DURANT, OKLA. — Just off U.S. 69/75 beside a Choctaw Travel Plaza billboard, nearly 500 Christians gather in a multipurpose room filled with four-legged cushioned chairs.
“You are the melody. You are the harmony. Praise to your name I will bring,” the Durant Church of Christ sings as Sunday morning worship begins.
About 15 miles north of the Texas state line, this growing church in the home city of Southeastern Oklahoma State University is building a new, 800-seat auditorium.
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But while the construction proceeds, members will need to rearrange the chairs and set up tables for the monthly Friends & Family Day potluck meal following the assembly.
Not that they mind.
The faithful prefer to focus on the blessings of a multiyear journey that brought together two Durant congregations: the Seventh and Beech Church of Christ and the Northwest Church of Christ.
“It’s been amazing,” Kim Mauck, 44, a mother of four, said of the 2020 merger just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We love it for our family. Just the whole process has been positive for us.
“I would say that for, like, maybe even the first year or two, you could kind of see people still sticking with their Northwest people and their Seventh and Beech people,” added Mauck, a former reviews editor for The Christian Chronicle. “But now it’s like, you can’t tell, and we’ve had so many new people who’ve come in, too. We’re all just one big group.”
Member Gail Hooten McKinney, 74, echoed Mauck: “There’s never been a selfish attitude about it. It has been unified in, ‘What can we do to make this better for the community?’ And it’s been great.”
The Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma gathers for worship in a multipurpose room. A new auditorium is under construction.
Frontier roots
The combined church traces its roots to the Maddux and Roberts families, who passed through Indian Territory in 1894 while going from Arkansas to Texas in covered wagons.
On the return trip to Arkansas, Cal Maddux, a gospel preacher, stopped and conducted a weeklong meeting.
Roughly 75 to 100 people gave their lives to Jesus in baptism, and the travelers decided to stay in Durant.
A few years before Oklahoma became the 46th state in 1907, a church split occurred over using an organ in worship. Those who objected to the instrumental music left the Christian Church and formed a Church of Christ.
After meeting in a smaller building, the Church of Christ erected a larger one at Seventh and Beech in 1917, said Jane Roberts Lewis, whose late grandmother was a niece of Cal Maddux.
“I grew up in the Seventh and Beech church,” said Lewis, 83, who interviewed her late aunt Jennie Maddux about the history in 1970. “My dad was a deacon for 67 years, probably because he wouldn’t quit.”
In a photo taken in 1929, members of the Seventh and Beech Church of Christ in Durant, Okla., witness the outdoor baptisms of new Christians.
By 1959, the Seventh and Beech congregation averaged Sunday attendance of 464, church records show.
As the congregation outgrew its building, the elders announced plans to plant the Northwest church about a mile and a half away. The new congregation met for the first time on July 1, 1962.
Northwest’s initial picture directory showed 88 adults and 20 children, while 379 members remained at Seventh and Beech, according to church records.
“At that point in time, with the town growing that direction, it made sense,” Layne Heitz, Durant’s pulpit minister and an elder, said of the church plant.
At right, the new auditorium of the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma can be seen under construction. At left, a Choctaw Travel Plaza billboard greets drivers along U.S. 69/75.
A different time
Americans’ driving habits were vastly different back then.
Half-hour or hourlong commutes to eat, work — or worship — were not the norm.
“At one point in U.S. history, we saw more of the geographically specific, neighborhood churches,” said Mark Mulder, a sociology professor at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich., who did a study on the subject. “Today, with more sorting, worshipers are willing to drive past many churches to find the one that best fits their affinity.”
Some residents of Durant, a city of 22,000 that is the headquarters of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, drive 95 miles south to work in Dallas.
Against that backdrop, two like-minded congregations — separate and apart for nearly six decades — began to make less sense.
The Northwest church started with a sizable contingent of young professionals. But over the years, it became the older congregation in Durant — the one grandparents chose.
Bill and Claudia Beach pray during a Sunday morning assembly of the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Seventh and Beech, meanwhile, maintained the Student Bible Center campus ministry and an active youth program. Younger families gravitated to it.
That’s how first cousins Jay Mauck and Matt Mauck ended up at different churches.
“You felt kind of torn on which church should I go to,” said Matt Mauck, 47, a fisheries biologist and father of three who moved to Durant in 2008. “We found our place at Seventh and Beech, but we knew people at Northwest.”
Jay Mauck, 48, Kim’s husband and a former two-time All-American basketball player at Oklahoma Christian University, grew up at Northwest and stayed active in that congregation.
“When a young family would come over, we’d try really hard to keep them because we didn’t have many,” Jay Mauck said. “And they’d go over to Seventh and Beech, and it was just covered with young kids and young families. … So there was a little bit of a divide.”
Charles and Kay Villines partake of the Lord’s Supper at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
God’s providence
When talk of a possible merger started, Seventh and Beech’s membership totaled about 300 — and Northwest’s was about 150.
Heitz, who first came to Seventh and Beech as the campus minister 30 years ago and later taught math at Southeastern Oklahoma State, explained his support for the idea.
“One of the big motivating factors was the fact that there were 150 of my brothers and sisters that met across town that I did not know well,” he said. “To be just a single, unified body of Christ here in Durant, there’s not even words that I can put on that to describe just what joy that brings to me.”
Martin Tucker, a Durant Church of Christ elder and the city’s mayor, makes Sunday morning announcements.
Even before the merger, the congregations would join together for Vacation Bible School and Christmas singing.
“When we were together, it just felt like family, you know?” Jay Mauck said.
Seventh and Beech’s three elders, including Heitz, approached Northwest’s three elders with a merger proposal in 2019. At first the Northwest leaders declined, but they later expressed an interest in considering the possibility.
Those discussions resulted in a joint decision to merge the elderships, the ministry staffs and the congregations in January 2020.
Logan Cates, the combined church’s family minister, points to a series of providential developments — as he sees it — during that time.
“We were selling properties during the depths of COVID,” said Cates, who first joined the Seventh and Beech ministry staff in 2016. “That’s the part that blows my mind. There were seven properties to sell, and they sold right in the middle of COVID.”
Family minister Logan Cates, right, prays with Dylan Harendt after she came forward on a recent Sunday.
At the same time, a church member who had owned valuable property near Durant’s major four-lane highway for 30 years decided to donate much of it for the new building.
Dollar General had tried to buy it but couldn’t get state approval for a median to allow vehicle access from both directions, said the owner, who asked not to be identified. But after the member gave the land to the church, an elected official persuaded the state Transportation Department to permit the median.
Why?
As Jay Mauck, the deacon overseeing the construction process, put it, “God wanted this building to be here.”
Durant Church of Christ member Ariel Maxey carries her son Casper and looks admiringly at her daughter Anzalee.
Smoothing the transition
In Heitz’s view, a choice by the combined church’s elders to make every decision unanimous has helped smooth the transition.
“If we don’t agree 100 percent,” he said, “then we will spend a week in prayer and come back together.”
One of those decisions: Making Sunday morning a worship-only experience. The church moved children’s and adult Bible classes to Sunday night.
“It’s difficult on families,” Heitz said of doing both in the morning. “We just said, ‘Why don’t we try this?’ We just did a trial for about three months, and the feedback we got from the congregation at large was like, ‘Our kids are doing better in worship service, and they’re paying more attention in Bible class in the evenings.’”
Sunday night attendance is up, too, compared with the previous format.
Dean Marcho, 77, worships alongside generations of her family, including her mother, Bette Jo Mashburn, 100; her daughter Carrie Sullivan, 56; and her granddaughter Hannah Sullivan, 26.
Bette Jo Mashburn, in the wheelchair, worships with her daughter Dean Marcho, granddaughter Carrie Sullivan and son-in-law Randall Sullivan at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Marcho’s late husband, Bob, was a minister, and they moved away from Durant for 45 years.
But she still remembers attending Northwest’s first service at age 12.
Fifty-eight years later, she praised God in the newly named Durant church’s first assembly in 2020.
“It just felt like, ‘Lord, we hear you. This is what you want,’” she said.
“It just felt like, ‘Lord, we hear you. This is what you want.’”
Her late husband, Bob, was a minister. They lived away from Durant for 45 years.
“We were part of congregations that talked about merging, but it was never successful,” Marcho said. “Because the other congregation would come in saying, ‘Well, y’all move in here with us and leave your building and help us pay for ours,’ that kind of thing.
“That was never a part of this discussion,” she said of the Durant merger. “It was, ‘How can we glorify God?’”
BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. He traveled to southeastern Oklahoma to report this story. Reach him at bobby@christianchronicle.org.
More photos
Jaleed Cagle and her daughter, Grace, attend the Sunday morning assembly of the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Philip Ashley helps serve the Lord’s Supper at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Hannah Vickers, holding her daughter Maizy, speaks with April Heitz at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Members of the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma enjoy fellowship before the Sunday morning assembly.
James Coats leads singing at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Anzalee Maxey enjoys a moment of reflection at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
Summer Cates, with daughter Sunshine, talks to Dylan Harendt at the Durant Church of Christ in Oklahoma.
