising beef cattle.”

A gift pulled from the trash 

But with no regular money coming in, Doyle started “working out” at other labors, including building houses, to provide income. In 1997, while he continued to help on the farm, he went to work for the Ozark County Road and Bridge Department, operating a grader and tractor brush hog. He retired from that job in 2014.

In addition to the regular farm work and his job with the county, he also helped his dad and brothers each fall in their annual sorghum-making work. The Turners became known far and wide for the tasty syrup they made. 

And through all those other jobs, Doyle continued to preach at True Hope. At first, he relied completely on the Holy Spirit to give him the words to say in his sermon. “I might have an idea a week or two before I’d give a sermon – and I might not have a clue until Saturday night what the Lord wanted me to say,” he said. “It used to worry me when I was a young preacher. But I learned that God has never left me hanging. He’s always come through.”

At first, he didn’t even take notes. “I just relied on the Lord to give me what was needed,” he said. Sometimes the Lord gave him ideas from his family life. His daughter Regina said, “I always knew anything I said or did could be a possible sermon story. I guess that was a good incentive to behave myself.” 

“But as I got older and went to studying more, I would have a lot of thoughts, and I knew I wouldn’t remember those ideas if I didn’t take notes,” Doyle said.

His preferred Bible is the King James Version - Thompson Chain Reference edition. His first one was a gift from his aunt when he was first called to preach. “I’d never seen one like it. The references are different. That’s been a tremendous help for me,” he said. 

He’s had several copies of that Bible through the years. “I didn’t wear them out. They weren’t falling apart. But when they started getting worn, I would put them back to keep, and I’d get a new one,” he said. 

His sermon-preparation method evolved into a system he followed each week. “I take a piece of typing paper and fold it three ways, so it would fit in a business-size envelope. So that leaves me a piece of paper 3-by-8 1/2-inches long. That one side is what consists of the notes for one sermon,” he said. “Then, the next week, I fold it again and have two more pieces the same size.” 

When he filled up and used all three panels of the paper with his sermon notes he threw it in the trash. “I came to the conclusion it would be too easy to rely on what I had preached before. Instead, I needed to rely on God,” he said.

So the notes went into the trash. 

“Little did I know, they was not going in the trash,” he said. “When we got to talking one day, Peggy got those out. She had taken those notes and put them in the Bibles I’d set back after they were worn. I didn’t know about it until after it was done.”

The notes were enclosed in three of the worn, set-aside Bibles that were given to Doyle and Peggy’s three grandsons, Jake, Michael and Chris Gooley. 

Selling the farm

Five years after Leslie Turner’s death in 2013, Kent Turner died of pancreatic cancer. That left Doyle to work the farm. Since then, he  has suffered two bouts of vertigo so severe he was hospitalized.

He talked with his surviving siblings. Leslie Turner had left the farm to all of them, telling his children, “Don’t  split the place up unless you just have to.”

But Leslie Turner hadn’t reckoned on one child being left to manage the farm alone. “We debated on it. I talked to the Lord about it and put it in his hands. I said, ‘Lord, if it’s meant to be, the place will sell.’”

The siblings agreed to break off 12 acres where Linda Turner Daughtery and her husband Wendell live and where Wade Turner also has his home. The rest of the farm was put on the market.

“It took two years to sell it,” Doyle said. “People came from California and everywhere, from all over, to look.” 

At one point the Turners thought the farm had sold and took it off the market for several months, waiting for the buyers to arrange financing, but that deal fell through. Then, in the spring, new buyers from Corpus Christi, Texas, closed the deal. The buyers’ son moved to Thornfield and lived in a tent on the farm to take care of the livestock while Doyle and Peggy prepared to pack up five decades of memories so they could move closer to Regina, who lives with her family in Bolivar.

By the time Doyle and Peggy were ready to buy a home, the real estate market was red hot, and listings in the Bolivar area were almost nonexistent. “Seems like things went from a terrapin to a runaway train,” Doyle said. “There was nothing on the market there. If something did come on, if you didn’t jump on it immediately, it was gone.” 

Doyle told his church family they were leaving. In June, the church honored them with a potluck lunch and retirement party after Sunday services. 

Doyle and Peggy were stepping into the unknown, but he wasn’t concerned. “Someone said, ‘Where you going?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Wherever the Lord tells us,’” he said.

They connected with a Bolivar real estate agent who had sold their grandson a house. They looked but found no houses there. “You can’t imagine how many hours Peggy and I have spent on the phones, looking for a house,” he said.

Moving ahead anyway, on July 10, the Turners had a big auction to sell a lifetime accumulation of farm implements.   

On the day after the property sale closed, “We still hadn’t found anything. I was down here fixing fence, and the real estate lady called. She had talked with a couple who had been considering selling but hadn’t listed yet. She said, ‘Could you come up and look at it?’ I left the fence-fixing right then, and we drove to Bolivar. We looked at the house and loved it,” Doyle said. 

They made an offer and were surprised when the sellers accepted it – until they remembered who was managing their affairs as they made this life change. “It’s amazing how God worked things out,” Doyle said

Now he’s looking forward to setting up his woodworking shop, and he’s helping Peggy settle into their new home. “I love anything that’s a challenge,” he said. “For one thing, I’ve always wanted to do is make an oak rolltop desk.” 

 Although he turns 70 in December, he’s not ready to say he’s retiring from preaching. “I’m not saying I’m retiring,” he said. “I ain’t bashful no more, and if there’s a place up here where I have an opportunity to preach, I may try it – but they may not like my hillbilly drawl. I’ll retire when the good Lord is ready for me to retire. I’m just leaving it all in his hands.”