Service planned to memorialize couple's ministry

Courtesy photo The Depews got their start in ministry by serving as evangelists in tent revival-style services, said their son Roland Depew. Ethel provided music for her husband’s services throughout their ministry, and she carried an accordion with her in those early days.
Courtesy photo The Depews got their start in ministry by serving as evangelists in tent revival-style services, said their son Roland Depew. Ethel provided music for her husband’s services throughout their ministry, and she carried an accordion with her in those early days.

J.W. Depew and his wife, Ethel, donated family inheritance and land to build a new church in the 1980s in Greenland. Today, membership of that congregation -- which has evolved into Grace Evangel Chapel -- will celebrate the couple's life of ministry. Ethel (Fulbright) Depew died in 2013 at age 85. J.W. died in February at 96. Sunday would have been their 70th wedding anniversary.

"They lived all their adult lives here," said Roger Phillips, the current pastor of the church. But the Depews moved to be near family as their health failed, and they both died in Perryville, Texas. "It's time to get together to pay our respects."

Memorial service

Who: Ethel and J.W. Depew

When: 2:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Grace Evangel Church, 78 W. Short St., Greenland

"At the age of 19, (J.W.) said that he surrendered to the Lord at a revival meeting, when Dan Newman (6 feet, 6 inches tall) put his huge hand on his shoulder and encouraged him to go forward," Roland Depew wrote in a memoir of his father.

After short training in Bible schools, J.W. Depew hit the road as an evangelist. Ethel joined him in 1946, as he served as a short-term pastor for churches in Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado and even Alaska. They returned to Texas to care for Ethel's mother, and then moved to Arkansas.

"(J.W.) pastored a community church in Bidville, and lived in a tiny trailer with a wife and three young boys for about a year, 1961-62," Roland Depew wrote. "The path in the back led to the outhouse, but the freezer was always stocked with goods from the church folks."

The family moved to Fayetteville in 1964 to pastor the People's Church, then pioneered a new church in 1968, Evangelistic Chapel (predecessor of today's church), "where they pastored as long as they were able," Phillips said.

In addition, J.W. Depew was a charter member of the Full Gospel Evangelistic Association in 1951 and served as vice president in 1953.

During this time, "they pretty much paid for all three sons to go to college" -- back in the days before grants, Roland Depew said proudly. "Even though they never went to college themselves, they really believed in it."

"Brother Jay was a faithful, low-key man. He was not what you'd call a Bible thumper,'" said Phillips, who joined the couple in ministry in 2002. "That was his personality.

"But he was a quiet influence on the way you live your life."

Ethel Depew was never far from her husband or family. In addition to serving as the church organist, she "taught piano and organ lessons to literally hundreds of Fayetteville area kids and adults from her living room from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s," Roland Depew recorded.

"She could play anything that had a keyboard," he continued, including an accordion she carried during those early days of tent revival evangelizing.

And most people didn't know it, but she provided fellow pastors' wives with the lessons for free. "If she wanted to learn music, she wanted to help them," Roland said. The family established a music and ministry scholarship in memory of their parents.

The couple also was active in community projects in the surrounding town of Greenland, where their two older sons graduated high school.

"And Mom cooked all the time," Roland Depew continued. "We took and delivered food, drove people to doctors' visits ... that typical small church stuff."

But their chaplaincy was a calling, Phillips said.

"They'd go visit somebody they knew, or somebody they knew of, or somebody somebody knew of ... ," he explained.

"A lot of people would come and go out of the hospital, and they were very faithful," visiting several times a week during an extended stay. They would sit with patients or help with household duties or chores the families couldn't do.

"They'd come and listen and pray and talk," Phillips continued. "They would talk about old times. They all had 'war stories.'

"They were very faithful. Even when they were semi-retired, they would visit. They loved to do that."

"They were really church servants," Roland Depew said.

"They were faithful in a small place -- or what seemed like a small place," he continued. "But by doing so, they touched a lot more people than they realized."

NAN Religion on 07/23/2016

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