Decker said that he stood up…30-minute speech. “Oh,” he said, “I read from the Old Testament. I read from the book of Psalms. I read from Greek lexicons. I read, I read, I read, I read… and,” he said, “when I finished my speech, I thought, ‘Boy! I have got him now!’” [He] Sits down.

Wilcox stands up. He says, “Brother Decker, I want to make a point here. I want to tell you what we do in the church of Christ.” He went to the blackboard—a chalkboard—and wrote “Sing—S…I…N…G.”

“Now,” he said, “here is what the Bible says to the church,” and he put down Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3: 16, other verses. Then he said, “That’s what we do; there are the passages. Now,” he said, “over here is what ya’ll do…(Ya’ll know what “ya’ll” means? OK.)…what ya’ll do.” And he said, “Ya’ll go over here and play—P…L…A…Y.” He drew a circle. “Now,” he said, “Brother Decker, take the chalk and go up here and put one verse in that circle [under the word ‘play’]” and he sat down…two minutes.

“Well,” Decker said, “I got up and I told them how embarrassed they were with Wilcox, and what a failure he was, and what a terrible injustice it was for him to even profess to be able to sustain what churches of Christ believe…on and on and on—thirty more minutes.” But he said, “I never did pick up that chalk.”

Wellll, Wilcox got back up. He said, “Well, maybe…maybe I didn’t make myself clear. This is what we do. We sing. That’s the passage. This what you do—here is the circle—and I’ll give you the rest of my 30 minutes to come up here and put the VERSE in it!” Wilcox waited… Decker didn’t come to do it. Wilcox sat down. The night’s over.

Now, I don’t know how it is out here in New Mexico. It may be that ya’ll have got something special like oxygen in the air and very little water, and you do some things different, but over where we come from, when elders do like this [some kind of hand sign] to a preacher, that’s not good.

[After making that hand sign, Decker and elders from the Christian Church] Went downstairs, in the back classroom; got in there, and one of the elders said, “Brother Decker, we’re so disappointed in you, we don’t know what to do.”

He said, “What’s wrong?”

“Well,” the elder said, “you didn’t put that verse up there.”

“Well,” Decker said, “No.”

And the elder asked, “Why did you not do that?!”

He said, “There’s not one.”

“There’s NOT one!!”

“No!”

And they said, “Well, what are you going to do?”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, but I’ve got till Saturday night to do this.”

“Well,” he said [as Brother Decker related the story], “every night—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—ole Wilcox got up there…said ‘Here’s what we do, here’s the verse; this is what you do, where is the verse?’ Got so a ten-year-old child could have made the argument. Nobody in the building failed to see the point!”