When God speaks, Helen Driscoll listens and obeys.
METAIRIE—When God speaks, Helen Driscoll listens and obeys.
Driscoll, 91, spends much of her time teaching Sunday school at Williams Boulevard Baptist Church in Kenner, witnessing to the people around her, and thanking God for a wonderful life, she said.
“She still feels impressed to go door to door and tell people about Jesus,” said John Faull, pastor of Williams Boulevard. “Last year she organized a group of people, took a map, set up a grid, and went door to door. In a month we baptized 14 people because of her outreach ministry.
“I’m sure that there were more that were saved,” the pastor continued. “The number of responses we got were many times that. It is not uncommon for her to come to me at the close of the service and to say to me that her heart is yearning to see people saved.”
Driscoll herself isn’t much worried about numbers, she said.
“I’m not sure how many,” she said, referring to those who may have been baptized as a result of the door-to-door visitation. “[The church] keeps the records. I just help them to get saved and baptized and into Sunday school.”
Driscoll mapped out a large square area from Williams Boulevard to Power Drive, and then from Bruin Street across to 33rd Street, she said. In that area, a large majority of the people are Catholic, she said.
Her inspiration came from her pastor’s sermons, she said.
“He preaches the gospel,” she said. “I would sit there and cry because I didn’t have a lost person in the audience to make a profession of faith.”
After one such sermon she chided herself: “I don’t have one person here to answer that,” she said. That’s when she decided to begin knocking on doors and going out into the streets.
“It must have been some time in April 2006,” she said. “My partner – Alma Clarke – has been in my Sunday school class for 40 years, first at Mid-city, then at Crescent City and now at Williams Boulevard, “I said, ‘Alma, you’ve heard everything I know, why do you keep coming to my class?”
But Alma keeps coming to Driscoll’s class, and the two together met every week last fall and knocked on doors. Driscoll finished five streets by herself, from Bruin to 33rd, she said.
“People were hearing about it in the church, and they would come and volunteer to take streets,” she said. Driscoll made a big board with every street, number and block so volunteers could assume responsibility for each house.
“If the people weren’t home, we’d leave a tract and letter, and write it down so we could go back and contact them later,” she said. “It took me two months to finish five streets.”
Driscoll was hospitalized in October 2006 after a fall that caused a blood clot on her brain. She came home in February 2007, she said.
“I haven’t been on the street anymore, but I do call and visit a few of the people,” she said. “You love the Lord and every day you want to please Him,” she continued. “You give him a part of your life. It may be in your home in prayer, knocking on someone’s door, or talking on the phone.”
Driscoll carries tracts in her purse, ready for an opportunity to share Jesus, she said.
“I can’t say I love every one of those people, but I love the Lord, and He loves them and doesn’t want them to go to Hell. The way people replied to me [that first week I visited] made it so obvious that they’re lost and they’re going to Hell and don’t even know it,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “This is what keeps me going.
“They’re out there, and they don’t know they’re going to Hell,” she continued. “We’re just sitting here and letting them go. I look at empty seats at church and I say ‘It’s sad.’ I don’t know how God stomachs us with empty seats in our churches.”
“Mrs. Driscoll also had a good mentor,” said Joe McKeever, director of missions for the Baptist Association of New Orleans. “Paul Driscoll, her husband, was a specialist in soul-winning. Johnny [the Driscolls’ son] told me one day about the time he introduced his dad to Perry Como, with whom Johnny had toured.”
Later, Johnny found his father in a corner with Como, a devout Catholic, talking with the singer about his salvation, McKeever said.
Mid-city Baptist Church, during Paul Driscoll’s tenure there as pastor, baptized at least 200 every year, McKeever continued. “They would lead the state in baptisms every year, and sometimes the entire convention.”
In 1942, the MidCity Baptist Mission was begun, and Helen Driscoll played the piano. The church was constituted in 1943, and the Driscolls stayed for the next 58 years. In 1956, the church founded a school of which Helen became the administrator, and then later the principal, a position she held for 46 years.
Driscoll retired from the school at the age of 85 in 2002, she said.
In the meantime, the church had moved first to Airline Highway, then to Metairie, changing its name to Crescent City Baptist Church in the early 1970’s. The school came to be known as Crescent City Baptist School.
Just before Hurricane Katrina, Crescent City merged with Celebration Church, McKeever said.
Paul Driscoll died in 2000, and soon after, Helen moved her membership to Williams Boulevard, a church Mid-City had founded, she said.
“I’ve had a great life,” Helen said, explaining that she was saved at nine and had parents who were in church every time the doors were open.
As a senior in high school, Driscoll committed her whole life to the Lord, she said. “I told Him, ‘God you can have all there is of me the rest of my life,’ and I never took it back. I have tried to serve Him. Can you tell me how God did all that in my life so young? He’s just been so good to me.”
In 1944, Driscoll graduated from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary with a masters degree in theology, she said.
Even though Driscoll had taken all the courses and had the highest average in her class, seminary leaders were reluctant to give her the degree, she said. After discussing the issue with them for three and a half hours, she said, they agreed to award her the degree if she promised never to preach, which is what she did.
Teaching children about the Bible through the school has been the most rewarding experience, Driscoll said.
“I wish that every Baptist church in our convention could have such a school to help our young people in the preparation for their lives,” she said.
One such student, Steve Cretin, Asia Strategy Coordinator for E3 Partners, formerly Global Missions Fellowship, in a letter to his former teacher, remembered his time in Driscoll’s class as especially preparatory for the work he does now.
“Yes, those days in Bible class, chapel, and especially the Saturday nights at your house were the beginnings of my training for the ministry … no doubt,” he wrote. “I still often quote the verses that we had to memorize in Bible class. I have learned to appreciate that scripture memory, which we weren’t fond of at the time, as a labor of love today.”
The list of grateful students who remember Driscoll’s impact on their lives continues to grow.
Driscoll often receives letters from former students who are now teachers, pastors, and missionaries, she said.
Once, on a trip around the world, Driscoll prayed that God would send someone to help the people she saw.
“And now I’m getting letters from some of my former students who are there,” she said. “We can influence the world if we try.
Everything that’s happened in my life, God has used it to bring me where I am. I was nobody, yet God opened door after door.”