by Don K. Clements

Most of us who attended Covenant Seminary in the 60’s and 70’s had lots of opportunities to preach in a number of RPCES (and even an RPCNA) congregations in the St. Louis and Southern Illinois area. I always enjoyed the opportunities I had in the coal fields across the river, in Sparta (RPCES in town, RPCNA in the country), in Cutler (anyone remember that funeral home?), and the big brick structure at 7th and Chestnut in Coulterville.

Harold Hight was the pastor at Coulterville when I started seminary. In 1972 he moved to become headmaster of Faith Christian School in Sparta (if memory serves me right, it was one of the schools connected to Max Belz’ famous telephone school!)

While seminary students are frequently influenced by professors (as I was), I was also greatly influenced by the local pastors I met. Harold was one of them. I was fascinated that the pastor of a small town church in backwater Illinois could be so erudite and such a wiz on the floor on of Presbytery. Once I learned about Brother Hight’s story, it all made sense.

Life as a minister and a teacher came naturally to Hight.

Harold’s father had himself intended to enter the ministry, but ended up teaching at a school in Idaho. So he also decided to become a teacher, attending a Teachers College in Oregon. Right out of school he started teaching in a nearby town, but even before his first year was up, his alma mater contacted him and asked him if he would like to take a position in Hawaii. If you were young and single, what else would you say?

“I was young and single and I thought that would be exciting,” Hight said. So he started on a two year contract at a private boarding school in Honolulu. He learned to surf on Waikiki and had a great time. Until one Sunday morning

’He was given a two-year contract as a math teacher at a private boarding school in Honolulu in 1941 when he walked across the University of Hawaii campus to get to church. It was December 7th.
The sky was strangely black. “I had no idea what was happening five miles away until I got to church and they said, ‘Do you know that Pearl Harbor is under attack?” Hight said.

He ran up to a balcony looked down the coastline to Pearl Harbor. “There was a column of smoke and flames shooting into the air,” Hight said. “The radio kept us abreast of the seriousness of the situation.” After that there was an immediate blackout, and schools were closed for the next six weeks while trenches were dug to help defend the islands.

After teaching at the boarding school during the rest of the war years because travel was restricted, Hight said, “The Lord impressed upon my heart there was a calling that was more significant for me than teaching school.”

In 1945, Hight enrolled in Faith Theological Seminary in Wilmington, Del. It was the seminary of the Bible Presbyterian Church, the group that separated from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church less than two years after that denomination was formed by men who had been run out of the Northern Presbyterian Church for their failure to leave the Independent Board of Foreign Missions and their desire to maintain a high view of Scripture.

In Delaware, Harold met a nurse, still in training, named Carmen. Ultimately the family grew to 7, with one boy and four girls.
Harold was ordained by the Pacific Norwest Presbytery of the BPC and served two years as an Assistant Pastor (it was primarily an internship).

He then moved on to be pastor of a BPC congregation in Concord, NC for several years and then up to Sodus Center, NY – a small town not far from Rochester – to plant a new church for National Presbyterian Missions. He stayed there near five years. During that period, there was yet another split in the BPC, and Hight remained with the group that formed the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES).

Then it was on to Williamstown, NJ for another mission church, where he remained from 1956 to 1967. He then took the call to the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Coulterville, IL. While there he helped to found a new Christian school and served that school as headmaster for four years.

Now in his late 50’s, he took one final call to serve as pastor of the Covenant Church in Glen Mills, PA (Delaware County) where he remained until 1987. At the age of 70, he took Honorable Retired status and he and Carmen – as did so many RPCES ministers – moved into the large retirement community in Quarryville, Pennsylvania. It was there he discovered he was not yet ready to fully retire.

Over the next 20+ years Harold assisted with visitation for the Westminster Presbyterian Church in nearby Lancaster, minister part-time as a Chaplain in the skilled-care unit at Quarryville and as minister to seniors at the Reformed Presbyterian church next to the retirement community. Near the end of his time with RPC, he also helped with the church’s English as a Second Language program.
“Most students were Hispanic in background, so I had to rely on my high school and college Spanish,” he said. He tutored up to eight intermediate students at a time

Earlier this year, Hight retired again, for the second time, at age 92. He still volunteers in the skilled-care unit at the retirement community, where he chairs the volunteer’s visitors committee, which is part of the residents’ council.

Hight has found time to do what most retirees do. “I’m now doing more studying and reading. In the busy life as a pastor, you do what you need for sermons, but (you don’t get a chance to) study for interest’s sake,” Hight said. He’s currently studying “The Story of Human Language.”

Harold also has more time to spend at his cabin in Bradford County, where he still enjoys fishing, cutting trees and splitting wood. And he has time to work in the retirement community’s woodshop, he said.