FORT YATES, N.D. — If you go to Standing Rock, one of the first persons you will meet is Pastor Boots.
His name is Boots Marsh, but from hearing people talk you would guess his first name is “Pastor” and last name is “Boots.”
Pastor Boots Marsh, in front of Tipi Wakan in Cannon Ball, N.D., talks with Virginia Baptist volunteers about cultural differences on the Standing Rock reservation. (Photo by Michael Clingenpeel)
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Pastor Boots is the ubiquitous leader of Tipi Wakan, a Baptist preaching point and ministry center in Cannon Ball, N.D. “We don't have a constitution and we’re not a church,” he says, but it’s as much a church as any you would find in Virginia.
But then, Pastor Boots is a little different from most pastors, and Tipi Wakan is a little different from most churches.
Worship, when they have it, is Sunday at 1 in the afternoon, or thereabouts. Pastor Boots wanders to the makeshift pulpit at one end of a room jammed with boxes, chairs, tables, a blackboard, shelves and sheets hanging from PVC pipe. He welcomes everyone, sings a verse of a hymn and reads a brief passage of Scripture. A volunteer leads a praise song on a guitar. Then Pastor Boots talks about the Scripture. He closes with the Doxology. It’s over in 40 minutes, 45 tops.
The Marshes live in a single-wide trailer behind Tipi Wakan, which means “sacred tent,” overlooking the Missouri River. “I have a million-dollar view from my single-wide,” deadpans Jackie.
They describe themselves as “reluctant missionaries.”
They were minding their own business in Texas when, in the winter of 2003, a friend who had been a Southern Baptist missionary in Fort Yates, N.D., a town on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, asked them to do a winter Vacation Bible School at Cannon Ball. Pastor Boots was a handyman for the week, and Jackie was the cook.
“It was 35 degrees below zero. We slept on the floor. It was pretty bleak, but we fell in love with the children,” recalls Boots' wife.
Three months later, convinced by what Pastor Boots calls “an inner calling,” the couple sold their home in Houston and moved to Cannon Ball to lead Tipi Wakan, which had no pastor.
The building sits on two and one-half acres of land leased to the ministry outpost for another 40 years by a woman who is a member of First Baptist Church in Mandan, the nearest city north of the reservation. Several people had kept a Sunday school going there, and Pastor Boots told them he felt called to be there. “Come on,” he recalls them saying when they heard his plans, “but we aren’t going to pay you anything.”
Over seven years later he still receives no regular salary and is not supported by the Dakota Baptist Convention or the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board. The couple gets by on some retirement savings, Social Security and the gifts of supportive friends.
Pastor Boots will tell you that his background is well suited for his daily ministry among a people beset with alcoholism, high unemployment and diabetes. He was reared in a broken home where alcohol abuse was prevalent. He dropped out of high school, attended Bible college and worked at a Christian camp. One day, however, he backed his truck up to a dump and threw out all his books from Bible college and “went negative on the Lord.”
For the next decade his life spiraled “all the way to the bottom,” he recalls. “I figured I was completely disqualified for the ministry, but I was given a second chance.” The next 10 years he spent “relearning, reassessing. It was 10 years of restoration.”
He became involved in a Baptist church in Houston, where he taught Sunday school, visited the elderly and taught a home Bible study, “easing back, not by my will or design, to fellowship and daily Christian living.”
“Someone who hasn't been through some of the destructive behaviors we've been through wouldn't have the patience, tolerance and hope we have,” he says.
“A window opened, and we walked through.”
Michael Clingenpeel is pastor of River Road Church, Baptist, in Richmond, Va.