 Christian journey included walk by surprised members of family By John H. Adams The Layman Volume 34, Number 7 Posted November 30, 2001 April 1971.
Church was not, and never had been, the order of the day for the family of Lt. Col. Roy Lunceford, a two-war combat veteran who was awarded the Silver Star in Korea. With his intentions unannounced, Lloyd Lunceford, Larry’s twin brother, walked the gauntlet, through the living room, past the stares and out the door – headed straight to a Baptist church. “I think my brother thought I was nuts,” Lunceford said. “My mom was very supportive. I think my dad was pretty leery. Thankfully, in time they all warmed up.” Soccer mom and pop team Today, Lunceford – a Presbyterian elder, partner in a major Baton Rouge law firm, a director of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, half of a soccer mom and pop team – still heads straight for church on Sundays. He remembers what prompted him to startle his family. “As a 15-year-old, I first understood the gospel listening to Billy Graham on TV. I didn’t hear thunder or see lightening, but I did feel an immediate change, in terms of a lot of anxiety and tension evaporating.” That was in November 1970. He began to read the tiny type of a pocket Bible, roughly three inches wide by five inches tall, planning to read a chapter a day. He got hooked. In three weeks, he read, with strained eyes, from Genesis to maps. At school, he found Christian friends who encouraged him. But it was five months before he ventured off to church. “Army life didn’t lend itself to church-going,” Lunceford said. “I grew up in a moral household. My parents emphasized strong personal character, honesty and integrity, but didn’t talk much about faith.” Student of the faith Lunceford became a serious student of the faith. At the University of Toledo in Ohio, where he majored in history, he became involved in Campus Crusade for Christ, the international ministry begun by Dr. Bill Bright of Orlando. In the summer of 1976, he attended a month-long Campus Crusade Institute of Bible Studies in Colorado, where he met Cynthia Treen, whose father, David C. Treen, would in 1980 become the first Republican governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction. “So many people have met their future spouses at IBS that it’s been dubbed ‘I’ve Been Searching,’” Lunceford said. That’s exactly what happened to Lunceford and Treen in 1976, a summer that initiated a three-year, mostly long-distance romance after they returned to their campuses. Campus Crusade had a lasting effect on both of them. Treen, who graduated from Tennessee a year before Lunceford got his degree at Toledo, went to work on the staff of Campus Crusade at Auburn. After graduation, Lunceford spent a year in Washington on a congressional study committee. Then he spent two years on staff with Campus Crusade at the University of Georgia. After the first year, the couple married and both served with Campus Crusade at Georgia. Positive impact on others Then Lunceford decided to go to law school. “I had concluded that if you wanted to have a positive impact on others and your community, there were three possible areas where you could do the greatest good: education, media or the law and public service as adjunct to that,” he said. He got all three. After earning his law degree from the Louisiana State University Law Center, Lunceford joined Taylor Porter Brooks & Phillips in Baton Rouge in 1983. Some of the major clients he has worked with are educational institutions and media outlets: LSU and its medical center; The Advocate, Baton Rouge’s daily newspaper; the local ABC television affiliate; the Louisiana Press Association; and Louisiana Public Broadcasting. With 62 lawyers, the firm is the largest in Louisiana’s capital. Lunceford is chairman of its appellate practice session. Recently, he was one of five individuals – and the only private-practice lawyer – whose names were submitted to the White House to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Two U.S. federal trial judges, a state Supreme Court justice and a U.S. magistrate were the other potential nominees. One of the federal trial judges was nominated. “It was a tremendous honor and very humbling to be in that company,” Lunceford said. After moving to Baton Rouge, the Luncefords began looking for a church home. (Today, the Luncefords have three children: Sarah, 16, Rebecca, 14, and Andrew, 9 – and more soccer, tennis, volleyball and Scout activities than they can keep track of.) His background was Baptist and hers was Methodist, but they wound up at First Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, an evangelical congregation that now has 1,700 members. “It was packed with baby boomers like ourselves,” he said. “We were very impressed how Christ-centered the sermons were. I scheduled an appointment with the minister, Russell Stevenson, and asked him what Presbyterians believed. He handed me a Book of Confessions. “After I got through the Scots, the Second Helvetic and the Westminster confessions, I thought this is incredibly rich theological material. If this is what Presbyterians believe, where do I sign?” The Luncefords joined First Presbyterian, and a few years later he was elected an elder. “Serving on the session, I began to get a little more educated about denominational problems,” he said. “My pastor said he wanted the session to be informed so that they could be part of the solution.” Human Sexuality Report Lunceford took his pastor to heart, which indirectly led to his becoming one of the national directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee. Lunceford read a task force’s “Human Sexuality Report” that was made to the 1991 General Assembly. That report advocated a new “justice-love” standard to endorse sex between consenting people outside of marriage, heterosexual or homosexual, premarital or extramarital. Lunceford criticized the report in a letter to other members of the session. One elder took his letter to René de Visme Williamson, a retired LSU professor (and author of Independence and Involvement: A Christian Reorientation in Political Science). The professor sent the letter to his son, Parker T. Williamson, editor of The Layman. Before long, Lunceford was being courted by the Lay Committee to become a director. He said he accepted the invitation in 1995 because “I was impressed by the fact that they were one of the few prominent voices at the time that were speaking up in the denomination in support of traditional values.” During four years service as chairman of the Publications Committee, he has given active leadership to the staff’s development of a Web site, which now serves thousands of Presbyterians; initiating a publishing ministry for evangelical curricula, Bible studies and inspirational books; and revamping The Layman with a new design and a full-color format. Like other directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Lunceford is committed to renewal in the Presbyterian Church (USA). “This is a wonderful denomination. It has a rich theological tradition. Its evangelical wing is perhaps more energized now than at any other time in memory,” he said. “On the other hand, the challenge to men and women of Biblical faith, and the risk of denominational dissolution has never been greater. I’m going to try to keep my oar in the water and do what I can to try to keep the denomination moored to its Biblical anchor.” Lunceford is no longer a member of the Presbyterian Lay Committee's board of directors. |
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