90-year-old retired home missionary/pastor still serving God

Uvalde ministry

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UVALDE—"A su nombre gloria"—Glory to his Name—not only was the name of the hymn M.E. O'Neill led his nursing home congregation in singing, but also could serve as his life's motto.

Ninety-year-old M.E. O'Neill continues his ministry in two  Uvalde nursing homes.

Now 90, he regularly leads worship services at two nursing homes and directs discipleship program for inmates.

O'Neill and his wife, Laura, surrendered to missions in 1947, feeling a calling to working with Spanish-speaking people.

Both had studied high school Spanish, but "we had a grammar knowledge more than anything else," O'Neill acknowledged.

The first church where the Southern Baptist Convention Home Mission Board sent them to work was a Hispanic congregation in rural Nacogdoches County. One of his primary jobs there was translation—from Spanish to English.

"The people there, while Hispanic, did not speak Spanish, but a lot of the materials from the Home Mission Board and the Mexican Baptist Convention would come in Spanish, so I'd get out my Spanish dictionary and translate it to English so they could understand," he explained.

O'Neill went on to be pastor of Spanish-language congregations in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, as well as churches in Alamo, Benevides, San Diego, Falfurrias, Ingleside and Aransas Pass.

The congregation in Alamo was one his parents had help start while he was a child. His parents did not speak Spanish, but they recognized the need for a Spanish-speaking congregation. So, they showed Spanish-language 8-mm. films on the side of a building until a pastor came.


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Also, during an 18-month stint in El Paso working at the Spanish Baptist Publishing House, he was pastor of Chinese mission—despite not knowing how to speak Cantonese. Some of the congregation could speak English and would translate for those who could not understand.

After retiring to Uvalde in 1990 and joining the congregation at Baptist Temple there, he was asked to be the interim pastor at Primera Iglesia Bautista there.

Besides his nursing home and prison ministries, O'Neill maintains a schedule for the five hours a day of programming for which Baptist Temple is responsible on a local cable channel.

In 1996, "I retired from pastoral work," O'Neill said—but he must mean the kind a person gets paid for doing.

He maintains a schedule for the five hours a day of programming for which Baptist Temple is responsible on a local cable channel. He fills the hours with services from Baptist Temple, as well as other congregations who send recordings of their services to be included.

For the last 17 years, he also has made the 80-mile round-trip drive to Hondo to conduct a discipleship program for inmates in the penitentiary there.

"There was Bible study for the English-speaking inmates, and preaching for the English speakers and sometimes a Spanish-speaking preacher would come, but there was no regular Bible study in Spanish," he explained.

Currently he is helping the 35 men in the group he leads there to how to be better Christian men through the films Fireproof and Courageous and accompanying study materials.

"It has been very effective for some of the men," he said. "Others aren't really all that interested, and others don't have the education to read the materials. So, they have to listen as the other men read things out loud to them."

O'Neill also leads worship services at two nursing homes in Uvalde. Since many of the people speak no English, he does his own translation while he preaches and teaches and also alternates between English and Spanish in the hymns he splices in while preaching, because he quips, "you know Spanish is the language of heaven."

O'Neill also visits in the rooms of people in the nursing home who either are not capable of attending services or forget to attend.

He has a ready explanation for his busy schedule even after nine decades of life.

"I started out in 1947, in that country church, trying to do the Lord's will, and I've tried to keep that up, right along until now," O'Neill explained.


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