McKisson, Theron Thomas
2/13/1981
1899-1981 |
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| Theron Thomas McKisson was a frontier style preacher who grew up in Arizona where his parents had moved about the time Arizona had become a state. He later served churches not too long after Oklahoma was made a state. In most of his ministry he served rural churches ministering to “the salt of the earth” people. Brother McKisson was born in Colonia, Kansas on July 27, 1899. He passed through death into eternal bliss with Jesus on February 13, 1981 at the age of 81. He began his ministry by graduating from God’s Bible College in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1922. He married Ethel May Beight and entered the ministry of the Church of The Nazarene serving churches in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio. By 1934, he was attending Northeast State Teacher’s College in Talaquaha, Oklahoma and being received into the Vinita District of the Oklahoma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Those were Depression Years and hard times and the McKissons were living in an abandoned store in Talaquaha. After serving churches in Oklahoma and Arkansas, Brother McKisson transferred into the Louisiana Annual Conference in 1958. He served at St. Joseph, the Choudrant-Douglas Charge, the Grayson-Kelly Charge, and the Gilbert-Boeuf Prairie Charge before retiring in 1967. But he was not through. He had a reputation for building churches, as he had done at Gilbert. Bishop Aubrey Walton asked him to take the Epps-Floyd Charge and help Epps with their new church building. He spent two years at Epps and one at Baskin before his health required that he give up the active work in the ministry. His beloved wife, Ethel May, died on December 19, 1970. She had been his right hand and strong support. She built choirs wherever they served and had been so much a part of all that Brother Mac did. He suffered a tremendous loss. A year later he married Mrs. Ora Gregg Woods, a widow of a Baptist minister. Ethel May and Reverend McKisson had eight children. They are Theron, Jr., who is now deceased, James Leroy of Houston, Texas, Orval Ray of Jonesboro, Arkansas, John Martin of Baton Rouge, La., Mrs. Audry Daniel of Grove, Texas, Mrs. Joan Peters of Scholter, Oklahoma, Mrs. Ruth Smith of Baldwin, Missouri, and Mrs. Mary Edith Kelly of Birmingham, Alabama. In his ministry, Reverend McKisson knew “how to be abased and how to abound” and through it all knew that nothing could separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus. He preached a straightforward, undiluted gospel, suffered affliction, but received the victory. The Gospel was important to him and he transmitted it every way possible. Funeral services were held in the First United Methodist Church of Winnsboro and burial was in the Boeuf Prairie United Methodist Church cemetery. Brother Mac was laid next to his wife at a place where they had both served. |
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| Source: Journal Louisiana Conference, 1981, p. 175 By Bill McCutcheon | |
