I’ve been a member of Goshen Baptist Church, small country church in my county for over fifty years now. It was the church my husband’s family were attending when we got married. My husband’s father was a tenant farmer, which means he worked a farm owned by someone else for half of the profits. They moved several times while Darrell was growing up, usually to try to improve their circumstances. My father-in-law was a devout Christian and so whenever they moved, they found the nearest Baptist church and joined the congregation there.
So the family had good memories of times with several churches in our county, but once they joined Goshen, they stayed members there even after they retired from farming and moved away from the Goshen neighborhood. By then, my husband and I had three children and we were driving past another church to go to Goshen to be part of the same church family as his parents.
I guess I’m a person who likes roots and I grew roots in that little church. In those early church years the church was well attended for a country church with sometimes more than eighty people of all ages filling the pews. Many of the members had family connections with the other members. Darrell and I didn’t, but we always felt like family. I learned so much from the older Christians who welcomed me into their church and encouraged me to take part in the activities from teaching Bible school and Sunday school and holding down some other jobs in the church.
The church, established in 1812, has a long history. While I don’t go back that far, we do go back a good ways and so have been blessed to know many different pastors in the years we’ve been members. But then there’s Br. Fred. He first came to Goshen to preach in 1977 and stayed eleven years. Until then no preacher I had known at Goshen stayed that long. He took a break from preaching but then came back to Goshen in 1994 and stayed even longer. He loved the church and we loved him. Last week, the Lord called him home after a hard year of various health problems. He’d had a few other health scares in the last few years but always bounced back and was back in the pulpit bringing us more Bible messages. This time, he recovered in a new way by leaving troubles and health problems behind and heading up to heaven.
He loved preaching about heaven and the joys that await those who trust in the Lord. He used to love to fish and he would imagine the biggest fish he might catch up in heaven. Then he would say it would be even better than that because the Bible says heaven is better than anything we here in this life can even imagine.
Br. Fred loved the Lord and he felt things deeply. He could just think about the Jesus dying for our sins and tears would fill his eyes and overflow. He loved sharing Bible stories and truths. He did a lot of teaching from the Scripture along with preaching. He was a bi-vocational preacher who for many years taught electricity at a vocational school. The kids called him Mr. K (short for his last name, Knickerbocker) and many of them kept in contact with him long after they were out of school. While Mr. K couldn’t preach sermons at school, he did preach by the way he lived and the example he presented to his students.
The same was true for all the people he touched at Goshen. When my older two children were teens, he was their Sunday school teacher and he opened up the Scripture to them. He loved to sing and for a few years sang tenor in the Southern Gospel quartet that my husband was with. My son said one of the favorite songs he remembered him singing was “When I Stand in the Presence of the Lord.” And now that’s where he is and we can rejoice for him even as we feel sad that we will never hear him preach at Goshen again.
He led Goshen for thirty-seven years and we were ready for him to lead us longer. While he was our pastor, we built a fellowship hall that many surely thought a small church like ours might be getting in over our head. Before we’d had fellowship time in the basement of our Sunday school addition built in the 1940’s. The stairs were steep and one of our much loved older women was having trouble making it down to the basement. So we decided to step out in faith and build a place easily accessed by all our members. Amazingly, with prayer and the support of many who had those treasured roots at Goshen, we paid off the loan in about a year for a beautiful building that we dedicated to Br. Fred and named K-Hall.
Br. Fred also instigated the addition of the steeple to our church building and while he was there we remodeled the interior and exterior of the church. With faith and prayer, he helped us believe anything was possible. The COVID year has been difficult for our little church as the church was dark for several months in 2020 and early in 2021, but we’re still meeting, still worshiping, still supporting one another. But this week and for weeks to come we’re going to be missing our beloved pastor, Br. Fred Knickerbocker. Just this morning, as we sang a couple of hymns, I teared up remembering how on nearly every hymn we’d sing, he would say that was one of his favorites. It became a joke between us that whenever I would announce a hymn and he claimed it as a favorite, we’d laugh and say it was one of his five hundred favorites.
I can’t even begin to share all he has meant to our church and to me and my family through the years. So many laughs and good times. So many precious memories. So many Bible truths he shared. So much love.
Thank you for letting me share at least a few of them with you about this man of God who lived life well and faithfully.