7 MILES IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE By Dr. Franklin R. Dumond, Director of Congregational Ministries
“Strategically located seven miles in the middle of nowhere” describes the location of the facilities of Cedar Grove General Baptist Church. At least that’s the way Pastor Larry Embry describes the church location when in conversation with other pastors. Whether you travel east from Hartford or Beaver Dam when you turn off either highway, it is still seven miles of rural Kentucky hillsides before you reach Cedar Grove Church. But there in the middle of nowhere stands a large multi-purpose building with its parking lot across the road and just down the hill from a large auditorium and educational complex with another parking lot. And right there in the middle of nowhere pre-Covid Sunday mornings found more than 250 people attending in-person worship services every Sunday. The church has not always enjoyed such fine facilities, nor has it always welcomed such crowds to worship. Back in 1959 the Cedar Grove Church was organized with 14 people. Pastor Larry’s father Rev. Basil Embry with three other men signed personal notes at the bank in order to purchase a house of worship. Previously abandoned by the Methodist congregation that it housed, the little frame building sat empty for 12 years before it became home to Cedar Grove. Pastor Larry was just a youngster when the church was organized. His father remained as pastor for a few years before moving on to serve other congregations in Kentucky and Indiana. Cedar Grove remained part of Larry Embry’s life, and it was there as a teenager that he became a Christian. Not many years later he met a charming
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young lady who attended church with him. She too was converted at Cedar Grove and later became Mrs. Elda Embry. During his college years Larry felt the call to preach. He remarked, “I told the Lord it was a mistake. I barely made a C in High School Speech Class.” A call to preach is a call to prepare, so Larry enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School and began serving rural churches. Later he took a teaching positon in Ohio County and moved back to the Hartford/Beaver Dam area as a middle school Social Studies and Science teacher. He still served churches as a bivocational pastor and like everyone else in those days, he stayed in each place 3-4 years and then moved on, as was generally expected. In 1981, he started a new job as pastor of that church his father had organized and that had been so pivotal in his own spiritual journey. His educational career moved from the classroom to that of building principal and later Assistant Superintendent for Ohio County Schools. In 2001 the leaders of the church offered to make his position full-time. With an early retirement from the school system he reported, “They paid me to study the Bible full-time!” In August, 2020 after 40 years of service to the Cedar Grove Church he retired from that position. Looking back over 40 years, Pastor Larry is the first to say that he never intended to stay that long. In fact he fully expected after a few years of holding the church together that he would conclude his service there and
