On so many Sundays since they married two years ago, the second time around for each, George and Darla Barton went to church the same way. They carried their Bibles and their burdens, and their testimonies never left their throats.
Mrs. Barton had lived all her 42 years here, a crossroads of 8,800 people, and belonged to First Christian Church from the cradle. She knew that in Clinton, a girl grew up and got married and had children. After more than a decade in her first marriage, she knew all too well she had none.
Customers at the bank where she worked would ask, "How many kids you have?" When she answered, "I haven't been blessed that way," they would change the subject. A boy in the Sunday-school class she taught, whose parents were divorcing, once blurted to her, "God doesn't answer prayers." She reflexively replied, "He didn't answer mine."
Mr. Barton, 51, had found his way to her and Clinton by way of the online matchmaker eHarmony.com. He was a city guy who had lived in St. Louis and Tulsa, gone to a conservatory for alto saxophone and never stopped second-guessing himself for having dropped out. Instead of playing Paul Creston concertos as a profession, he was a hospital maintenance worker.
What Mr. Barton regretted most was the way he had neglected his ties to his three grown children in Tulsa. Since remarrying and moving to Clinton, he had occasionally called them, left messages and, when they were not answered, stopped trying. As the winter of 2009 wore on, he had not seen the children since Christmas 2007.
Then, six weeks ago, the pastor at First Christian Church, Doyle Kinney, gave out copies of a book called "One Month To Live" (WaterBrook Press, 2008) and solicited volunteers from the congregation to spend an hour every Wednesday night discussing it.
George and Darla Barton signed up and started to read. A dozen pages in, Mr. Barton came to a section about the "Someday syndrome," the way people put off the really important things. "This is your life, right here, right now," went one passage. "Wherever you're reading this page, feeling what you're feeling, facing what you're experiencing, Someday is right now."
Mr. Barton waited a week, feeling all unsettled, fearing rejection, and then he called the older of his two daughters.
Of that call, more can be said later. At this point, it is worth knowing the chain of events that brought the Bartons to this particular moment.
It began in the autumn of 2007 in an evangelical megachurch near Houston, the Fellowship of the Woodlands. The senior pastor there, Kerry Shook, ran into a friend and longtime congregant, Jimmy Dowden. Mr. Dowden said that his prostate cancer had spread and that doctors had given him about six months to live.
"We'll pray for you," Mr. Shook recently recalled having told Mr. Dowden.
"You don't need to pray for me," Mr. Dowden replied. "I need to pray for you and the congregation. I'm not distracted by life anymore. I know exactly what I need to do."
That exchange inspired Mr. Shook and his wife and colleague, Chris Shook, to write their book, "One Month To Live," by early 2008. It combined life lessons, practical advice, gentle theology, quotes from Mother Teresa, Helen Keller and a panoply of religious leaders — and an audacious, even morbid confrontation with mortality. The Shooks expected it to be useful mostly for the fellowship's 16,000 members.
"This is all about living," Mr. Shook, 46, said in a telephone interview. "In 20 years of ministry, Chris and I have walked many people through the last months of their lives, and we've never had anyone say, 'If only I'd had more possessions, if only I'd gone sky diving.' It always comes down to relationships. That's the priority all the time."
By the middle of 2008, the book had been picked up by two of the most important evangelical churches in the country, the Rev. Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Southern California and the Rev. Bill Hybels's Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago.
From those hubs, word spread to scores of other congregations, and Mr. and Mrs. Shook developed printed and Web-based materials, including items as diverse as discussion-group worksheets and advice on a healthy diet.
By now, 1,800 churches in 48 states have done or have firmly planned workshops and worship services oriented around the "One Month To Live" challenge — a genuine grass-roots phenomenon, not a marketing coup.
One of the ministers who picked up "One Month To Live" was Doyle Kinney. It happened to be the book he was reading on the day in May 2008 when he learned he had prostate cancer, and the day soon afterward when one of his daughters discovered she had breast cancer.
"I've always been naturally a religious person," Mr. Kinney, 62, said in an interview, "but this book really got me when it talked about having a no-regrets life. We all have a wish basket — someday I'll do this, someday I'll go there — but now you begin to say you can't wait for those things."
Which brings us back to George Barton and that phone call to his older daughter. She called back, and three weeks ago, he and Darla spent a day with her family in Tulsa, ordering in pizza, playing in the yard with two young grandchildren. The next day, the Bartons visited George's son, and they talked for three hours in a restaurant and another hour in the parking lot.
"So when are y'all coming back?" the son asked as they finally parted. A few days later, the daughter's husband called Darla to say he wanted to add her name to an online family tree.
"Something shifted," Mrs. Barton said the other day, thinking back. "I have my kids now. These are my husband's kids, my husband's grandkids. I truly feel like I have a family. And if the book did that ..." She caught herself. "I mean, God did that."
E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com
A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2009, on page A20 of the New York edition.