By 20 minutes, Rev. Ron McClung is the eighth of nine children in his family, but the closeness of the two men goes far beyond the brief time between their births.
Ron and his twin brother, Rev. Don McClung, went to school together, have been ministers about the same amount of time, and both have retired once. Both, however, have taken positions with smaller congregations.
Ron, a Jones County resident since 1992, pastored Haddock Baptist from August of that year until January of 2023. Don was pastor at First Baptist Church in Hawkinsville for 25 years and retired six months before his brother.
“He’s taken a small church out in the country near Hawkinsville,” Ron said of his brother.
Ron McClung, meanwhile, has been at Hardwick Baptist for about two years now.
McClung and his siblings grew up in Stone Mountain. All nine are still alive and live in Georgia.
“I was there, like when they were doing the carving at Stone Mountain; that was right in our backyard, you know? So that was kind of kind of fascinating, some of that history.”
McClung, who turns 70 in August, attended what was Atlanta Baptist College and became Mercer University, as did his twin brother.
“We worked the first semester in the library, and then he and I worked together for most of the years in the bookstore. So that was a cool arrangement.”
McClung and Sharon Wheeler met in their teens at Memorial Park Baptist Church. They dated three and a half years before marrying in 1977. It was a hectic time for the groom.
“I graduated from Mercer in Atlanta one Saturday and got married the next Saturday,” he chuckled.
They have been married 48 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren. McClung said it has been a blessed journey.
“We stuck together through the ups and downs of growing up, because, really, we were still trying to figure life out.”
McClung was teaching in DeKalb County, and his new bride was working as a nurse right out of school. In addition, he was going to school at Georgia State to obtain his Master’s Degree.
A fellow teacher asked McClung if he would consider serving as a youth minister at a local church.
“And the truth is,” he acknowledged, “I had had a struggle about going into the ministry. I felt like God may be calling me into the ministry, but my twin brother had already answered a call to go into the ministry.
“And you know,” McClung noted, “when you’re a twin, you get tired of hearing, ‘oh, your brother’s doing this, and you’re doing this’ kind of thing. But we felt like the Lord was leading us. So I went to that church and was the youth minister there parttime while I was teaching school.”
Then came the time when the McClungs felt the Lord had different plans for them.
“Then we felt a calling to actually go to the mission field,” he reflected. “The choice was, do you go as a teacher, or do you go as a minister? And that was a big struggle for me to try to decide.”
He chose the ministry and in 1980 entered seminary school in Louisville, Ky. Don was already there and actually pastoring a small church.
“After we’d been there a short time, a church offered me to go and pastor, but they wanted me to live on the church field, which was about 75-80 miles away,” McClung said.
“I went there in November of 1980 to be their pastor. What it meant was we had to commute back and forth to classes. We did that for three years. So, that was an interesting experience.”
The two daughters, Jennifer and Kimberly, were born in 1981 and 1982, respectively, and the McClungs already felt they would be going elsewhere for the Lord.
“We knew at that time we probably were going to the mission field somewhere because we just felt that tug,” he shared.
McClung pointed out there were ample ministers to fill vacancies in this country, but nobody was answering the call for overseas ministries.
The McClungs chose to respond.
“When we graduated in 1983, about a month later we were appointed by the Foreign Mission Board,” McClung said. “And, my brother and his wife were appointed at the same time as missionary. So, that’s kind of unique. She grew up on the mission field in Brazil. So they went back to Brazil.”
Ron and Sharon ultimately chose Ecuador in 1983 and located first in Riobamba.
“We were the only North American family that lived there. So that was a huge culture shock,” McClung recalled.
The family later moved to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and, during those years, all of them learned to speak Spanish fluently, he added.
In the States in late 1991-early 1992 on furlough, McClung was feeling restless.
“I kind of talked to some people and said if we could find the right church, we might stay in the U.S., because it’d been a while since I’d pastored.”
McClung worked primarily at the Scottish Rite Hospital and St. Joseph Hospital in Atlanta January through May, 1992, in a program that is introductory training to be a chaplain, “but it’s also the introductory training to just kind of help you process change in your life,” he explained.
“The hospital gave me a chance to kind of sit back and evaluate, where do we go now? What’s the next chapter?”
At about that time, Shirley Moore Knowles, daughter of Haddock Baptist Church member and strong supporter Jesse Moore, contacted McClung. Moore worked with Cherokee Products, which had begun hiring Mexicans in the early ‘90s.
“Haddock (Baptist) saw that as an opportunity,” McClung shared. ‘What are we going to do? The mission field has come to our backyard. How are we going to respond to that?’
“The unique thing for us,” McClung pointed out, “was when my wife and I were talking about coming and looking for a church, one of her things was we really need to go somewhere where we can use our Spanish.”
Haddock was interested in a minister who could speak Spanish.
“When our resume landed with them, and our contacts were made, it just seemed like, hey, something’s happening here that may be of divine orientation,” McClung recalled. “So, we started that process in early spring, and then by the end of July, we felt like, okay, this is what we should do.”
McClung was offered and accepted the pulpit.
“We came here in August of 1992,” he said. “My first official Sunday was the first Sunday in August.”
For a while, the new minister used his missionary- attained talent.
“After about six months or so, there was a time when, during the Sunday School hour, I would lead a worship service in Spanish, and then at the 11 o’clock hour, I would preach in English. So there was about a year, year and a half, where I would use both languages pretty regularly.”
McClung’s actual title since 1997 has been Rev.
Dr. Ron McClung.
“After being at the church for a year, I wanted to go back and work on an additional degree, Doctorate of Ministry. So I decided to go to Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta.”
Haddock Baptist’s facilities expanded significantly during McClung’s time.
“We built the fellowship hall in the education building in 1997-98 for about a million dollars.”
Then there was the sanctuary.
“That sanctuary building was the biggest indebtedness the church ever incurred and made the pastor nervous,” McClung suggested. “I think it did the members too, like a $2 million building project, and that took a little longer than three years to get paid off.”
The pastor decided in 2023 it was time to move on. McClung said a fellow minister summed it up for him.
“He said, ‘I’m too old to stay, but I’m too young to stop,’ and that’s what retirement was for me. I felt like I was too old. I had reached the 30-year mark at Haddock when I turned 67.”
The retiring minister did not know what was next when he left Haddock Baptist.
“I really didn’t know what the plan was, other than to try a change of pace and try to figure out what was going to be the next chapter. What I found was, I missed the relationships. I missed the people.”
McClung, who has been a volunteer chaplain with the Jones County Sheriff’s Office since 2011, expressed his gratitude for his years at the church.
“I am so very thankful that through the years, I’ve had the joy of working with a lot of staff members who came and went. I had a lot of good relationships with those through the years and the blessing of hanging around for 30 years. A church member told me one time, ‘you know, there’s going to come a time when you will stop burying church members, and you’ll start burying your friends.’ And that came a long time ago.”
McClung said the church secretary assisted him in calculating some services he’s conducted.
“I’ve done about 250 funerals, about 100 weddings and almost 300 baptisms.”
Though at a much smaller congregation in Hardwick, McClung is still preaching. When asked how much longer he will occupy the pulpit, he had a ready reply.
“That’s a good question. I don’t know. I guess the good Lord will answer that.”
