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WAVENEY ANN MOOREThe minister's death was too painful to talk about, but it will be talked about today. The Rev. Bruce Smead will be honored for his leadership and kindness.
SEMINOLE - Today, Lake Seminole Presbyterian Church will embrace a past with its joys and tears, heal the hurts and finally honor a beloved pastor who had been at its core for 22 years.
The Rev. Bruce N. Smead died in 1992. He was 59 and had been suffering from multiple myeloma, bone marrow cancer, when he took his life.
As its founding pastor, he had nurtured Lake Seminole Presbyterian Church to maturity and into the fastest growing congregation in its denomination. He also had spearheaded a successful building program.
After his death, though, it was almost as though he had never existed. Many in the stunned congregation seldom mentioned his name.
Today, as the church celebrates its 40th anniversary, the interim pastor, the Rev. Bob Davenport, plans to bring about a closure long denied. He will lead a ceremony at which Smead will posthumously be named pastor emeritus of the church he led from 1965 to 1987. The congregation's fellowship hall also will be named in Smead's honor.
"He was a kind of self-effacing guy. It should have happened 20-something years ago," Davenport said during a recent interview.
"Among the reasons he retired was to open a nursery. It had been a lifelong ambition, but within a couple of years of doing that, he developed cancer and became very, very sick and ultimately took his own life."
One of the jobs of an interim pastor is to serve as a bridge between the old and the new, Davenport said. In the case of Lake Seminole Presbyterian, his task seemed to be to help the congregation come to terms with its past.
"Some of you were hurt or demoralized by Bruce's final decision in life," he plans to say during today's 10:45 a.m. service. "We meet and act today both to respect and to heal old griefs and grievances, to remember and to forgive."
The church, organized as a small mission in 1964 by the Revs. Joe Conyers and Frank Anderson, thrived under Smead's leadership and quickly became self-supporting. In 1969, it was named the fastest growing church in what then was the Presbyterian Church in the United States. That body later became part of the Presbyterian Church (USA). By the time Smead retired, his congregation, at 8505 113th St. N, had grown from fewer than 50 members to about 500. Today membership has declined to about 160.
After retiring, Smead served as interim pastor of Highland Presbyterian Church of Largo and First Presbyterian Church of Dunedin. He also fulfilled a lifelong dream and started Smead Nursery in Seminole.
"He loved growing plants," his widow, Eleanor, said Thursday.
Her husband grew so many plants that they eventually took over the back yard at their home near the church, she said. Eventually they moved to larger property.
Mrs. Smead credits her husband's personality and a growing Seminole community for the church's success. His building program included a new sanctuary, administration and music buildings and an educational wing.
"He was a nice person," she said of the man who was known for his instructive and entertaining children's sermons.
"He had a sense of humor and it seems as though a lot of people enjoyed coming to hear his sermons because they liked to have a chuckle every now and then," said Mrs. Smead, who lives in Dunedin.
"He was kind of a special fellow. He was a blessing to a lot of people."
She particularly recalled the time he took a bed rail to the home of an elderly church member who was ill and frail. The man's wife had mentioned that she was worried about her husband, so the pastor got the bed rail to prevent him from falling out of bed.
Mrs. Smead thought her husband's farewell sermon to the church he had served for more than two decades gave a superb glimpse of the type of person he was.
"In truth, I was a very shy person. My family taught me from childhood how not to be demonstrative toward others," he told his congregation that Sunday back in 1987.
"I remember seeing a television commercial made by Bill Cosby for the Peace Corps. He said something like this: "Maybe you are one of those folks whose parents couldn't say, I love you. What they said was things like, Sit up straight. Eat all your supper. Be in by 9 o'clock. That was just their way of saying, I love you. Maybe you are not the kind of person who finds it easy to say, I love you. In the Peace Corps, you could build a bridge, teach people to read, work in a clinic, teach folks how to farm with modern implements. The Peace Corps has thousands of ways of letting you say, I love you, without getting caught.' Perhaps during our years together, there was something I did sometime which was my way of saying, I love you, without getting caught."
Two of the couples' three daughters, Deb and Janet Smead, will accompany their mother to today's service. A third daughter, Suzanne Hartmann, lives in North Carolina.
Davenport, the interim pastor, said he timed today's events to coincide with Reformation Sunday - which marks the beginning of the Protestant Church in the 16th century - and their proximity to All Saints' Day on Monday.
He will tell church members that they are gathered to celebrate the lives of the saints who have been part of Lake Seminole Presbyterian's history, especially the Rev. Bruce N. Smead. He will speak of Smead's illness, one of the most common forms of bone marrow cancer, and say that the late pastor's pain was "constant and uncontrollable."
"He endured that condition for two years, until he suddenly felt he was rapidly becoming completely incapacitated," the sermon he prepared says.
"Being a burden on others and prolonging life when, under natural conditions life would have ended, was unacceptable to Bruce. With characteristically careful planning for the protection of his loved ones, Bruce brought his life to an end - his last loving gift to his family."
The main message to his congregation will be, "Bruce died well."