Dr. Morris Sheats Obituary - lubbockonline.com

Sheats started preaching at sixteen. He grew up a leader, serving as his school's student body president while building a lifelong love of music that stuck with him. He played cello, accordion, piano, organ and viola, and sang in his school choir.

Sheats earned his B.A. From Texas Tech before heading to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for his M.Div. And D.Min. He came back to preach, teach and mentor for the rest of his life, and he wrote five books along the way. Family, friends and the people he mentored remember him as a musician as much as a minister, someone who moved just as easily behind a pipe organ as behind a pulpit.

For Lubbock, Sheats represents a kind of local figure that's getting rarer, a hometown Tech graduate who built an entire career and reputation without leaving. People who sat in his pews or took his lessons are the ones carrying his influence forward now, in classrooms, in choirs, in whatever churches they ended up leading themselves.

A man who started preaching before he could vote ended up spending seventy years doing it.