Rev. Arthur McPhail

The Reverend Arthur McPhail, 81, of Newaygo, died on Friday, May 29, 2026, at Gerber Memorial in Fremont, in the county he served for forty years from the pulpit of Newaygo United Methodist Church — a county he had, by his own rough accounting, married about half of and buried about the other half, and loved without much regard to which.

He was born September 28, 1944, in Newaygo, to Donald and Frances McPhail, and grew up two blocks from the Muskegon River and one block from the church he would eventually serve. He felt the call early and never seems to have doubted it. He took his degree at Albion, his divinity training at Garrett, married Marilyn Voss of Grand Rapids in 1968, and came home to Newaygo in 1971 to a congregation he would not leave for forty years.

What a country pastor does is mostly invisible and mostly at inconvenient hours, and Arthur did it for four decades without a day off that anyone can recall. He sat with the dying at two in the morning. He talked more than one farmer down off the worst night of his life. He performed something like six hundred weddings and buried something like nine hundred people, and he could tell you, years later, which hymn each family had chosen and why. He baptized babies whose grandparents he had married. He kept no record of any of it, because to Arthur it was not a record, it was the town, and you do not keep records of your own people.

He was not solemn. He preached in his overcoat every January, because the furnace at Newaygo United Methodist had been dying with dignity since the Ford administration, and he worked the fact into roughly one sermon a month on the theory that shame was cheaper than a new boiler. He lost that argument for forty years. He would find it very funny, and entirely correct, that the family has finally asked for the furnace.

He retired from the pulpit in 2011 but not from the work, filling in wherever a church was between pastors and turning up at funerals as a mourner, only to leave as the man who had quietly taken the family aside. He is remembered for his handshake, for the way he waited at the graveside until the last car had somewhere to be, and for a faith that never once got loud because it never once needed to.

He is survived by his wife of fifty-eight years, Marilyn; their children, the Reverend Paul (Susan) McPhail of Kalamazoo, Ann (Todd) Bergsma of Newaygo, and Ruthie (Mark) Feenstra of Holland; nine grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and forty years of a county that will not quite know where to bring its griefs now.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Donald and Frances, and his brother, Robert.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you give to the furnace fund at Newaygo United Methodist Church — the one Arthur begged from the pulpit for forty years. He would laugh, and he would mean it.