On Oct. 19, 1929, a little girl was born in Washington, Iowa. Her parents named her Ruth. Almost 95 years later, I sat down to talk with Ruth about her life.

We had both moved to Manhattan, Kan., around the same time in 2022—Ruth coming from Minneola, Kan., where she had lived and attended the Minneola (first AP, then RP) Church for the previous 74 years. Our family had just moved to Manhattan for my husband, Robert, to pastor the RP church here after attending the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary for three years. Just imagining all that Ruth had seen and experienced in her almost century of life left me intrigued, so I was excited to learn more.

Ruth’s mother came from a long line of Seceders, a nickname for the Associate Presbyterian (AP) Church that broke away from the Church of Scotland in the 1770s and shared many convictions with the RP church. Her father was a talented jack-of-all-trades and provided for the family, but he was not a believer, a fact that grieved Ruth greatly as a young girl.

Her mother faithfully took Ruth and her brothers to church as often as she could. They lived eight miles from the AP Church in Washington, and although they often couldn’t use the family car to drive to church, someone in the congregation would come pick them up. Ruth says her father would come a few times per year, but would constantly criticize people in the church. Her brothers later followed in her father’s footsteps, leaving the church when they were in high school—though after they got married they both attended their wives’ churches.

Despite the disunity and pain this brought to her family, Ruth saw God’s providence even in this. She knew from a young age that when she got married, she wanted to make sure she was marrying a believer. She said, “I thought it would just be wonderful to stand and sing the Psalms together.”

Despite her father’s lack of involvement in her spiritual upbringing, Ruth remembers warmly all the ways that the saints at the Washington, Iowa, APC shepherded her. She recalls three unmarried sisters (“spinsters” in that day and age) who faithfully taught her Sunday school, assigning copious numbers of psalms for the children of the congregation to memorize. In a humorous aside, she recounted how painstakingly these sisters would iron the linen tablecloth for the exceedingly long communion table at the front of the church—going over the linen three times, including a final press of the spots where they had pinched the fabric to spread it across the table.

When Ruth was a teenager, one of the sisters gave Ruth her own Bible, which she treasured greatly, and a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. She memorized the entire Westminster Shorter Catechism and was rewarded with $50 (a sizeable sum at that time).

After high school, Ruth worked as a legal secretary at Livingston and Day law firm. In 1946, she was attending a young people’s conference at the AP Church in Four Mile, Pa. (now Tusca Area [Beaver, Pa.] RPC) and talked with Emma Lee McKissick, an acquaintance. Emma said that she’d like to introduce Ruth to her brother, Archie. Ruth says she looked back to see Archie grinning at her from a few rows back. He lived in Minneola, a small farming community in southwestern Kansas about 600 miles from her home in Iowa. At Christmastime, she got a Christmas card in the mail from him. The only thing he had written was his name, “Archie,” but Ruth figured it was pretty significant nonetheless, and she sent him a card back.

The rest, as they say, is history. They were married two years later when Ruth was 19 years old. She wore a wedding dress she had sewn herself (the fabric cost $25). I asked her if moving that far away from home as a new wife was hard, but once again the simplicity of her answer struck me. “I was just glad to be in the church and glad to have a Christian husband.” Adding four babies in the first seven years of marriage kept her busy.

In 1951, hard times fell upon the church when a divisive split took place. More than half of the congregants—many of them old-timers who had been in the church for decades—decided they wanted to be in a different church. They left, leaving only about 20 behind. Still, God sustained the Minneola church through many seasons of both prosperity and leanness. In 1969, the AP denomination merged with the RPCNA. Ruth and Archie took their children often to family camp, and Ruth was active in the Women’s Missionary Fellowship and annual women’s presbyterial gatherings. She also taught all ages in Sunday school, and helped with community Bible school.

As the years went on, the church membership began to dwindle—a sad but common trend in many small-town farming communities. Although the Lord is the one who sustains or ends the work of a church, Ruth did observe that over the years the church body hadn’t helped matters by decreasing their evangelism efforts significantly—“we just weren’t contacting people.”

When I asked Ruth to reflect on how the church and culture had changed over her lifetime, she had a few simple but significant thoughts. The biggest change she mentioned was that people didn’t keep the Lord’s Day as they used to. She quoted Archie’s uncle, who would say, “In order for us to get along, we need to start with the Ten Commandments.” In our busy, modern lives, and obsession with sports and other hobbies, the culture (and much of the church) has forgotten God. She also mentioned a decline in memorizing Scripture, compared to what was expected of her as a young girl.

One of Ruth’s favorite Bible verses is 3 John 1:4: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.” She shared how thankful she is that her four children continue to walk with the Lord as adults. I asked her to share parenting tips, and she offered two things: they always did family worship (with Ruth leading on the days that Archie had to be working in the fields early), and their kids always knew they would be going to church on Sundays, morning and night.

Grief and loss have also been a part of Ruth’s story. She lost her husband, Archie, in 2004 after he suffered from dementia and other health problems for a number of years. In December 2023, her oldest daughter Vickie Burke passed away after a short battle with advanced pancreatic cancer. “All things work together for good to those who love God” (Rom. 8:28) is another favorite verse of Ruth, but she emphasized, “you have to love the Lord. Good things don’t just come your way without that part of it. And, His ways are not our ways.” We can trust in God’s goodness without understanding all of it. Reckoning with that truth has helped her deal with such losses.

A final verse she shared was Psalm 25:7: “Do not remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions; according to Your mercy remember me, for Your goodness’ sake, O Lord.” “After all,” she said, “I am a sinner saved by grace.”

At some point in the conversation, I asked Ruth if it was hard to move here to Manhattan after 74 years in Minneola. She answered frankly, “No, not really. I wanted to be near the church, and my family.” (The Minneola church was dissolved in 2020.) Her emphasis on the church as a linchpin of her life really struck me. In a time where “online church” is on the rise—a particularly tempting option for those dealing with the struggles that come with old age—how refreshing and challenging it was to see her earnest desire to be present every Lord’s Day with a body of believers in a faithful church.

Throughout our conversation, I was struck with the beautiful simplicity of what steadfast faithfulness can look like. Sometimes faithfulness requires us to move overseas, take a leadership position in some ministry, start up a new church program, etc. Sometimes (and probably, much more often), faithfulness looks like making use of the means of grace, day in and day out: committing to only marry a fellow believer, hiding God’s Word in your heart, setting apart the Lord’s Day for worship, and prioritizing family worship. I am reminded of Jesus’s words, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). Although these simple, yet foundational practices require diligence, they are not difficult.

This sort of faithfulness can have effects for generations to come—and indeed, in Ruth’s case, it has. Out of her family of four children (Vickie Burke, of Jacksonville, Fla.; Robert McKissick of Kokomo, Ind.; Bruce McKissick of Minneola, Kan.; and Jean Stewart of Manhattan, Kan.), 15 grandchildren, and 36 great-grandchildren, the vast majority continue to walk in the faith. In a particularly sweet instance of God’s providence, Ruth’s grandson-in-law, Keith Dewell, now pastors the very same AP-turned-RP congregation in Washington, Iowa, where Ruth attended as a young girl all those years ago.