“God has been faithful and the people have been faithful,” she said. “We have held each other up. The church is strong.”
In a year when tragedy has struck the members and leaders of Towne Boulevard Church of God, two more people tied to the church recently passed away minutes apart.
The Rev. A. Wayne Burch, 80, father of the church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Mitchell Burch, passed away around 4 a.m. Dec. 6 in West Virginia. About 30 minutes later, the Rev. Billy Thomas Ball, pastor of the Grand Avenue/Towne Boulevard Church of God from 1970 to 1986, died at his Middletown residence.
Ball, 85, a World War II veteran and West Virginia native, started his ministry in 1954 as an evangelist and also served as pastor of several churches in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. He served Towne Boulevard during the building of the new church on Towne Boulevard.
Earlier this year, the church also lost the pastor’s wife and mother-in-law in a car accident, and two married members in a separate accident.
The Rev. Tim Draxler, 68, is organist at Mount Zion Lutheran Church, but attends Sunday School at Towne Boulevard Church of God. He said the members at Towne Boulevard have “really rallied and been supportive” throughout this trying year.
“We’re just scratching our heads and asking, ‘Lord, what’s going on?’” he said.
The Rev. Burch’s wife, Rochelle “Shelly” Burch, 54, and her mother, Linda Dykstra, 77, were killed in a two-vehicle accident on May 13 in Indiana. The Burchs were married for 36 years and she was the church’s pianist and a member of a quartet.
At his wife’s memorial service, while Burch didn’t officiate, he addressed the more than 1,000 mourners.
“I just want to tell you that I’m OK. That’s in context, you understand. I’m not OK. A lot of people have asked me, ‘How are you doing?’ and I say, ‘I’m just doing.’ You have to do. There’s no qualifiers,” he said. “Please don’t ask me about tomorrow, or next week or next month. I don’t know … I can’t think that far. I don’t know how. My context is gone. I don’t have a context for my ministry right now. Shelly and I did this together.”
When the Rev. Burch took a sabbatical from the church, the Rev. Claude Robold, who retired from New Covenant Church, served as interim pastor. Burch returned after his wife’s death, and is expected to return next week following his father’s death, Green said.
Less than one month after Shelly Burch and her mother were killed, a Trenton couple, Leonard and Joyce Lawson, who attended Towne Boulevard three times a week, were killed in a two-vehicle crash at the intersection of U.S. 22 and Ohio 350.
Leonard, 76, and his wife, Joyce, 73, were traveling to Hillsboro to visit family, according to relatives.
Leonard Lawson, driving a 2006 Mercury Grand Marquis, failed to stop at the stop sign at U.S. 22 and the vehicle was struck by a 1983 Peterbilt dump truck heading south, according to an investigation by the Ohio Highway Patrol’s Lebanon Post.
The dump truck driver was treated and released with minor injuries.
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