Poured In, Poured Out

By James Griepp

Chronicles of the heritage of a farmer turned preacher, James’ antics start early and continue throughout this book and his life. You’ll be introduced to his godly family, experience farm life through the eyes of a young boy, and journey with him as he hears and heeds the Father’s call to ministry. You’ll glean wisdom fro

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781640883765

Book preview

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To my wife, Vicky, who for sixty years gave herself to me in the work of the ministry. Though she felt called to be a pastor’s wife (a calling she fulfilled with excellency), she also fulfilled other roles outside of her comfort zone with grace and dignity.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1

Grandpa’s Reflections

Part 2

Early Life

Part 3

Preparation for Ministry

Part 4

Pastoral Ministry

Part 5

Texas

Part 6

Later Ministry

Part 7

See You in Eternity

The apostle Paul tells us that though we have many teachers, we have not many fathers in the faith (1 Corinthians 4:15). This book affords you the precious opportunity to learn about life and ministry from a master teacher and pastor—my spiritual father—in a most transparent and enjoyable way. It tells the story of God’s faithfulness across five generations in a way that will inspire you to surrender your life more fully to God and live a life that counts for eternity. What you do each day matters. Each decision counts in eternity and ripples through time to impact others in ways you could never imagine, as this book illustrates. Whether your life or ministry needs a tune-up or a major overhaul, you have come to the right place.

—Dr. James T. Flynn

Associate Dean and Associate Professor

School of Divinity, Regent University

I am delighted to recommend this book to you, first, because it provides an informative and engaging narrative of a significant life and ministry beginning in the homestead days of South Dakota and ending in the contemporary suburbs of Houston, Texas. The story is always moving and often hilarious. But its deep impact is because of its central character, my wonderful pastor, mentor, and friend, Jim Griepp.

As a young seminarian, I was privileged to attend the church led by Jim and Vicky Griepp—Calvary Assembly of God—in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. Through their love, patience, and investment in me, the Lord used Jim and Vicky to deepen my Pentecostal experience and to equip me for pastoral ministry. I believe that as you read this book, Pastor Jim’s life experience, deep love of Jesus, passion for prayer, and other qualities you will discover here will create a new desire in you for adventures with the Lord.

—Herschel Rosser, MDiv

Doctor of Ministry Candidate,

Assembly of God Theological Seminary

Associate Pastor Mission Vineyard Church

Acknowledgments

There would be no story to write had it not been for my father and mother who pioneered the West and brought with them a strong desire to share the gospel. Much of the information recorded was passed on to me directly by them.

A big thank-you to my older brothers and sisters: Ezra, Aaron, Willma, Marian, and Phil, whose memories go back further than mine, and to my younger brother, Allen. David and Alice were too young to have memories of this period. Cousins Charles and Edwin Griepp also contributed. Ruth Rosenau’s valuable insights are also included. Christine Delzer Hansen, who was our hired girl when I was born, was a joy to visit with by phone. It’s natural that not everyone remembers each detail the same, but as far as possible, we’ve tried to give an honest account of life in the West.

Thank you to my children: Becky, Brad, Debbie, Vicky, and Art, who grew up hearing me tell stories of homestead days and prodded me to record them. Also, thanks to my grandchildren who are my inspiration; without them, I would have little incentive to pass on my heritage. Thanks to my children and their families who asked and encouraged me to write down my heritage for posterity. This volume is an expansion of the original writing.

My wife, Vicky, I thank for her encouragement and tireless work on the computer: editing, adjusting, and copying.

Thank you to my granddaughter Lauren for typing, editing, and coordinating the publishing of this volume.

Last of all, to God, my heavenly Father, I give thanks for placing me in the home and environment where I could trace from birth and childhood His faithfulness in the good as well as trying circumstances of life.

Introduction

God has been pouring into this bowl for eighty-seven years. In this volume, I am tipping the bowl to let you in on what God has poured into me. Anything of value is what God has done, in and through me. To Him be all the glory.

Part 1

Grandpa’s Reflections

Who are you?

The following pages are a brief attempt to answer that question. Every one of us has a genetic makeup. By learning to know who our parents were, we can more fully understand ourselves. For that reason, in the pages that follow, I would like to introduce you to my father and mother who passed on to succeeding generations a godly heritage.

Second, everyone has a history that is uniquely his. History, to a great extent, shapes us into what we are. The following is a glimpse into my past.

Third, each of us has a void that only God can fill. These vignettes trace the extent to which my parents and their peers would go to satisfy that hunger and then to share this good news with their community and to pass it on to their children and their children’s children.

By so reading, you will find commonality with your grandparents in who you are.

James A. Griepp

How It Began

My parents heard the saving gospel for the very first time in 1922 while on their honeymoon!

At age nineteen, my father with two brothers, Gust and Rudolph, and a sister, Anna, staked out their homesteads in Zebach County, South Dakota. It was 1909. Nothing much was done with my father’s homestead though it was kept in force by Gust during the time Dad and Rudolph served in World War I, until 1918. Art, my father, served in the merchant marine while Uncle Rudy was in the army in France.

After the war, my father married my mother, Emma Albertina Stern, in Wisconsin. For their honeymoon, they visited western South Dakota where Dad’s claim was. On their return trip, they stopped over to visit brother Rudolph who at that time was a student at Brookings State College.

Rudolph and his wife, Mae, invited Dad and Mom to a revival meeting. The presentation of the gospel so gripped them that they had an instant and ongoing hunger for more of God.

Thus, the seed of the gospel was planted in my parents’ hearts.

Trivia about

Great-Grandpa Griepp

When my father was farming the homeplace in Wisconsin, he was in the process of installing a milking machine when he discovered that a part to the machine was missing. Anxious to get the machine operational, he jumped into his Ford Model T, in a hurry to go to town for the missing part.

While speeding along, he suddenly realized a train was bearing down on the crossing just ahead. Model Ts weren’t known for having good braking systems, and there obviously wasn’t enough time to stop. What was he to do?

In a split second, he saw the answer in a telephone pole with a guide wire cable running from the ground to the top at a forty-five-degree angle. It was the only alternative to a head-on collision with the train, so he aimed his car astride the cable, zooming in the air like a jet plane taking off! Out of contact with the ground, the car toppled to the earth below.

Soon, a crowd gathered, wanting to know who the drunk was who ran his car up the telephone pole! Dad had to confess it was him. Although, he said, if he had been drunk, he would have been killed on the tracks.

Talk about guardian angels!

(Without Great-grandpa’s quick thinking and God’s protection, I wouldn’t be writing this Grandpa’s Reflections!)

Get thee out of thy country …

(Genesis 12:1, JPS)

After the end of World War I and the death of my father’s father (Albert Griepp) on December 21, 1921, Dad was asked by his mother to take over management of the Albert Griepp farm, three miles northeast of Bonduel, Wisconsin. It was during this time that my father married my mother, Emma Albertina Stern, on November 15, 1922.

Also, during this period of time, their hearts hungered for more of God than they had been exposed to in the church of which they were members. The Pentecostal message was new in the area. Upon hearing of a home meeting where the power of the Spirit was evident, my parents became interested and attended from time to time.

They continued on my grandfather’s homeplace until the spring of 1926, when they turned the farm over to a brother, Albert Griepp, so they could follow their dream of establishing a new home on the western plains of Dad’s South Dakota homestead.

It was there that they would feel free to follow the leading of the Lord for their lives.

Hon-yock-ers

Migrating from eastern Wisconsin to the western plains of South Dakota was no small feat in the homestead days of the Midwest. Treaties signed between the government and the Indians as late as 1868 had been broken, according to my cousin Edwin Griepp, making land available for homesteading.

My father, Uncle Gust, Uncle Rudolph, and Aunt Anna Griepp filed for homesteads between 1908 and 1916. They would have been young people in their late teens to early twenties at the time. The claim in most cases was one half a section (320 acres) of land per person, which was to be used either for farming or ranching.

In my father’s case, not only did he homestead, he also worked on farms and ranches in the West from De Smet, South Dakota, north into Canada, and west to Vancouver, British Columbia. The going rate for farm labor was seventeen dollars per month, but in the prairies of the West, the salary was thirty-five dollars per month. Big wages in those days! Winter wages were room and board only, however.

I remember my uncle Gust calling these floating farm laborers Hon-yock-ers. I don’t know what it meant, but it doesn’t sound very flattering to me! (I suppose it’s some German slang expression.)

Emigrant Car

The process of moving to the West required collecting everything necessary for life on the barren western plains and loading it onto a railroad car, which was rented and sidetracked in Bonduel, Wisconsin. Equipment necessary for survival included basics such as a stove, cooking utensils, groceries, preserved food, beds and bedding, and clothing. Then there were farm implements such as plows, seeder, binder, a wagon for transportation at the end of the railway line, and lumber for building. Last of all, the horses and cows were loaded with ample feed for them on the trip. To top all that, the men lived in the same car as the animals and goods for the journey west.

In my father’s case, he went on the emigrant car a few months before my mother and her two babies: Ezra, three years old, and Aaron, one year old.

It staggers my imagination that they were confined in a closed RR boxcar for several days and survived! One redeeming factor was the requirement that the train stop periodically and the animals be corralled for exercise. Most every town on the RR line had corrals for that purpose. My uncle Gust tells about corralling his horses in Aberdeen, South Dakota, but the proprietor failed to properly latch the gate. Come morning, Gust’s horses were missing. The manager loaned him a horse to round up the animals. After following their tracks in a light, sifting snow to a haystack on the outskirts of town, Gust had them back in the boxcar in time to ship out.

Incidentally, when my uncle returned the borrowed horse, the owner asked him, How was the horse? to which he replied, Just fine. The amazed owner admitted, That’s funny: you’re the first person he hasn’t bucked off!

First Night on the Prairie

My father tells of an incident after driving team and wagon twenty-three miles from Isabel, South Dakota (the end of the rail line), to Gust’s and my father’s homestead.

For protection from the cold of the night, they stood the seed grain sacks around the bottom of the wagon, then crawled under the wagon to sleep. Sometime in the dark of the night, their grain sacks started disappearing. Not knowing at first what was going on, they ran out to see wild horses that roamed the area carrying off the sacks. While chasing the horses away, Uncle Gust, with no shoes on, stepped on a cactus, driving a thorn deep into his foot. Dad had to light the lantern and dislodge the cactus needle with an eight-penny nail!

After arriving on the claim, the usual first order of business was to build a homestead shack. In my father’s case, however, he was offered a shack built earlier by a homesteader named Singer. The Singer Shack became a starter house for my parents.

The homestead shacks usually consisted of a wooden structure of one room, varying in size, but often twelve feet by twelve feet. Another common characteristic was a storm cellar under them, accessed with a trap door and steps down to escape any ominous windstorms. These also doubled as a place to store food supplies.

Terrain of the West River Territory

The land to which my parents moved was often referred to as the West River Country. It was so named, I’m sure, because the Missouri River flowed through South Dakota from North to South, dividing the state into east and west sections. East of the Missouri was primarily agricultural while west of the river was ranch country.

The terrain of the land was rolling hills and valleys, except for what they call buttes. The butte is an abrupt hill, very steep and high into the air, cropping up from flatland. Atop these buttes, one would find a variety of fossilized fish, shark’s teeth, and other sea life. My brothers Aaron and Allen found Thunder Butte was ideal for rattlesnake hunting! In recent years, a rancher in the area saw a bone-like horn sticking out of the ground, which upon further examination, found it to be a full-sized skull of a triceratops. The skull is now in a museum in Lemmon, SD.

Another characteristic of the territory was a flat area that suddenly dropped off ten or twelve feet, appearing as though the dirt was scooped out with a large backhoe. This void could be anywhere from one to ten acres. In one such pit, northeast of our place, we mined our own lignite coal—a soft coal which is the product of ancient tree life, though very few trees existed in the area when we lived there. In Lemmon, South Dakota, not far from our home, they have a whole city park and museum filled with buildings and other structures made from petrified wood, indicating the area was once a forest.

If you’ve seen the movie Dances with Wolves, you have an idea of the territory. The movie was filmed not far from where we lived—on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Fact is, Big Chief Sitting Bull’s grave is on a ridge just west of the Missouri River. Formerly, buffalo roamed freely west of the river.

Petrified Forest Lemmon, SD 1945

Settling the West: Homestead Shacks

My wife Vicky, my parents, and I visited the homestead territory in 1962. I hadn’t been back since we moved away when I was a boy of six years old. Talk about being nostalgic! Anyway, we saw some of the afore-described abandoned shacks.

One belonged to a bachelor known as Pete Schultez. His was a tar paper shack, about eight feet by twelve feet, with a mangerlike rack across the end. This was his bed! Incidentally, I found a shaving brush and a mug that belonged to him in that shack. He had long since passed on.

An interesting structure was a larger sod house with sod walls about one foot thick and, as I remember, a thatched roof. Another structure still standing was my uncle Gust’s homestead. After his permanent house was built, he used this as a chicken coop.

My uncle Rudolph’s home consisted of two shacks put together as one unit, according to cousin Charles Griepp. Their home burned down, along with their new 1928 Chrysler car. Seems cousin Grace struck a match while Aunt Mae was fumigating the house with a flammable substance, setting it on fire.

The Rudolph Griepps—four children and parents—lived with us for a short time after our permanent house was built. They later built over what had been their icehouse, partially in-ground, which served them well until they moved from the area. These cousins were always our very special playmates.

Pete Schultez’s shack in more recent years

My Pioneer Mother

The real champion in