Talladega’s Drummond still actively serving at nearly 80

At nearly 80 years old, James Drummond is one of the oldest active pastors in Carey Baptist Association but says he is doing just fine. 
   
Drummond may have a stint in his brain and a defibrillator in his chest but the preacher is best known for the joy in his soul. He says he just celebrated 60 years of marriage to the same beautiful woman and is still doing what he loves in life, what comes naturally. 
   
Born and bred in Talladega, Drummond doesn’t mention racetracks when discussing his life. He doesn’t even talk about football. That’s because Drummond — nicknamed “Penny” since the Great Depression — eats, breathes and remembers one thing: “servin’ the Lord.”
   
Drummond’s wife, Joyce, (he calls her “Mama”) fetches a ministerial scrapbook when the recollecting gets too involved and it often does. 
   
With the exception of some surgeries and recuperations in his later years, he has been behind Alabama’s pulpits for nearly half a century, not one Sunday passing that didn’t find him responsible for a church family. 
   
“In ’89, I had a massive heart attack and they told me I’d have to give up ministry altogether. The doctors tried to set me up on total disability and I turned it down,” Drummond said. 
   
“I said, ‘Yes I can do it. I can get my regular Social Security.’ I said, ‘If I take total disability, it’ll be against the law for me to go in the pulpit and preach any more.’ And they said, ‘Well fella, your preachin’ days are over.’ And I said, ‘Well evidently you don’t know who I’m preaching for, and we’ll just leave it up to the good Lord.’ 
   
“I wasn’t out of the pulpit but 11 months, and I took a little church down in Clay County, Rock Springs,” he said.
   
From Rock Springs Baptist Church in Clay County to Westside Baptist Church, Talladega, six churches have claimed him as their pastor over the years, including Horn’s Memorial Baptist Church, Talladega, where he currently serves as interim pastor.
   
Clyde Pettus, pastor of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, Talladega, where Drummond once preached, calls him “one of our elder state statesmen.”
   
“He’s a wonderful man of God, and he’s been a great help to some folks, been preaching almost 50 years,” Pettus said. 
   
“I didn’t have any breathing room,” Drummond said. “For 46 years of those (50) years, when the Lord moved me from one church to another, I would preach the last message at the church I was giving up Sunday morning and had to take care of prayer meeting in the one I was going to on Wednesday night.”
   
But Drummond — simply Bro. Penny on most marquees — is hardly complaining. 
   
“We’d accept a vacation once in a while, take a few days and maybe go to the Smoky Mountains,” he said. “But I preached up there when I was in the Smoky Mountains. They adopted me as a campground pastor up there for a long time. 
   
“In the first two weeks in October for 15 years, I preached in Shady Oaks Campground up there and saw people out of Detroit saved in that campground service. So I still had to preach when I was on vacation but I enjoyed it — that’s my life.” 
   
The life Drummond enjoys was almost cut short by the Korean conflict. 
   
Unsaved at the time, he was the only soldier recalled to base out of his entire Army unit mere moments before being deployed to engage the communists on the Yalu River. He knows of only a handful who survived. 
   
“My company outfit was lost there, and it just stayed on my heart. I couldn’t understand why I was still livin’ and my best friends were all dead,” Drummond said. “But the Lord spared me. He had something else for me to do. I understood it later.”
   
He and Joyce were saved soon after he returned from his military service and Drummond quickly answered the call to the ministry, preaching revivals across the state — what he calls “that old country-style, God-blessin’ worship.”
   
“We just had a lot of people praying for us up at Blue Eye Baptist Church in Lincoln — that was our home church — and the Lord began to deal with me very heavy,” Drummond said. “One night, I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t resist any longer and just fell off beside my bed and accepted Christ. 
   
“And when I raised up, my wife was on her knees beside me and made her decision at the same time,” he said. “We went and got a preacher out of bed close to midnight to let him know we’d been saved.”  
   
He and Joyce still live in the house they built for themselves and still sleep in the same room in which they were saved. 
   
“We’ve just had a great life and great ministry and we’re still celebrating,” Drummond said.