I called Elder Roehn a couple of days after my appointment with the president.
“Hi Elder Roehn. How are you? Elder Kretschmar talked to me the other day and asked if I would come and work with you. I was wondering if we could get together and talk about what you expect of me.”
“Yes, John, I think we can get together some time. This week I’m pretty busy, maybe next week sometime.”
“Okay, I’ll give you a call next Sunday.”
I hung up the phone laughing. Elder Roehn did not sound surprised by the news I was coming as his assistant. Neither did he sound eager to talk with me.
This was going to be interesting.
Sometime during the previous year, maybe as much as six months earlier, I have been asked by the Gardeners, principle English-speaking couple at the German Church, to help lead a Bible study at the church on Sabbath afternoons. Marilyn Gardner would cook a big pot of soup and invite English-speaking people who attended church in the morning to stay for lunch and a Bible study. I would finish preaching at Babylon, visit briefly in the lobby, then most Sabbaths race off for Manhattan, arriving about 2:00 p.m. for the Bible study.
Elder Roehn never attended. I never saw him.
The Sabbath after my conversation with the conference president, Karin and I drove into Manhattan as usual. Besides the four or five regulars, Kurt and Gertrude Paulien were there. Kurt was the head elder. Before getting into the Bible study, we visited a bit about my coming as Elder Roehn’s assistant. Kurt wanted me to take over preaching as soon as possible. What had been happening was Elder Roehn would preach three Sabbaths a month. Kurt would sit in the back and attempt simultaneous translation for the hand full of non-Germans present. And Dr. Gardner preached in English one a month. Kurt was eager to see the language of worship move from German to English and Herb not was a particularly compelling speaker even if German was your native language.
Kurt did have one complaint. Why, he wanted to know, when I had been at the church before, did I never attend board meetings? I was surprised by his complaint. No one had ever invited me to board meetings. I knew they happened once a month, but I had no idea I was welcome, much less expected to attend.
Marilyn Gardner, especially, was warm in her expression of happiness at the prospect of my coming to the church in a pastoral role. I began to dream about ministry in the city again. Much as I loved Long Island, it could never be more than comfortable. Dreaming of ministry in Manhattan was exciting.
I called Elder Roehn on Sunday. His week was really full, but finally he agreed for me to come by his house on Tuesday.
Herb and Eva lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in Queens. He welcomed me into the curtained living room. It was dark and immaculate. We talked.
“So how long have you been at the German Church?”
“I came in 1968. I’ve been here a long time. I’ve watched conference presidents come and go, and projects and campaigns. I’ve seen a lot, John. I don’t get very excited any more when the conference announces some new program that’s going to finish the work and save the city. I’ve been here too long for that.”
“Does Eva like it here?”
“Yes. We built this house, practically. You should have seen it when we bought it. It was a dump. So every year for about five years, I spent my two weeks of vacation working on the house. I completely gutted the upstairs all the way down to the bare studs. Pulled off all the old plaster and lath. Pulled out the old bathroom. Everything. After we finished the upstairs, we started on the downstairs. We like it now. It’s ours. We know the neighbors. I think we’ll stay right here after I retire.”
I asked about his daughters. One was doing well. The other had been a constant source of concern, in and out of relationships with wild guys. A grandchild.
He talked about the church. Described some of the work he had done on the physical plant and work that needed doing in the near future. At one point he complained about Elder Kretschmar sending me without properly introducing me. I brushed off his comment, and fortunately he didn’t pursue it..
The neighborhood around the church had changed during the seventeen years he had been pastor there. When he first arrived, he said, the stores along 86th Street were mostly German. You heard German spoken on the street. But not now. You were more likely to hear Spanish than German.
The longer we visited, the more comfortable he became. He didn’t mind talking. I practiced listening. A couple of hours later I left and drove into the city.
Driving into the city never failed to thrill me. It didn’t matter which route I took, but the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge was the best. You got onto the bridge through a cobweb of steel that carried the train overhead. The bridge carried you high above the East River, giving you views of the skyline before dropping you onto the congested streets of Manhattan.
I drove up to the church, found a parking place a couple of blocks from the church, parked and walked the neighborhood. It did not have the earthy vitality of Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side. It didn’t have the glitz of Times Square or Rockafeller Center. But it was Manhattan. The sidewalks were full of people. Nanny’s pushing baby carriages. Seventy-year-old women made up with the care of a twenty-year old headed to a dance. Men in suits, walking with brisk determination. Everywhere the streets were constricted with the double-parked service vans of plumbers, carpenters, delivery men, electricians, elevator repairmen and dry cleaners. Yellow taxis threaded their way through and blared their horns. It felt like home.
I walked the couple of blocks west from the church to Central Park. The trees were fresh with the new leaves of summer. People were everywhere. Joggers filled the path around the reservoir. Ten blocks north I left the park at 96th Street. Ninety-sixth street on the east side was one of the most jarring boundaries in New York. South of 96th was my neighborhood, York Town, the Upper East Side, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York. Little, old white women walked the sidewalks, dressed and made up or pulling little grocery carts. The only people of color were maids and nannies and uniformed doormen. North of 96th was Harlem. There were no fences separating the two neighborhoods, no physical barriers, but the might as well have been the an international boundary. The contrast between north of 96th and south of 96th was easily as stark as the difference between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez or San Diego and Tijuana. I couldn’t help wondering if Jesus would have preferred working north of the border.
My first Sabbath morning in New York three weeks later, the congregation looked pretty much the same as it had five years earlier. About forty people in a building that could seat 400. Eighty percent of them Germans over sixty-five. There were a couple of younger Germans. A Romanian woman and her three children who lived in the tiny apartment at the back of the church. She served as sexton. The Gardeners. John Benedetto.
Emily was there, parked in a chair by the front door after church, waiting for the Pauliens to fetch their car to take her home. She was as ebullient as ever, loudly greeting everyone. And Edith. A retired fashion designer. Elegant and gracious.
Coming out of seminary, my opinions about how to achieve optimal church function were sharply defined. I had read the books and fed off the zeal of other dreamers. I was going to be God’s spokesman, God’s designated leader, moving people toward high ideals. I had mastered the entire complex of Adventist theology, both the formal statements of belief and the vast library of traditional prophetic scenarios, biblical interpretation, behavioral and liturgical mores. I was eager to teach my version of classic Adventism. I knew what to do and what to say to revolutionize the life of the church.
But it didn’t take long in Babylon to reduce me to a student again, learning from people without titles. The saints in Babylon never challenged my theological ideas, they simply modeled effective Christian spirituality in the context of their prosaic suburban lives (though, of course, they never used the word,“spirituality”). They weren’t perfect Adventists. Rachel hardly ever attended church. Sam drank coffee. The Jeffersons went to movies. Mabel ate meat. Hans’ temper made life difficult for his wife. Wilson was having anonymous sex with men at a rest area on the Long Island Expressway. Mr. Smith was blatantly racist. The fat couple with the bulldog were eating themselves to death. But the sum of their life together was greater than their individual characters. Together they had created a generous, gentle community that was largely color-blind, hopeful, forgiving, gracious. Their lives together reduced many traditional theological certainties to merely curious addenda to the truth of community.
Now I was in Manhattan, a place where preaching would be the big deal. New York preachers had influenced the world–Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Dave Wilkerson. Finally, I was going to be a preacher. My words were going to matter.
Delusions of grandeur die hard.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Chapter 49 Called out of Babylon
When I was first asked to pastor on Long Island, I was disappointed. I felt called to the city. I had no interest in pastoring in the suburbs. But Long Island was beginning to feel like home. My dad had given Karin and me money for a down payment on a house and we were house hunting. The prices still seemed completely out of reach, but it was exciting to look, especially in the neighborhood south of the church near the water.
With the school closed I was no longer at war with the Robinsons. Mabel had been largely neutralized. Trevor took care of the Huntington Church. I was in love with my daughter. Things were good with Karin. I deeply appreciated the relationships we had built with the Babylon church members. Life was sweet.
The one disturbance was a nagging suspicion Elder Kretschmar was going to ask me to move to Manhattan after Herbert Roehn retired or perhaps he would ask me to pastor the Greenwich Village Church. This had been my dream when I came to New York from seminary. But now I wondered why I should uproot and start all over somewhere else.
The canal lined with boats just a couple of blocks from the church was magic, especially on sunny afternoons. I loved the clack-clack of halyards on the aluminum masts, the raucous call of gulls and the smell of seaweed, fish and salt water. I could settle down and live here for a very long time. But there was a nagging sense in the back of my mind that I was being called to Manhattan.
I went back and forth in my mind for weeks, then months. Finally, one Thursday night as I was praying, I said to God, “All right, I give up. If you want me to go to Manhattan, I’ll go.”
About nine the next morning, I answered the phone.
“Hello, John McLarty speaking.”
“Hi John. This is Lydia at the conference office. Can you hold for Elder Kretschmar?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, John, how's it going? How’s Karin and your daughter?”
“They’re great. Thanks.”
“Say John, do you think you could come in to see me sometime next week?”
“Sure. When’s best for you?”
“What about Monday, say 10:00?”
“No problem. I’ll be there.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you then.”
I hung up laughing. Okay. So I was going to Manhattan. I talked to Karin that night. “Well, I think we’re going to Manhattan.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Elder Kretschmar called today. He wants to see me on Monday.
“Did he tell you what he wanted to talk to you about pastoring in Manhattan?”
“No.”
“Then how can you be so sure that’s what he wants to see you about?”
“I just am.”
“Whatever.”
Monday, I was at Elder Kretschmar’s office. His secretary informed him on her intercom I was there. A minute later, he opened his door and greeted me with his usual big smile. “Come on in John. How are you?
“Here, have a seat. Tell me how are things going in Huntington?”
“Trevor’s doing fine. He seems to understand the people and manages them well. I don’t hear any complaints. I think their attendance is picking up a bit.”
“Terrific. And how is Babylon?”
“We’re having a lot of fun in Babylon. Our attendance is pushing a hundred. Our tithe is up. Some men who had been very much on the edge of the church for years are getting more involved. Mabel has about given up trying to run things. I’d say it’s going to pretty good.”
“That’s great to hear. Listen, John, I have a big request. You don’t have to say yes. But I need some help. I want you to go to the German Church in Manhattan. But it’s complicated.
“I think you know that Herb Roehn is planning to retire at the end of the year. I’ve met with the board there and asked them to hang on till he retires, then we’ll get them a new pastor. But they have insisted I put someone in there now or they will all scatter to find other churches. Most of them don’t live near the church, so it would be natural for them to find churches closer to where they live. But I don’t want to lose this church. I could just let it become a West Indian church, but I’d like to save that congregation for the Anglos in the city.
“So I have to find someone who can step into that church now and work with Herb until he retires and then take over the church. That’s what I’m hoping you will do.
“I know that Herb is hard to get along with. He’s crotchety. His members don’t like him. But if I don’t find someone to go in there and work with him now, come January, we won’t have a church there. If you’ll do this I’ll back you up. If he gives you too hard a time, you can just call me and I’ll come and talk to him. You don’t have to do this, but I would really appreciate it if you would. I can’t think of anyone else who could do it. Could you pray about it and see if this is something you could take on?”
“I don’t have to pray about,” I said. I’ve already prayed about it. In fact, I Thursday night when I was praying, I told God that if you called me to Manhattan, I would go. So, I don’t need any time to think or pray about it. However, I do have one condition. I’ll take this on, I ‘ll work with Elder Roehn, as long as you agree that you will not get involved unless I specifically ask you to do so. You won’t call Elder Roehn, you won’t visit the church or talk to the board members unless I ask you to.”
I could see the puzzlement on his face. He didn’t know what to say. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You know Herb is famous for his temper. Nobody can work with him. Part of the reason the church members insist that I send in his replacement now, while he’s still there, is they have such a hard time getting along with him. At least the head elder does.”
“Look, I’ll go. I’ll deal with Elder Roehn. But I have to have your agreement that you will stay out. You won’t talk to him or get involved unless I specifically ask you to.”
“Well, if that’s what you want, I guess I can do that.”
“Okay, when do you want me to start?”
“I’d like you to start next week. You could announce your move this Sabbath and then start the next week at the German Church.”
“I think that is too precipitous. We been at Babylon for four years. The people there are our friends. They deserve a bit more time for the transition. We need more time to say goodbye. What about the end of the month? That would give us four weeks to try to get things in order so we don’t leave too much unfinished business when we leave.”
“Okay. That’ll work.”
“I’ll tell the board at the German Church. They were interested in having you come because at least you were someone they knew.”
“All right, you talk to Kurt Paulien. But let me tell Elder Roehn. Okay?”
“If that’s what you want.”
We knelt on his prayer rug and he prayed for my new assignment.
With the school closed I was no longer at war with the Robinsons. Mabel had been largely neutralized. Trevor took care of the Huntington Church. I was in love with my daughter. Things were good with Karin. I deeply appreciated the relationships we had built with the Babylon church members. Life was sweet.
The one disturbance was a nagging suspicion Elder Kretschmar was going to ask me to move to Manhattan after Herbert Roehn retired or perhaps he would ask me to pastor the Greenwich Village Church. This had been my dream when I came to New York from seminary. But now I wondered why I should uproot and start all over somewhere else.
The canal lined with boats just a couple of blocks from the church was magic, especially on sunny afternoons. I loved the clack-clack of halyards on the aluminum masts, the raucous call of gulls and the smell of seaweed, fish and salt water. I could settle down and live here for a very long time. But there was a nagging sense in the back of my mind that I was being called to Manhattan.
I went back and forth in my mind for weeks, then months. Finally, one Thursday night as I was praying, I said to God, “All right, I give up. If you want me to go to Manhattan, I’ll go.”
About nine the next morning, I answered the phone.
“Hello, John McLarty speaking.”
“Hi John. This is Lydia at the conference office. Can you hold for Elder Kretschmar?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, John, how's it going? How’s Karin and your daughter?”
“They’re great. Thanks.”
“Say John, do you think you could come in to see me sometime next week?”
“Sure. When’s best for you?”
“What about Monday, say 10:00?”
“No problem. I’ll be there.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you then.”
I hung up laughing. Okay. So I was going to Manhattan. I talked to Karin that night. “Well, I think we’re going to Manhattan.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Elder Kretschmar called today. He wants to see me on Monday.
“Did he tell you what he wanted to talk to you about pastoring in Manhattan?”
“No.”
“Then how can you be so sure that’s what he wants to see you about?”
“I just am.”
“Whatever.”
Monday, I was at Elder Kretschmar’s office. His secretary informed him on her intercom I was there. A minute later, he opened his door and greeted me with his usual big smile. “Come on in John. How are you?
“Here, have a seat. Tell me how are things going in Huntington?”
“Trevor’s doing fine. He seems to understand the people and manages them well. I don’t hear any complaints. I think their attendance is picking up a bit.”
“Terrific. And how is Babylon?”
“We’re having a lot of fun in Babylon. Our attendance is pushing a hundred. Our tithe is up. Some men who had been very much on the edge of the church for years are getting more involved. Mabel has about given up trying to run things. I’d say it’s going to pretty good.”
“That’s great to hear. Listen, John, I have a big request. You don’t have to say yes. But I need some help. I want you to go to the German Church in Manhattan. But it’s complicated.
“I think you know that Herb Roehn is planning to retire at the end of the year. I’ve met with the board there and asked them to hang on till he retires, then we’ll get them a new pastor. But they have insisted I put someone in there now or they will all scatter to find other churches. Most of them don’t live near the church, so it would be natural for them to find churches closer to where they live. But I don’t want to lose this church. I could just let it become a West Indian church, but I’d like to save that congregation for the Anglos in the city.
“So I have to find someone who can step into that church now and work with Herb until he retires and then take over the church. That’s what I’m hoping you will do.
“I know that Herb is hard to get along with. He’s crotchety. His members don’t like him. But if I don’t find someone to go in there and work with him now, come January, we won’t have a church there. If you’ll do this I’ll back you up. If he gives you too hard a time, you can just call me and I’ll come and talk to him. You don’t have to do this, but I would really appreciate it if you would. I can’t think of anyone else who could do it. Could you pray about it and see if this is something you could take on?”
“I don’t have to pray about,” I said. I’ve already prayed about it. In fact, I Thursday night when I was praying, I told God that if you called me to Manhattan, I would go. So, I don’t need any time to think or pray about it. However, I do have one condition. I’ll take this on, I ‘ll work with Elder Roehn, as long as you agree that you will not get involved unless I specifically ask you to do so. You won’t call Elder Roehn, you won’t visit the church or talk to the board members unless I ask you to.”
I could see the puzzlement on his face. He didn’t know what to say. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You know Herb is famous for his temper. Nobody can work with him. Part of the reason the church members insist that I send in his replacement now, while he’s still there, is they have such a hard time getting along with him. At least the head elder does.”
“Look, I’ll go. I’ll deal with Elder Roehn. But I have to have your agreement that you will stay out. You won’t talk to him or get involved unless I specifically ask you to.”
“Well, if that’s what you want, I guess I can do that.”
“Okay, when do you want me to start?”
“I’d like you to start next week. You could announce your move this Sabbath and then start the next week at the German Church.”
“I think that is too precipitous. We been at Babylon for four years. The people there are our friends. They deserve a bit more time for the transition. We need more time to say goodbye. What about the end of the month? That would give us four weeks to try to get things in order so we don’t leave too much unfinished business when we leave.”
“Okay. That’ll work.”
“I’ll tell the board at the German Church. They were interested in having you come because at least you were someone they knew.”
“All right, you talk to Kurt Paulien. But let me tell Elder Roehn. Okay?”
“If that’s what you want.”
We knelt on his prayer rug and he prayed for my new assignment.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Chapter 48. Ordination Exam
In spring of 1983 Elder Kretschmar called and invited Karin and me to meet with the ordination committee. I was excited–and troubled.
Ordained ministers are the guardians of the church, the guarantors of continuity, stability and orthodoxy. I had a hard time seeing myself in that role. I more often saw myself as an iconoclast, a reformer, a gadfly. How could I pledge unreserved allegiance to the church organization given what I thought about Ingathering*, the Davenport scandal*, the sometimes irrational emphasis on evangelism as the only reason for the church's existence, the institutional racism, the culture of moral and administrative incompetence? I loved the church. It was my family. I found its theology a wonderful resource for thinking. But could I really devote my entire adult life to promoting the institutional church? Was accepting ordination hypocritical? Did it suggest a kind of agreement that I could not, in good conscience, give?
I considered canceling my appointment with the ordination committee. Perhaps I could postpone the whole thing for a year. But what would be the point? I didn’t have any fewer questions now than I had the year before or the year before that. The questions never went away. And then there was the matter of my calling. I sometimes wondered if God existed. Atheism seemed a reasonable alternative to belief. But I could not shake the sense of call. It had hounded me for thirteen years. I had broken up with more than one girlfriend because of my call. I had not pursued a career in science because of the call. If God had called me, then making a deliberate choice to avoid ordination would be an affront to God. But how could it be right to accept a title under false pretenses?
After stewing over this for a week or two, I finally decided to appear before the committee and simply present myself as transparently as I could. If, with full knowledge of who I was, they still decided to ordain me, then I would accept it as God’s will. It would be a hopeful sign of openness in the church.
From what I had heard, with some guys the ordination committee merely went through the motions. They asked a few questions, received the answers they expected and moved on the next candidate. Other candidates told of intense grilling about everything from the guy’s theology to his marriage to his eating habits. Some candidates I knew were put on formal probation after their interviews and given a year to make improvements. The pastor who interviewed before me came out of the room smiling and relaxed. It was a good sign.
A few minutes after he left, Elder Kretschmar invited Karin and me into the committee room. There were seven on the committee. The president, vice-president and treasurer of the conference, several pastors–Israel Gonzalez, a sweet, gentle pastor I greatly admired; the pastor of the Old Westbury Church, John Smith, a Midwestern good old boy without a seminary education, James Murray, the flamboyant pastor of a large, rapidly-growing Jamaican church in the Bronx. Also present was Elder Kurt Schmidt, the ministerial director of the Atlantic Union (the denomination's administrative unit for the Northeastern USA).
“I believe you know everyone here.” Elder Kretschmar said to me, once we had taken our seats. “Have you met Elder Schmidt, our Union ministerial director?”
I nodded to Elder Schmidt. I didn’t know him personally. His body language made me wary.
“John,” Elder Kretschmar continued, “you have done good work in this conference over the past three years. We’ve appreciated your commitment and hard work. But the work of the gospel ministry is a high and exalted calling. Ordination is a formal recognition by the church that God has called you to serve his church by preaching the gospel and winning souls. It is our responsibility to make close inquiry of those we are considering for ordination. Thanks for being here. Let’s begin with prayer.”
After prayer the questioning began. Elder Kretschmar was first.
“John, tell us about your call to the ministry.”
I told them my story–my plans to be a doctor, the irresistible sense of calling to ministry, my final yielding to the call and subsequent certainty. They liked the story.
“John, many young ministers have been greatly unsettled by the controversies surrounding Dr. Ford. Do you have confidence in the doctrines of the Adventist Church?
“While I was in seminary and in the year or two immediately following graduation, a number of my friends left the church because they no longer believed the Adventist interpretation of the judgment and our teaching about 1844. When I talked with them, I realized that all of their reading, one hundred percent of it, was in literature that was critical of the church’s position. So naturally they were persuaded by the critics. I decided to go back and read what the founders of the church had written. I read books by James White and Loughborough and Andrews. When I looked at the Bible passages through their eyes, it made sense. I saw how they derived their views from the Bible. In addition, the Adventist concept of the Great Controversy–the idea that God is unwilling to “get on with eternity” until he has responded to every human question–I don’t see that kind of respect for human intellect in any other Christian theology. It helps me live with my own unanswered questions. And our rejection of eternal hellfire–wow, that is incredibly helpful in sharing Jesus with people who are not Christians.
“So do I have confidence in the doctrines of the Adventist Church? Yes.”
I could sense the social warmth in the room. These guys, except for the Union minister, were my friends. They knew me. They wanted to ordain me. They were going to do their due diligence. They were going to ask real questions, but they weren’t out to get me.
“What about the Spirit of Prophecy? Do you believe Ellen White was inspired by God?” This was from Elder Gonzalez.
“That’s an easy one. Sure. It seems to me in the Bible the dominant role of prophets is to rebuke people, to challenge the status quo, to unsettle people. Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Amos, Ezekiel–all were famous for their stern calls for repentance. Mrs. White certainly gave plenty of rebukes–both to individuals and to leaders. And we see the fruit of her work in our hospitals, schools, healthy life style and the world-wide distribution of the church. So yes, I believe she was inspired.”
Everyone around the circle was smiling and nodding as I talked. I continued. “But I do think we need to be careful about context and setting. Some of our members use Ellen White like a club to hit each other and visitors over the head. In Sabbath School class these folks quote Mrs. White instead of the Bible. I think we need to be careful about that.”
Elder Gonzalez agreed. “Yes, we are all aware of those challenges in our congregations. We do have a responsibility to help our members to use the Spirit of Prophecy in the right way, as the lesser light pointing to the greater light.”
The mood didn’t change. They continued nodding and smiling.
Then the minister from the Union took his turn. “John, I want to ask you about tithe. I have three questions for you: Do you believe it? Do you practice it? Do you teach it?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “Yes, definitely.” I paused a long moment, then added, “But if I were you I would ask more than that.”
He was visibly taken aback, but he didn’t hesitate more than a couple of seconds. “Okay, so I’m asking. What else do you have to tell us?”
“I know some pastors will not allow any one to hold a church office if that person does not contribute ten percent of their income to the church through the regular tithe fund. I have someone in my church who dedicates ten percent of his income to God, but he does not contribute all of it to the tithe fund. He uses some of it for various charitable purposes. I have told him this is against the policy of the church, but I cannot, in good faith, tell him that what he is doing is contrary to what the Bible teaches. He’s a leader in our church and I see no reason to press the issue beyond informing him of the voted policy of the denomination.”
I could see emotion rising in Elder Schmidt’s face. I had assaulted a sacred cow. “Our tithing system was established under divine guidance. It provides the financial support for our world-wide church. This tithe system enables us to maintain missionaries in over two hundred countries around the world even though we are a small church. If you weaken the tithe system, if you allow members to do what they think is best with their tithe dollars, it would cripple our ability to fulfill our divine commission to take the Third Angel’s Message to the whole world.”
“I understand your point.” I said. “But how can I show from the Bible that the only way to fulfill your obligations to God is to put a tenth of your income in a tithe envelope and give it at church? I know someone who is wealthy. He gives his tithe once a year. And he always gives it as tithe, but he doesn’t always give it through his own local church. Sometimes he sends it directly overseas to a mission field. Is that wrong?”
“Yes.” Elder Schmidt insisted. “The only right way to manage your tithe is to give it to the tithe fund through the local church where you are a member. Anything else is wrong.”
“But can you show me how to prove that from the Bible?
“The Bible in Malachi says that we are bring all the tithe into the store house. That means we should give our tithe through the local church.”
“Wait a minute. If we use that text as the rule, then every church member in the world should send their tithe to the General Conference. This text does not say ‘store houses.’ It mentions only one storehouse which was the temple in Jerusalem. We have four thousand congregations in North America and fifty conferences. They all accept tithe. So how can I use Malachi’s words about a single storehouse to prove anything to my church member?
“And what about Ellen White? She didn’t always give her tithe through the regular church process. When she thought the church was underfunding some particular ministry–especially her son’s ministry to Blacks in the South–she gave her tithe directly to him and didn’t make a secret of it.”
“What do you mean?” Elder Schmidt demanded. “Are you telling me Ellen White diverted tithe money? Where did you hear that?”
“Elder Schmidt, it’s common knowledge.” I answered. “I read her statements defending her practice in the Ellen White Research Room at the seminary. All of her 'irregular' gifts of tithe money that I remember reading about were to support either the work of her son Edson who was working among the Blacks in the South or to Black ministers in the South who were grossly underpaid.”
I could see Elder Schmidt was upset. He couldn't concede my point, but others in the room were nodding in acknowledgment of what I was saying. So contradicting my statement of historical fact might show his ignorance. If Ellen White had actually done what I said she had, it gave the question a twist he had never thought about. He was stuck. Elder Kretschmar came to the rescue:
“John, we can’t use Ellen White’s personal behavior as an example for us in every instance. She was prophet. She had special guidance from God. If all our members were to give their tithe wherever they felt like, how would we pay the salaries of the ministers? How would we support our schools?” (I smiled inwardly at Elder Kretschmar's defense of church policy. A year earlier he had helped me arrange for “special” receipting of $40,000 of tithe funds from a donor in another part of the country. If the money had been officially received as tithe, the conference would have been obligated to pass on thirty percent or more to higher levels of the church organization. Instead, through creative receipting, the entire $40,000 was kept locally and used to hire an assistant pastor for the Huntington Church.)
Elder Kretschmar talked a bit more about how important it was to protect the church's official teachings regarding tithe. Then, he gently moved us away from the explosive issues tithe policy to the safer ground of tithe income. “We can’t settle here whether you have to remove someone from office in your local church because they don’t give all their tithe through the tithe fund. That’s an issue you will have to decide in consultation with your congregation. I do think it is important that ministers bear a strong testimony in support of what the church teaches about returning God’s tithe. We can’t have every member thinking they have the same prerogatives as a prophet. We need to teach our members to return their tithe to God's storehouse through their local church. By the way, John, I’ve noticed tithe giving in your church has increased quite a bit during the years you’ve been there, so obviously you support the teaching of the church.
“Elder Murray, do you have a question?”
“John, I want to know whether you support church standards. In today’s world there is so much permissiveness, so much laxity and carelessness in the things of God. Our young people, especially in the city, need clear, firm guidance. So brother, as you prepare for the sacred rite of ordination, tell us, do you support church standards?”
“I would if I knew what they were.” I felt bad saying this. James was tossing me an easy pitch. His entire demeanor was an invitation to answer yes and we would move on. “Church standards” was Adventist code for the detailed behavioral rules of our community. They could see my wife wore no make up and that neither of us wore a wedding ring. I was somewhat notorious for publicly advocating the special health rules of Adventism–I was a vegetarian and a runner. I didn’t go to movies or dance. We didn’t go out to eat on Sabbath. I believed in “church standards” and advocated them. I could have answered with a simple, yes. It would have been true and in keeping with the spirit of the questioner, but I had vowed to be totally transparent. Hence my comment.
“What do you mean, ‘you would support church standards if you knew what they were?’” James asked.
“Just two months ago,” I said, “we elected a new youth leader for our church. All the kids like her, but she wears a lot of make up and huge earrings and flashy necklaces. So I went to see her. I told her I wasn’t there to try and convince her that wearing jewelry was wrong. However, it was important for people in leadership to uphold the standards of the church. I could see Patricia wasn’t overly impressed with my words so I pulled out a copy of our 27 Fundamental Beliefs and showed her section 21. She took it from me and read it, then looked up and said, 'It doesn’t say anything here about jewelry.’
“I didn't believe her, of course. So I took the paper back and read for myself. And reread it. She was right! It doesn’t say a word about jewelry. Not one word. Talk about feeling stupid! Here I am, a minister, and I don’t know what our own official doctrines say. Adventists don’t wear jewelry. I’ve been told since I was old enough to understand English. But the Fundamental Beliefs of our church does say anything about it. Not one word.”
The place erupted. They were interrupting each other as they contradicted me. “Now, John, that can’t possibly be true. Of course, it’s there.” That was Elder Kretschmar. The others were equally adamant that our official statement of beliefs required Christians to avoid drawing attention to themselves by wearing jewelry and ostentatious make up.
“I’ve been a minister for thirty-five years.” The Union ministerial guy said. “I know what we believe. And we believe that wearing jewelry is contrary to God’s ideal for his people.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe in modesty and humility in dress.” I said. “I don’t wear jewelry. My wife doesn’t wear jewelry. We don't even wear wedding rings. But I’m telling you, the Statement of Beliefs does not mention jewelry. It’s not there. And it doesn’t mention movies either.
“Some of my leaders regularly go to the movies. You all 'know' they are not supposed to. I 'know’ they’re not supposed to. But the Statement of Beliefs does not back me up.”
“John, I think you need to go back and reread the Statement of Beliefs.” This was Elder Kretschmar again. “We all know what our church believes when it comes to standards. Seventh-day Adventists don’t believe in wearing jewelry and going to movies. That’s what we teach our young people. It’s what we expect of our mature members.”
“I’m not arguing about what we believe,” I said. “I’m arguing about what our official statement of beliefs says we believe. If I’m going to 'support’ church standards, I can’t expect people to just accept what I say. I have to be able to show them what the church has voted. I need to be able to show them something official. Obviously the Bible doesn’t say, 'Thou shalt not go to movies.’ Or 'Thou shalt not wear earrings.’
“It must be there.” Elder Gonzalez’ voice was the first gentle entry into the debate. “John, I think you’re not remembering correctly. Surely our church included these standards in our Statement of Beliefs. I don’t see how these things could be missing from the 27.”
“I thought the same thing, Elder Gonzalez. I was positive they were there. But they aren’t. Neither jewelry nor movies are mentioned.” I started to get up from my chair. “If you’ll wait just a minute, I’ll run out to my car and get a copy of the 27 from my briefcase in the car.”
Elder Kretschmar stopped me. “Sit down, John. We don’t need to read the Statement of Beliefs. We know that you and Karin order your lives according to traditional standards of the church. And I’m sure you will find a way to teach your members to practice modesty in their dress and carefulness in their entertainment.
“Karin, let me ask you a question. How do you feel about being a minister’s wife? It can be most rewarding. It can also be challenging. Tell us how you see your role in the ministry.”
“John is the one called to the ministry, not me. But he is my husband and I support him in the work God has called him to. I help out where I can. In the Babylon Church I work in the children’s Sabbath School and I’m part of a women’s Bible Study group. Sometimes I play the organ. I do whatever I can to be helpful.”
“How do you handle it when church members have a conflict with your husband?”
I figure that’s John’s department. There’s been obviously been some conflict, especially in Babylon. But I don’t cause the conflict, and I can’t resolve it. I figure the best thing for me to do is leave John to address those issues.”
Before Elder Kretschmar could think of another question for Karin, Elder Smith spoke up. “John, in every organization you have to have a boss. You have to have someone who has the responsibility for overall direction of the work. And we need to respect that leadership role. Part of respecting that leadership is taking advice and counsel. I want to know if you’ll take counsel.”
[Note to reader: “Take counsel” was a technical term in Adventist clergy circles. It was the label for proper deference to the church hierarchy as a system and to all the persons above you in that hierarchy.]
“That’s a good question. But I don’t know how to answer it. I’m pretty hardheaded. . . . As I think most of you know.” Most of them laughed.
“Maybe I should clarify just a bit,” Elder Smith said. “I’m not talking about moral issues. I recognize there are times when you’ve got to take a stand, when it’s a matter of right and wrong. When it’s a moral issue, you’ve got to follow your conscience no matter what anyone says. But I’m talking about when the president gives you counsel about some course of action that does not involve a moral issue, when it’s a matter of judgment. Will you take counsel in that kind of situation?”
I didn’t answer immediately. What should I say? The right answer was obvious. I could feel Elder Smith setting me up for the right answer. It was another friendly pitch. He was praying I would hit it out of the park. But would I really take counsel and advice? Sure, sometimes I would. No, most of the time I would. But it seemed to me that if I gave a simple yes to his question, I would be agreeing with the authoritarian model of church leadership that Elder Smith held. I knew I viewed church hierarchy in a radically different way. I did not share Elder Smith's deference toward authority. “I think I better stick with my first answer. I would certainly listen, but would I take counsel? I don’t know.”
There were a few more questions. We had gone way over time. There was another candidate waiting. Elder Kretschmar asked Elder Prestol to close with prayer. Karin and I left. She was appalled by some of my answers, but the words were out there. I had placed the dilemma of my fitness for ordination squarely in their hands, except for my questions about geochronology. They hadn’t asked about that.
The next day Elder Kretschmar called to tell me the committee had voted to ordain me. I learned later the sole dissenting vote had been Elder Schmidt, the Union minister.
*Ingathering was a fund-raising program in which members were expected to solicit donations from the public for disaster relief and other humanitarian activities by the church. Every congregation was assigned a fund-raising goal based on their membership. Over the years it had become the tail that wagged the dog. Ministers could find themselves out of a job if their congregations failed to raise the expected amounts. Unfortunately, the internal controls on the management of Ingathering funds were so loose the church could not (or would not) give any report on how the monies were spent.
*The Davenport scandal: An Adventist business man offered church administrators fantastically generous returns on their own personal investments in return for their steering church monies into his investment vehicles which turned out to be pyramid schemes.
Ordained ministers are the guardians of the church, the guarantors of continuity, stability and orthodoxy. I had a hard time seeing myself in that role. I more often saw myself as an iconoclast, a reformer, a gadfly. How could I pledge unreserved allegiance to the church organization given what I thought about Ingathering*, the Davenport scandal*, the sometimes irrational emphasis on evangelism as the only reason for the church's existence, the institutional racism, the culture of moral and administrative incompetence? I loved the church. It was my family. I found its theology a wonderful resource for thinking. But could I really devote my entire adult life to promoting the institutional church? Was accepting ordination hypocritical? Did it suggest a kind of agreement that I could not, in good conscience, give?
I considered canceling my appointment with the ordination committee. Perhaps I could postpone the whole thing for a year. But what would be the point? I didn’t have any fewer questions now than I had the year before or the year before that. The questions never went away. And then there was the matter of my calling. I sometimes wondered if God existed. Atheism seemed a reasonable alternative to belief. But I could not shake the sense of call. It had hounded me for thirteen years. I had broken up with more than one girlfriend because of my call. I had not pursued a career in science because of the call. If God had called me, then making a deliberate choice to avoid ordination would be an affront to God. But how could it be right to accept a title under false pretenses?
After stewing over this for a week or two, I finally decided to appear before the committee and simply present myself as transparently as I could. If, with full knowledge of who I was, they still decided to ordain me, then I would accept it as God’s will. It would be a hopeful sign of openness in the church.
From what I had heard, with some guys the ordination committee merely went through the motions. They asked a few questions, received the answers they expected and moved on the next candidate. Other candidates told of intense grilling about everything from the guy’s theology to his marriage to his eating habits. Some candidates I knew were put on formal probation after their interviews and given a year to make improvements. The pastor who interviewed before me came out of the room smiling and relaxed. It was a good sign.
A few minutes after he left, Elder Kretschmar invited Karin and me into the committee room. There were seven on the committee. The president, vice-president and treasurer of the conference, several pastors–Israel Gonzalez, a sweet, gentle pastor I greatly admired; the pastor of the Old Westbury Church, John Smith, a Midwestern good old boy without a seminary education, James Murray, the flamboyant pastor of a large, rapidly-growing Jamaican church in the Bronx. Also present was Elder Kurt Schmidt, the ministerial director of the Atlantic Union (the denomination's administrative unit for the Northeastern USA).
“I believe you know everyone here.” Elder Kretschmar said to me, once we had taken our seats. “Have you met Elder Schmidt, our Union ministerial director?”
I nodded to Elder Schmidt. I didn’t know him personally. His body language made me wary.
“John,” Elder Kretschmar continued, “you have done good work in this conference over the past three years. We’ve appreciated your commitment and hard work. But the work of the gospel ministry is a high and exalted calling. Ordination is a formal recognition by the church that God has called you to serve his church by preaching the gospel and winning souls. It is our responsibility to make close inquiry of those we are considering for ordination. Thanks for being here. Let’s begin with prayer.”
After prayer the questioning began. Elder Kretschmar was first.
“John, tell us about your call to the ministry.”
I told them my story–my plans to be a doctor, the irresistible sense of calling to ministry, my final yielding to the call and subsequent certainty. They liked the story.
“John, many young ministers have been greatly unsettled by the controversies surrounding Dr. Ford. Do you have confidence in the doctrines of the Adventist Church?
“While I was in seminary and in the year or two immediately following graduation, a number of my friends left the church because they no longer believed the Adventist interpretation of the judgment and our teaching about 1844. When I talked with them, I realized that all of their reading, one hundred percent of it, was in literature that was critical of the church’s position. So naturally they were persuaded by the critics. I decided to go back and read what the founders of the church had written. I read books by James White and Loughborough and Andrews. When I looked at the Bible passages through their eyes, it made sense. I saw how they derived their views from the Bible. In addition, the Adventist concept of the Great Controversy–the idea that God is unwilling to “get on with eternity” until he has responded to every human question–I don’t see that kind of respect for human intellect in any other Christian theology. It helps me live with my own unanswered questions. And our rejection of eternal hellfire–wow, that is incredibly helpful in sharing Jesus with people who are not Christians.
“So do I have confidence in the doctrines of the Adventist Church? Yes.”
I could sense the social warmth in the room. These guys, except for the Union minister, were my friends. They knew me. They wanted to ordain me. They were going to do their due diligence. They were going to ask real questions, but they weren’t out to get me.
“What about the Spirit of Prophecy? Do you believe Ellen White was inspired by God?” This was from Elder Gonzalez.
“That’s an easy one. Sure. It seems to me in the Bible the dominant role of prophets is to rebuke people, to challenge the status quo, to unsettle people. Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Amos, Ezekiel–all were famous for their stern calls for repentance. Mrs. White certainly gave plenty of rebukes–both to individuals and to leaders. And we see the fruit of her work in our hospitals, schools, healthy life style and the world-wide distribution of the church. So yes, I believe she was inspired.”
Everyone around the circle was smiling and nodding as I talked. I continued. “But I do think we need to be careful about context and setting. Some of our members use Ellen White like a club to hit each other and visitors over the head. In Sabbath School class these folks quote Mrs. White instead of the Bible. I think we need to be careful about that.”
Elder Gonzalez agreed. “Yes, we are all aware of those challenges in our congregations. We do have a responsibility to help our members to use the Spirit of Prophecy in the right way, as the lesser light pointing to the greater light.”
The mood didn’t change. They continued nodding and smiling.
Then the minister from the Union took his turn. “John, I want to ask you about tithe. I have three questions for you: Do you believe it? Do you practice it? Do you teach it?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “Yes, definitely.” I paused a long moment, then added, “But if I were you I would ask more than that.”
He was visibly taken aback, but he didn’t hesitate more than a couple of seconds. “Okay, so I’m asking. What else do you have to tell us?”
“I know some pastors will not allow any one to hold a church office if that person does not contribute ten percent of their income to the church through the regular tithe fund. I have someone in my church who dedicates ten percent of his income to God, but he does not contribute all of it to the tithe fund. He uses some of it for various charitable purposes. I have told him this is against the policy of the church, but I cannot, in good faith, tell him that what he is doing is contrary to what the Bible teaches. He’s a leader in our church and I see no reason to press the issue beyond informing him of the voted policy of the denomination.”
I could see emotion rising in Elder Schmidt’s face. I had assaulted a sacred cow. “Our tithing system was established under divine guidance. It provides the financial support for our world-wide church. This tithe system enables us to maintain missionaries in over two hundred countries around the world even though we are a small church. If you weaken the tithe system, if you allow members to do what they think is best with their tithe dollars, it would cripple our ability to fulfill our divine commission to take the Third Angel’s Message to the whole world.”
“I understand your point.” I said. “But how can I show from the Bible that the only way to fulfill your obligations to God is to put a tenth of your income in a tithe envelope and give it at church? I know someone who is wealthy. He gives his tithe once a year. And he always gives it as tithe, but he doesn’t always give it through his own local church. Sometimes he sends it directly overseas to a mission field. Is that wrong?”
“Yes.” Elder Schmidt insisted. “The only right way to manage your tithe is to give it to the tithe fund through the local church where you are a member. Anything else is wrong.”
“But can you show me how to prove that from the Bible?
“The Bible in Malachi says that we are bring all the tithe into the store house. That means we should give our tithe through the local church.”
“Wait a minute. If we use that text as the rule, then every church member in the world should send their tithe to the General Conference. This text does not say ‘store houses.’ It mentions only one storehouse which was the temple in Jerusalem. We have four thousand congregations in North America and fifty conferences. They all accept tithe. So how can I use Malachi’s words about a single storehouse to prove anything to my church member?
“And what about Ellen White? She didn’t always give her tithe through the regular church process. When she thought the church was underfunding some particular ministry–especially her son’s ministry to Blacks in the South–she gave her tithe directly to him and didn’t make a secret of it.”
“What do you mean?” Elder Schmidt demanded. “Are you telling me Ellen White diverted tithe money? Where did you hear that?”
“Elder Schmidt, it’s common knowledge.” I answered. “I read her statements defending her practice in the Ellen White Research Room at the seminary. All of her 'irregular' gifts of tithe money that I remember reading about were to support either the work of her son Edson who was working among the Blacks in the South or to Black ministers in the South who were grossly underpaid.”
I could see Elder Schmidt was upset. He couldn't concede my point, but others in the room were nodding in acknowledgment of what I was saying. So contradicting my statement of historical fact might show his ignorance. If Ellen White had actually done what I said she had, it gave the question a twist he had never thought about. He was stuck. Elder Kretschmar came to the rescue:
“John, we can’t use Ellen White’s personal behavior as an example for us in every instance. She was prophet. She had special guidance from God. If all our members were to give their tithe wherever they felt like, how would we pay the salaries of the ministers? How would we support our schools?” (I smiled inwardly at Elder Kretschmar's defense of church policy. A year earlier he had helped me arrange for “special” receipting of $40,000 of tithe funds from a donor in another part of the country. If the money had been officially received as tithe, the conference would have been obligated to pass on thirty percent or more to higher levels of the church organization. Instead, through creative receipting, the entire $40,000 was kept locally and used to hire an assistant pastor for the Huntington Church.)
Elder Kretschmar talked a bit more about how important it was to protect the church's official teachings regarding tithe. Then, he gently moved us away from the explosive issues tithe policy to the safer ground of tithe income. “We can’t settle here whether you have to remove someone from office in your local church because they don’t give all their tithe through the tithe fund. That’s an issue you will have to decide in consultation with your congregation. I do think it is important that ministers bear a strong testimony in support of what the church teaches about returning God’s tithe. We can’t have every member thinking they have the same prerogatives as a prophet. We need to teach our members to return their tithe to God's storehouse through their local church. By the way, John, I’ve noticed tithe giving in your church has increased quite a bit during the years you’ve been there, so obviously you support the teaching of the church.
“Elder Murray, do you have a question?”
“John, I want to know whether you support church standards. In today’s world there is so much permissiveness, so much laxity and carelessness in the things of God. Our young people, especially in the city, need clear, firm guidance. So brother, as you prepare for the sacred rite of ordination, tell us, do you support church standards?”
“I would if I knew what they were.” I felt bad saying this. James was tossing me an easy pitch. His entire demeanor was an invitation to answer yes and we would move on. “Church standards” was Adventist code for the detailed behavioral rules of our community. They could see my wife wore no make up and that neither of us wore a wedding ring. I was somewhat notorious for publicly advocating the special health rules of Adventism–I was a vegetarian and a runner. I didn’t go to movies or dance. We didn’t go out to eat on Sabbath. I believed in “church standards” and advocated them. I could have answered with a simple, yes. It would have been true and in keeping with the spirit of the questioner, but I had vowed to be totally transparent. Hence my comment.
“What do you mean, ‘you would support church standards if you knew what they were?’” James asked.
“Just two months ago,” I said, “we elected a new youth leader for our church. All the kids like her, but she wears a lot of make up and huge earrings and flashy necklaces. So I went to see her. I told her I wasn’t there to try and convince her that wearing jewelry was wrong. However, it was important for people in leadership to uphold the standards of the church. I could see Patricia wasn’t overly impressed with my words so I pulled out a copy of our 27 Fundamental Beliefs and showed her section 21. She took it from me and read it, then looked up and said, 'It doesn’t say anything here about jewelry.’
“I didn't believe her, of course. So I took the paper back and read for myself. And reread it. She was right! It doesn’t say a word about jewelry. Not one word. Talk about feeling stupid! Here I am, a minister, and I don’t know what our own official doctrines say. Adventists don’t wear jewelry. I’ve been told since I was old enough to understand English. But the Fundamental Beliefs of our church does say anything about it. Not one word.”
The place erupted. They were interrupting each other as they contradicted me. “Now, John, that can’t possibly be true. Of course, it’s there.” That was Elder Kretschmar. The others were equally adamant that our official statement of beliefs required Christians to avoid drawing attention to themselves by wearing jewelry and ostentatious make up.
“I’ve been a minister for thirty-five years.” The Union ministerial guy said. “I know what we believe. And we believe that wearing jewelry is contrary to God’s ideal for his people.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe in modesty and humility in dress.” I said. “I don’t wear jewelry. My wife doesn’t wear jewelry. We don't even wear wedding rings. But I’m telling you, the Statement of Beliefs does not mention jewelry. It’s not there. And it doesn’t mention movies either.
“Some of my leaders regularly go to the movies. You all 'know' they are not supposed to. I 'know’ they’re not supposed to. But the Statement of Beliefs does not back me up.”
“John, I think you need to go back and reread the Statement of Beliefs.” This was Elder Kretschmar again. “We all know what our church believes when it comes to standards. Seventh-day Adventists don’t believe in wearing jewelry and going to movies. That’s what we teach our young people. It’s what we expect of our mature members.”
“I’m not arguing about what we believe,” I said. “I’m arguing about what our official statement of beliefs says we believe. If I’m going to 'support’ church standards, I can’t expect people to just accept what I say. I have to be able to show them what the church has voted. I need to be able to show them something official. Obviously the Bible doesn’t say, 'Thou shalt not go to movies.’ Or 'Thou shalt not wear earrings.’
“It must be there.” Elder Gonzalez’ voice was the first gentle entry into the debate. “John, I think you’re not remembering correctly. Surely our church included these standards in our Statement of Beliefs. I don’t see how these things could be missing from the 27.”
“I thought the same thing, Elder Gonzalez. I was positive they were there. But they aren’t. Neither jewelry nor movies are mentioned.” I started to get up from my chair. “If you’ll wait just a minute, I’ll run out to my car and get a copy of the 27 from my briefcase in the car.”
Elder Kretschmar stopped me. “Sit down, John. We don’t need to read the Statement of Beliefs. We know that you and Karin order your lives according to traditional standards of the church. And I’m sure you will find a way to teach your members to practice modesty in their dress and carefulness in their entertainment.
“Karin, let me ask you a question. How do you feel about being a minister’s wife? It can be most rewarding. It can also be challenging. Tell us how you see your role in the ministry.”
“John is the one called to the ministry, not me. But he is my husband and I support him in the work God has called him to. I help out where I can. In the Babylon Church I work in the children’s Sabbath School and I’m part of a women’s Bible Study group. Sometimes I play the organ. I do whatever I can to be helpful.”
“How do you handle it when church members have a conflict with your husband?”
I figure that’s John’s department. There’s been obviously been some conflict, especially in Babylon. But I don’t cause the conflict, and I can’t resolve it. I figure the best thing for me to do is leave John to address those issues.”
Before Elder Kretschmar could think of another question for Karin, Elder Smith spoke up. “John, in every organization you have to have a boss. You have to have someone who has the responsibility for overall direction of the work. And we need to respect that leadership role. Part of respecting that leadership is taking advice and counsel. I want to know if you’ll take counsel.”
[Note to reader: “Take counsel” was a technical term in Adventist clergy circles. It was the label for proper deference to the church hierarchy as a system and to all the persons above you in that hierarchy.]
“That’s a good question. But I don’t know how to answer it. I’m pretty hardheaded. . . . As I think most of you know.” Most of them laughed.
“Maybe I should clarify just a bit,” Elder Smith said. “I’m not talking about moral issues. I recognize there are times when you’ve got to take a stand, when it’s a matter of right and wrong. When it’s a moral issue, you’ve got to follow your conscience no matter what anyone says. But I’m talking about when the president gives you counsel about some course of action that does not involve a moral issue, when it’s a matter of judgment. Will you take counsel in that kind of situation?”
I didn’t answer immediately. What should I say? The right answer was obvious. I could feel Elder Smith setting me up for the right answer. It was another friendly pitch. He was praying I would hit it out of the park. But would I really take counsel and advice? Sure, sometimes I would. No, most of the time I would. But it seemed to me that if I gave a simple yes to his question, I would be agreeing with the authoritarian model of church leadership that Elder Smith held. I knew I viewed church hierarchy in a radically different way. I did not share Elder Smith's deference toward authority. “I think I better stick with my first answer. I would certainly listen, but would I take counsel? I don’t know.”
There were a few more questions. We had gone way over time. There was another candidate waiting. Elder Kretschmar asked Elder Prestol to close with prayer. Karin and I left. She was appalled by some of my answers, but the words were out there. I had placed the dilemma of my fitness for ordination squarely in their hands, except for my questions about geochronology. They hadn’t asked about that.
The next day Elder Kretschmar called to tell me the committee had voted to ordain me. I learned later the sole dissenting vote had been Elder Schmidt, the Union minister.
*Ingathering was a fund-raising program in which members were expected to solicit donations from the public for disaster relief and other humanitarian activities by the church. Every congregation was assigned a fund-raising goal based on their membership. Over the years it had become the tail that wagged the dog. Ministers could find themselves out of a job if their congregations failed to raise the expected amounts. Unfortunately, the internal controls on the management of Ingathering funds were so loose the church could not (or would not) give any report on how the monies were spent.
*The Davenport scandal: An Adventist business man offered church administrators fantastically generous returns on their own personal investments in return for their steering church monies into his investment vehicles which turned out to be pyramid schemes.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Chapter 47 Wars in Babylon
Note: This is a memoir--life according to my fallible memory. This is my recollection, my point of view. I've done my best to tell the truth, but I'm sure these stories would sound very different if others told them.
It seemed to me the Hippocratic charge, “first to do no harm,” applied to pastors no less than than to physicians. But sometimes “doing no harm” appeared to be impossible. By virtue of my office as pastor I was required to make decisions between conflicting convictions and interests. Sometimes I could see no available path that did not offend or wound someone. I felt a desperate need for greater knowledge or better wisdom.
When I met with Elder Kretschmar to learn about my pastoral assignment, he cautioned me about the Babylon school—an eight-grade parochial school next door to the church. In the Adventist elementary school system, school payrolls are run by the conference. The sponsoring congregations reimburse the conference for a major portion of the payroll for their school. The Babylon Church had gotten so far behind on its obligations to the conference that the conference had voted to close the school. To avert this closure, Rollin, the former pastor, and, Ian , the principal, had proposed a novel plan: their wives would continue working as teachers at the school, but they would donate their salaries back to the conference to pay off the old debt. The congregation's only obligation then would be to keep current with on-going expenses.
Elder Kretschmar expressed admiration for the commitment to Christian education these two families demonstrated. But the whole arrangement was unconventional. I would need to keep my eye on things. Kretschmar didn’t say so explicitly, but it was clear he didn’t trust the plan or the players.
Rollin, the former Babylon Church pastor, lived in a conference-owned parsonage across the street from the church and school. He would remain there even though his pastoral assignment had changed. He offered to continue as chairman of the school board since I was new to the ministry and he was used to working with Ian and the school. I was happy for him to do so.
The principal, Ian Robinson, taught full time in a local public school, then came to the church school in the afternoons and evenings to handle the administrative tasks of the school, without any compensation. The time and energy he devoted to the school were incredible. Even when he was sick and on the verge of pneumonia for several weeks, still he was there every afternoon. This, on top of his wife's donation of her entire salary.
I was puzzled by the name of the school. Elder Kretschmar had referred to it as the Babylon School. But the school letterhead read Sound View Adventist School. The name would have made sense in Huntington which was adjacent to the Long Island Sound on the north side of Long Island. But Babylon was located on the south side of the island on the Great South Bay, not the Sound. Ian explained the name did not have a geographical meaning, rather it was a statement of philosophy. They had chosen the name to reflect the school's commitment to providing its students a sound education–a solid, trustworthy foundation for life.
At the first board meeting I attended–in February–we didn’t have a financial statement, but I didn’t think much of it. Rollin was an experienced pastor. He had been chairman for several years. If he wasn’t concerned, the lack of a financial statement was obviously not something to worry about. March and April board meetings we didn’t have financial statements either. I finally, asked Rollin about it. He acknowledged that this was a bit of problem. Ian had so much to do that he found it difficult to get the financial statements together. Rollin was working with him to try and get things taken care of.
In June, Elder Kretschmar called me. “John, I think we’ve come to the end. It was a great idea but it hasn’t worked. The Babylon School is $25,000 in the red. Naomi’s and Sue’s salary give back has helped a little bit, but the school is deeper in the hole now than it was last year. I think we should close it.”
I protested. What if I can get pledges to cover the debt? If we close the school, there’ll be no incentive to repay the debt. I’ll have no carrot. And you won’t have a stick.
“All right. See what you can do.”
I visited every home in both Babylon and Huntington Churches and asked for pledges to keep the school open. Some young adults pledged only ten dollars a month, but I added their pledges to my tally.
After I made my pitch in one home, the husband who seldom attended church said, “Pastor, listen. I wish I could run my business the way those people run that school. They just spend and spend and figure the money will come from somewhere. They have no idea of fiscal responsibility. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You get rid of the principal and I’ll pay the entire twenty-five thousand dollar debt. I’ll take care of the whole thing. You just get rid of that principal. And while you’re at it get rid of his wife, too.”
I was speechless. Ian and his wife were strong, in-your-face people. He came from a West Indian family. I thought she was also West Indian. (I was wrong. She came from a prominent African American family in Boston.) I didn’t like their style. I felt betrayed by Ian ’s failure to provide the board with regular financial statements. I knew the conference president would be happy to be rid of Ian .
But Mr. Smith's antipathy was so blatantly race-based (“those people” meant Black people) and his offer of money for their ouster was so crass, I knew I had to reject it. I felt trapped. I would have loved to work for Ian ’s ouster. But Mr. Smith had put me in a corner. If I cooperated in removing Ian as principal I could never live with my conscience.
I finished my canvass of every home in the two churches. I accumulated enough pledges that on paper at least, we should be debt-free by the end of the following school year, if enrollment and tuition payments held. The conference agreed to give us another year.
The following year, Rollin was gone as board chairman. I became chairman of the school board. In board meetings, Ian and I sparred constantly. I felt utterly outclassed by him. He was older. A good debater. His manner was professional. He had decades of experience in education. I often wished I could just get out of the way and let him do whatever he wanted to do. I felt desperately ill-prepared for the role I was cast in. I needed more knowledge, more experience, more wisdom. I had no idea where to turn for advice. The conference educational superintendent was useless. The conference president just wanted to be rid of Mr. Robinson, so I could hardly look to him for balanced advice. But while I wished I could abdicate, I felt a responsibility to the Babylon Church. The church was the final guarantor of the school’s finances. My first commitment was to the church not the school. I constantly fought to save money. Ian fought to enhance the quality of education offered by the school.
At one point late in the school year, I told the board, “I cannot work with Ian . Either he goes or I go.” Romelda Walker, an experienced administrator in the state mental health system, a West Indian with a pleasant manner but a firm hand, told me that was unacceptable. I had to get together with Ian and find a way to cooperate for the good of the school and the church. She said it carefully and respectfully. I didn’t like it, but she was obviously right. I tried spending some time with Ian in his office every week. We survived the school year, we didn’t become friends.
Mabel
The conference president had warned me of potential conflict with Ian Robinson, but he had said nothing to prepare me for Mabel. When I met her, I was impressed with her energy and zest. She obviously loved her church and was devoted to it. She had no use for my immediate predecessor, Rollin, but she talked of other pastors prior to him with affection. I was sure Mabel and I would get along great.
And we did for about a year. That first year, I did my best to listen and learn. This was my first parish. And while I had read a lot of books, and figured I was reasonably smart, I was at least occasionally aware of my inexperience. It helped that the saints of Babylon were gracious, good people. While the school was problematic nearly from the beginning, I was continually impressed with the sweetness and competence of the people at church. Marion the church clerk and her husband, Jim. Sue, the church treasurer. Sam, the head elder. Hans and Elzabeth Tauber. The Loughlins and Olivers. They did not need me to tell them how to run the church. They had been doing church together for decades, in some cases.
Mabel was the most outspoken at church board meetings. She had been there the longest. She knew how things had “always been done” and how they ought to be done. She was so pleased to have a new pastor, because the previous pastor had been completely unmanageable.
Toward the end of the first year, we began talking about remodeling the church. The stucco on the front of the church was cracked and water was coming through. The front steps of the church were disintegrating. The linoleum in the basement looked dreadful. I had read in books about the wars that can erupt when a church tries to choose carpet, so I suggested to the board that we ask Marion and Mabel to pick the carpet. Marion was the only person who appeared to get along with Mabel. Mabel would trust no one else’s opinion. And she had good taste.
On one level, the strategy worked. We ended up with new carpet without a fight. But on another level, it apparently failed. One reason I suggested having Mabel pick the carpet was to show her that while I might disagree with her, I still had high regard for her. As we moved into my second year and I began to offer my own opinions about directions for the church Mabel grew increasingly hostile.
She arrived at every board meeting breathing anger and frustration. We were not doing things the way they had always been done. I had to confront her over her ungracious behavior. One Sabbath, the head deacon left his fifteen year old son at church while he drove one of our elderly members home. The temperature was in the high thirties. It was raining. Mabel was in the church puttering around, putting things away when the deacon left. She finished before he returned. She wanted to go home (next door) and get her lunch. You can’t leave a teenager unattended in the church. You never know what they might do. So she put Jimmy outside on the back porch and locked up the church. When the deacon returned he found his thoroughly chilled, annoyed son shivering on the back porch.
I apologized to Jimmy. I ordered Mabel to never, ever do something like that again. She took offense.
Visitors sat in her accustomed seat in church. She came in after the church service started and asked them to move to a different pew. I took offense and lectured her on courtesy to guests. When I asked her if she thought she owned that pew, she answered, “Yes. My husband and I bought that pew. And no one else has a right to sit in it.”
Her “base of operation” was the “lay activities” table in the tiny lobby of the church. The “Lay Activities Department” used to be called “The Home Missionary Department.” Now it is called “Personal Ministries.” But whatever the name, its purpose has always been to encourage people to communicate their faith to people outside the church. And among Adventists a primary way of communicating our faith to outsiders has been literature. From her base in the lobby, Mabel would button hole members during various denominational campaigns seeking their commitment to sponsor magazine subscriptions for neighbors, friends, government leaders. These gift subscriptions would give the recipients an opportunity to become acquainted with “The Truth.”
Mabel was effective. Our church always did well in per capita participation in all of these denominational campaigns. But her table took up a quarter of the floor space in the tiny entry way. And her location in the lobby gave her the opportunity to annoy, offend and otherwise bother nearly everyone who came through the door. In addition, her title, Lay Activities Secretary, made her an ex officio board member. After the incident with Jimmy, I decided it was time for her to go. I had never heard someone cite general obnoxiousness as a cause for removing someone from church office. But it seemed to me that in an organization publicly devoted to Jesus, it was inappropriate to retain someone in leadership who was constantly wounding teenagers, friends and guests.
So when we convened our annual congregational nominating committee I proposed we remove Mabel. Her abrasive manner made Jesus and the church look bad to our kids. She offended guests. Her arrival at board meetings instantly transformed a pleasant, congenial atmosphere into a tense, silent dread. She never participated in Communion, the most venerated element of Christian worship.
I wanted us as a congregation to continue to welcome her as a member. I wanted us to show her care and respect. But, I argued, by retaining her in formal leadership, we were making the church an accessory to her discourtesy and aggression.
The women on the committee expressed concern. They could see my point, but they knew Mabel would be terribly hurt by this demotion. I countered that at some point leadership had to demonstrate more care for the “little people” than for themselves. The conversation lasted awhile. Committee members did not question my evaluation of Mabel’s behavior, but they could not bring themselves to remove her. They suggested I talk to her and tell her about our concerns. If she would agree to participate in Communion and practice greater courtesy and respect in her treatment of teenagers, guests and members, then we would continue her as the Lay Activities Secretary.
I talked with her. She agreed.
The next year, when the nominating committee met, I was ready. Mabel had not participated in Communion. She had not modified her unpleasant style of interacting with nearly everyone. And this year, there were new people on the nominating committee I was confident would support my decision. One on the new committee members was a math professor. A decade or so earlier, he had been deeply offended by a pastor in upstate New York. Tim’s wife had remained devout and devoted to the church, but he maintained a studied, careful distance. But over the past three years as our friendship developed, he had allowed himself to be drawn into church life. I was surprised and pleased when he accepted the invitation to serve on the nominating committee. Another man on the committee was Oliver, a business man, someone always open to change and new ideas.
At our second meeting we discussed Mabel. I made the same speech I had the year before about my concern for the youth in the church, about the value of a congenial atmosphere in board meetings where we dealt with church business. And I told the committee about the action of the previous committee insisting that Mabel agree to make changes if she was to remain in office. She had not made any change. It was time to act.
Again, the women voiced concern over what this would mean for Mabel. I countered with my concern about what inaction would say to our young people and how it would affect the life of the church. To my astonishment, Tim and Oliver entered the discussion on Mabel’s side. We were a congregation of mature people. Sure Mabel was rude, but we could handle it. We just considered the source. She wasn’t really doing all that much harm.
We talked awhile. My sense was that at least half the group would vote with me to remove Mabel from office. But I could tell that Tim and Oliver were not persuaded. And Marion was hesitant. She was the one woman in the church who had somehow found a way to get along with Mabel and I deeply respected her. I really thought we ought to remove Mabel from office. But I also thought such a drastic action should be taken only if we as a committee and ultimately the church were deeply united in taking it. That unity obviously did not exist in our committee so I withdrew my recommendation. We retained Mabel in office.
A month or two later, Tim talked to me about the meeting.
“John, when we discussed Mabel, I could see that if you pushed it, you could have gotten the committee to go along with you. Especially the women would not have voted against you, if you had insisted on a vote. You could have gotten your way. You could have gotten rid of Mabel.”
My first thought was, I sure missed that one! We could have had Mabel out of the way. But Tim wasn’t through.
“But you yielded to sense of the committee. You allowed the reservations and concerns of the committee to be fully expressed. You let us keep Mabel. I’ve never seen a pastor step back like that. Thanks.”
The next year, the committee voted unanimously to remove Mabel from office. The congregation supported the action without blinking. The literature table disappeared from the lobby. The entry of the church became a happy greeting space. Board meetings became pleasant. And Tim who had refused to every church office for more than ten years, agreed to serve as our new treasurer. It was safe to serve in a church where the pastor was not God.
One final note on Mabel: After I left the Babylon Church I was replaced by a man who had been serving as a faculty member at an Adventist high school and who lived in the same apartment building as Mabel. Mabel used to complain to him bitterly about me.
When he became pastor at first she was thrilled. But over the next few years she became as bitterly opposed to him as she had been to me. He would tell me “Mabel stories” when we met at clergy meetings.
At one clergy gathering he could hardly wait to get me into the hall so he could tell me the latest Mabel story. She had gotten very angry at him. No one, she said, had ever treated her as cruelly and disrespectfully in her whole life. Certainly no minister had ever been as mean and evil to her as he was.
Charlie couldn’t resist. He asked her, “What about McLarty?”
She had paused, thought for a minute, then said, “John? Why I never had any trouble with him.”
Ian Robinson, Continued.
The next year we elected Romelda as chairperson. She did a fine job, but our finances continued to slide. Part of the problem was that the Babylon Church was responsible for the entire subsidy of the school. All expenses above income from tuition were obligations of the church. But only ten percent of the students in the school came from the Babylon Church. Twenty-five percent came from the Huntington Church and almost fifty percent came from the Bay Shore Spanish Church. So an aging majority White congregation was paying well over half of its income to support a school for Blacks and Hispanics from other churches. With the exception of Mr. Smith, I did not hear much overt racial prejudice. In fact, I often wondered if I was more racist than the great majority of my congregation. I tried to subdue my own racial bias. But I knew it was there.
At one point a group of parents demanded to have a meeting with the school board. I agreed. The parents were not members of my church, but their students were in our school. The meeting rapidly degenerated into a bitter protest against me and the Babylon Church for not doing more to support the school. I did not defend myself. I listened. Responded where I thought it might be helpful and survived the night.
On one hand I felt unfairly judged. I was the one who had visited every home in my two churches soliciting pledges to keep the school open. I had strongly supported the massive fund raising program in the Huntington Church which sold Indian River citrus during the winter months to raise money for tuition support for students who attended Sound View. The Babylon Church put between sixty and seventy percent of its budget into school. Didn’t all of that count for something?
On the other hand, I wondered, would I have done more if these students had come from White homes? I was never sure I had transcended my own racial bias.
The following summer, the conference closed the school. The closure gave a huge financial relief to the church. It ended the war between the Robinsons and me, between the school and the church board. It made Mr. Smith glad–the Robinsons were gone and he didn’t have to pay. But I have wondered for twenty-five years if the school could have succeeded. Did I do everything I could have? Did I treat Ian fairly?
During the height of my conflict with Ian, his wife went into the hospital for surgery. I wondered whether I should go see her. I didn’t really want to and I figured showing up and acting “pastoral” would have been seen by them as the height of hypocrisy, given the intensity of our conflict. I was sure that if the roles were reversed and I was in the hospital, I would not want her or Ian to visit me, no matter what title they had. But after Sue was back teaching, she protested my failure to visit. Why did I stay away? Didn’t I regard her as a member of my church?
Part of me was tempted to dismiss her complaint as just clever rhetoric, a way to get in a dig at me. But I didn’t hear that in her voice. If I understood correctly, she was saying there was something about the role of pastor that was independent of my personal character or competence. When she was in the hospital she wanted the attention of her pastor. At that point, it did not matter that I was in constant conflict with her husband and had a testy relationship with her. I was still the pastor. No matter who I was as an individual, I still represented her community of faith. My presence had a unique capacity to make the church present in her life in that crisis. My absence was not merely personal. It meant her church had failed to keep her company in her distress.
It seemed to me the Hippocratic charge, “first to do no harm,” applied to pastors no less than than to physicians. But sometimes “doing no harm” appeared to be impossible. By virtue of my office as pastor I was required to make decisions between conflicting convictions and interests. Sometimes I could see no available path that did not offend or wound someone. I felt a desperate need for greater knowledge or better wisdom.
When I met with Elder Kretschmar to learn about my pastoral assignment, he cautioned me about the Babylon school—an eight-grade parochial school next door to the church. In the Adventist elementary school system, school payrolls are run by the conference. The sponsoring congregations reimburse the conference for a major portion of the payroll for their school. The Babylon Church had gotten so far behind on its obligations to the conference that the conference had voted to close the school. To avert this closure, Rollin, the former pastor, and, Ian , the principal, had proposed a novel plan: their wives would continue working as teachers at the school, but they would donate their salaries back to the conference to pay off the old debt. The congregation's only obligation then would be to keep current with on-going expenses.
Elder Kretschmar expressed admiration for the commitment to Christian education these two families demonstrated. But the whole arrangement was unconventional. I would need to keep my eye on things. Kretschmar didn’t say so explicitly, but it was clear he didn’t trust the plan or the players.
Rollin, the former Babylon Church pastor, lived in a conference-owned parsonage across the street from the church and school. He would remain there even though his pastoral assignment had changed. He offered to continue as chairman of the school board since I was new to the ministry and he was used to working with Ian and the school. I was happy for him to do so.
The principal, Ian Robinson, taught full time in a local public school, then came to the church school in the afternoons and evenings to handle the administrative tasks of the school, without any compensation. The time and energy he devoted to the school were incredible. Even when he was sick and on the verge of pneumonia for several weeks, still he was there every afternoon. This, on top of his wife's donation of her entire salary.
I was puzzled by the name of the school. Elder Kretschmar had referred to it as the Babylon School. But the school letterhead read Sound View Adventist School. The name would have made sense in Huntington which was adjacent to the Long Island Sound on the north side of Long Island. But Babylon was located on the south side of the island on the Great South Bay, not the Sound. Ian explained the name did not have a geographical meaning, rather it was a statement of philosophy. They had chosen the name to reflect the school's commitment to providing its students a sound education–a solid, trustworthy foundation for life.
At the first board meeting I attended–in February–we didn’t have a financial statement, but I didn’t think much of it. Rollin was an experienced pastor. He had been chairman for several years. If he wasn’t concerned, the lack of a financial statement was obviously not something to worry about. March and April board meetings we didn’t have financial statements either. I finally, asked Rollin about it. He acknowledged that this was a bit of problem. Ian had so much to do that he found it difficult to get the financial statements together. Rollin was working with him to try and get things taken care of.
In June, Elder Kretschmar called me. “John, I think we’ve come to the end. It was a great idea but it hasn’t worked. The Babylon School is $25,000 in the red. Naomi’s and Sue’s salary give back has helped a little bit, but the school is deeper in the hole now than it was last year. I think we should close it.”
I protested. What if I can get pledges to cover the debt? If we close the school, there’ll be no incentive to repay the debt. I’ll have no carrot. And you won’t have a stick.
“All right. See what you can do.”
I visited every home in both Babylon and Huntington Churches and asked for pledges to keep the school open. Some young adults pledged only ten dollars a month, but I added their pledges to my tally.
After I made my pitch in one home, the husband who seldom attended church said, “Pastor, listen. I wish I could run my business the way those people run that school. They just spend and spend and figure the money will come from somewhere. They have no idea of fiscal responsibility. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You get rid of the principal and I’ll pay the entire twenty-five thousand dollar debt. I’ll take care of the whole thing. You just get rid of that principal. And while you’re at it get rid of his wife, too.”
I was speechless. Ian and his wife were strong, in-your-face people. He came from a West Indian family. I thought she was also West Indian. (I was wrong. She came from a prominent African American family in Boston.) I didn’t like their style. I felt betrayed by Ian ’s failure to provide the board with regular financial statements. I knew the conference president would be happy to be rid of Ian .
But Mr. Smith's antipathy was so blatantly race-based (“those people” meant Black people) and his offer of money for their ouster was so crass, I knew I had to reject it. I felt trapped. I would have loved to work for Ian ’s ouster. But Mr. Smith had put me in a corner. If I cooperated in removing Ian as principal I could never live with my conscience.
I finished my canvass of every home in the two churches. I accumulated enough pledges that on paper at least, we should be debt-free by the end of the following school year, if enrollment and tuition payments held. The conference agreed to give us another year.
The following year, Rollin was gone as board chairman. I became chairman of the school board. In board meetings, Ian and I sparred constantly. I felt utterly outclassed by him. He was older. A good debater. His manner was professional. He had decades of experience in education. I often wished I could just get out of the way and let him do whatever he wanted to do. I felt desperately ill-prepared for the role I was cast in. I needed more knowledge, more experience, more wisdom. I had no idea where to turn for advice. The conference educational superintendent was useless. The conference president just wanted to be rid of Mr. Robinson, so I could hardly look to him for balanced advice. But while I wished I could abdicate, I felt a responsibility to the Babylon Church. The church was the final guarantor of the school’s finances. My first commitment was to the church not the school. I constantly fought to save money. Ian fought to enhance the quality of education offered by the school.
At one point late in the school year, I told the board, “I cannot work with Ian . Either he goes or I go.” Romelda Walker, an experienced administrator in the state mental health system, a West Indian with a pleasant manner but a firm hand, told me that was unacceptable. I had to get together with Ian and find a way to cooperate for the good of the school and the church. She said it carefully and respectfully. I didn’t like it, but she was obviously right. I tried spending some time with Ian in his office every week. We survived the school year, we didn’t become friends.
Mabel
The conference president had warned me of potential conflict with Ian Robinson, but he had said nothing to prepare me for Mabel. When I met her, I was impressed with her energy and zest. She obviously loved her church and was devoted to it. She had no use for my immediate predecessor, Rollin, but she talked of other pastors prior to him with affection. I was sure Mabel and I would get along great.
And we did for about a year. That first year, I did my best to listen and learn. This was my first parish. And while I had read a lot of books, and figured I was reasonably smart, I was at least occasionally aware of my inexperience. It helped that the saints of Babylon were gracious, good people. While the school was problematic nearly from the beginning, I was continually impressed with the sweetness and competence of the people at church. Marion the church clerk and her husband, Jim. Sue, the church treasurer. Sam, the head elder. Hans and Elzabeth Tauber. The Loughlins and Olivers. They did not need me to tell them how to run the church. They had been doing church together for decades, in some cases.
Mabel was the most outspoken at church board meetings. She had been there the longest. She knew how things had “always been done” and how they ought to be done. She was so pleased to have a new pastor, because the previous pastor had been completely unmanageable.
Toward the end of the first year, we began talking about remodeling the church. The stucco on the front of the church was cracked and water was coming through. The front steps of the church were disintegrating. The linoleum in the basement looked dreadful. I had read in books about the wars that can erupt when a church tries to choose carpet, so I suggested to the board that we ask Marion and Mabel to pick the carpet. Marion was the only person who appeared to get along with Mabel. Mabel would trust no one else’s opinion. And she had good taste.
On one level, the strategy worked. We ended up with new carpet without a fight. But on another level, it apparently failed. One reason I suggested having Mabel pick the carpet was to show her that while I might disagree with her, I still had high regard for her. As we moved into my second year and I began to offer my own opinions about directions for the church Mabel grew increasingly hostile.
She arrived at every board meeting breathing anger and frustration. We were not doing things the way they had always been done. I had to confront her over her ungracious behavior. One Sabbath, the head deacon left his fifteen year old son at church while he drove one of our elderly members home. The temperature was in the high thirties. It was raining. Mabel was in the church puttering around, putting things away when the deacon left. She finished before he returned. She wanted to go home (next door) and get her lunch. You can’t leave a teenager unattended in the church. You never know what they might do. So she put Jimmy outside on the back porch and locked up the church. When the deacon returned he found his thoroughly chilled, annoyed son shivering on the back porch.
I apologized to Jimmy. I ordered Mabel to never, ever do something like that again. She took offense.
Visitors sat in her accustomed seat in church. She came in after the church service started and asked them to move to a different pew. I took offense and lectured her on courtesy to guests. When I asked her if she thought she owned that pew, she answered, “Yes. My husband and I bought that pew. And no one else has a right to sit in it.”
Her “base of operation” was the “lay activities” table in the tiny lobby of the church. The “Lay Activities Department” used to be called “The Home Missionary Department.” Now it is called “Personal Ministries.” But whatever the name, its purpose has always been to encourage people to communicate their faith to people outside the church. And among Adventists a primary way of communicating our faith to outsiders has been literature. From her base in the lobby, Mabel would button hole members during various denominational campaigns seeking their commitment to sponsor magazine subscriptions for neighbors, friends, government leaders. These gift subscriptions would give the recipients an opportunity to become acquainted with “The Truth.”
Mabel was effective. Our church always did well in per capita participation in all of these denominational campaigns. But her table took up a quarter of the floor space in the tiny entry way. And her location in the lobby gave her the opportunity to annoy, offend and otherwise bother nearly everyone who came through the door. In addition, her title, Lay Activities Secretary, made her an ex officio board member. After the incident with Jimmy, I decided it was time for her to go. I had never heard someone cite general obnoxiousness as a cause for removing someone from church office. But it seemed to me that in an organization publicly devoted to Jesus, it was inappropriate to retain someone in leadership who was constantly wounding teenagers, friends and guests.
So when we convened our annual congregational nominating committee I proposed we remove Mabel. Her abrasive manner made Jesus and the church look bad to our kids. She offended guests. Her arrival at board meetings instantly transformed a pleasant, congenial atmosphere into a tense, silent dread. She never participated in Communion, the most venerated element of Christian worship.
I wanted us as a congregation to continue to welcome her as a member. I wanted us to show her care and respect. But, I argued, by retaining her in formal leadership, we were making the church an accessory to her discourtesy and aggression.
The women on the committee expressed concern. They could see my point, but they knew Mabel would be terribly hurt by this demotion. I countered that at some point leadership had to demonstrate more care for the “little people” than for themselves. The conversation lasted awhile. Committee members did not question my evaluation of Mabel’s behavior, but they could not bring themselves to remove her. They suggested I talk to her and tell her about our concerns. If she would agree to participate in Communion and practice greater courtesy and respect in her treatment of teenagers, guests and members, then we would continue her as the Lay Activities Secretary.
I talked with her. She agreed.
The next year, when the nominating committee met, I was ready. Mabel had not participated in Communion. She had not modified her unpleasant style of interacting with nearly everyone. And this year, there were new people on the nominating committee I was confident would support my decision. One on the new committee members was a math professor. A decade or so earlier, he had been deeply offended by a pastor in upstate New York. Tim’s wife had remained devout and devoted to the church, but he maintained a studied, careful distance. But over the past three years as our friendship developed, he had allowed himself to be drawn into church life. I was surprised and pleased when he accepted the invitation to serve on the nominating committee. Another man on the committee was Oliver, a business man, someone always open to change and new ideas.
At our second meeting we discussed Mabel. I made the same speech I had the year before about my concern for the youth in the church, about the value of a congenial atmosphere in board meetings where we dealt with church business. And I told the committee about the action of the previous committee insisting that Mabel agree to make changes if she was to remain in office. She had not made any change. It was time to act.
Again, the women voiced concern over what this would mean for Mabel. I countered with my concern about what inaction would say to our young people and how it would affect the life of the church. To my astonishment, Tim and Oliver entered the discussion on Mabel’s side. We were a congregation of mature people. Sure Mabel was rude, but we could handle it. We just considered the source. She wasn’t really doing all that much harm.
We talked awhile. My sense was that at least half the group would vote with me to remove Mabel from office. But I could tell that Tim and Oliver were not persuaded. And Marion was hesitant. She was the one woman in the church who had somehow found a way to get along with Mabel and I deeply respected her. I really thought we ought to remove Mabel from office. But I also thought such a drastic action should be taken only if we as a committee and ultimately the church were deeply united in taking it. That unity obviously did not exist in our committee so I withdrew my recommendation. We retained Mabel in office.
A month or two later, Tim talked to me about the meeting.
“John, when we discussed Mabel, I could see that if you pushed it, you could have gotten the committee to go along with you. Especially the women would not have voted against you, if you had insisted on a vote. You could have gotten your way. You could have gotten rid of Mabel.”
My first thought was, I sure missed that one! We could have had Mabel out of the way. But Tim wasn’t through.
“But you yielded to sense of the committee. You allowed the reservations and concerns of the committee to be fully expressed. You let us keep Mabel. I’ve never seen a pastor step back like that. Thanks.”
The next year, the committee voted unanimously to remove Mabel from office. The congregation supported the action without blinking. The literature table disappeared from the lobby. The entry of the church became a happy greeting space. Board meetings became pleasant. And Tim who had refused to every church office for more than ten years, agreed to serve as our new treasurer. It was safe to serve in a church where the pastor was not God.
One final note on Mabel: After I left the Babylon Church I was replaced by a man who had been serving as a faculty member at an Adventist high school and who lived in the same apartment building as Mabel. Mabel used to complain to him bitterly about me.
When he became pastor at first she was thrilled. But over the next few years she became as bitterly opposed to him as she had been to me. He would tell me “Mabel stories” when we met at clergy meetings.
At one clergy gathering he could hardly wait to get me into the hall so he could tell me the latest Mabel story. She had gotten very angry at him. No one, she said, had ever treated her as cruelly and disrespectfully in her whole life. Certainly no minister had ever been as mean and evil to her as he was.
Charlie couldn’t resist. He asked her, “What about McLarty?”
She had paused, thought for a minute, then said, “John? Why I never had any trouble with him.”
Ian Robinson, Continued.
The next year we elected Romelda as chairperson. She did a fine job, but our finances continued to slide. Part of the problem was that the Babylon Church was responsible for the entire subsidy of the school. All expenses above income from tuition were obligations of the church. But only ten percent of the students in the school came from the Babylon Church. Twenty-five percent came from the Huntington Church and almost fifty percent came from the Bay Shore Spanish Church. So an aging majority White congregation was paying well over half of its income to support a school for Blacks and Hispanics from other churches. With the exception of Mr. Smith, I did not hear much overt racial prejudice. In fact, I often wondered if I was more racist than the great majority of my congregation. I tried to subdue my own racial bias. But I knew it was there.
At one point a group of parents demanded to have a meeting with the school board. I agreed. The parents were not members of my church, but their students were in our school. The meeting rapidly degenerated into a bitter protest against me and the Babylon Church for not doing more to support the school. I did not defend myself. I listened. Responded where I thought it might be helpful and survived the night.
On one hand I felt unfairly judged. I was the one who had visited every home in my two churches soliciting pledges to keep the school open. I had strongly supported the massive fund raising program in the Huntington Church which sold Indian River citrus during the winter months to raise money for tuition support for students who attended Sound View. The Babylon Church put between sixty and seventy percent of its budget into school. Didn’t all of that count for something?
On the other hand, I wondered, would I have done more if these students had come from White homes? I was never sure I had transcended my own racial bias.
The following summer, the conference closed the school. The closure gave a huge financial relief to the church. It ended the war between the Robinsons and me, between the school and the church board. It made Mr. Smith glad–the Robinsons were gone and he didn’t have to pay. But I have wondered for twenty-five years if the school could have succeeded. Did I do everything I could have? Did I treat Ian fairly?
During the height of my conflict with Ian, his wife went into the hospital for surgery. I wondered whether I should go see her. I didn’t really want to and I figured showing up and acting “pastoral” would have been seen by them as the height of hypocrisy, given the intensity of our conflict. I was sure that if the roles were reversed and I was in the hospital, I would not want her or Ian to visit me, no matter what title they had. But after Sue was back teaching, she protested my failure to visit. Why did I stay away? Didn’t I regard her as a member of my church?
Part of me was tempted to dismiss her complaint as just clever rhetoric, a way to get in a dig at me. But I didn’t hear that in her voice. If I understood correctly, she was saying there was something about the role of pastor that was independent of my personal character or competence. When she was in the hospital she wanted the attention of her pastor. At that point, it did not matter that I was in constant conflict with her husband and had a testy relationship with her. I was still the pastor. No matter who I was as an individual, I still represented her community of faith. My presence had a unique capacity to make the church present in her life in that crisis. My absence was not merely personal. It meant her church had failed to keep her company in her distress.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Chapter 46 Lesson on Prayer
Sometimes, people could use some education about prayer. Take Mrs. Cusik, for instance. She was wanting me to prayer for miraculous healing from cancer when it was obvious to me that what she really needed was healing for her soul.
I met Mrs. Cusik my first Sabbath in Huntington. She was miserable. You couldn’t miss it. It was written all over her face. And the look never changed. When I visited, she told me her story.
Her mother had become an Adventist when Mrs. Cusik was five. Her dad allowed mom to raised the kids as Adventists. When Mrs. Cusik turned seventeen, she left home and church and God. She drank and smoked and partied. She married and had kids. Later she got a job. Then, when she was sixty-three she came back to church and God.
But her conversion brought her no peace. She could not get past her regret at all the wasted years. She was eighty-one when I first began listening to her story. She had been rebaptized eighteen years ago. She had been coming to church for eighteen years, singing hymns about God’s love, taking Communion, listening to sermons. And for eighteen years she had been miserable, and, in her mind, unforgiven.
I visited her occasionally. And always our conversation circled back to laments about the lost years. It was not possible that God could ever really, truly forgive her. She had deliberately, knowingly, rebelled. She had failed to raise her children right. No amount of lecturing, counseling, praying, Bible quoting by me made any difference. She was sure she was lost. She came to church and nursed her guilt.
She was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had already metastasized. There was no point in doing surgery. They did radiation to shrink the tumor in her lung. Then watched. She lost weight. When she wasn’t in the hospital she was at her daughter’s home. As I got acquainted with her daughter, I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the picture I had in my mind from Mrs. Cusik’s constant laments about failing to lead her children in the right path and what I actually observed in the life of her daughter. Her daughter was pleasant, attentive, careful of her mother’s needs.
Mrs. Cusik was back in the hospital. I visited her on a Friday. She was a mere bag of bones. She had lost so much weight that I would not have recognized her if her name had not been on the foot of her bed. Her daughter had called me. “I don't think Mom has much more time.” she said.
As I stood beside the bed, Mrs. Cusik opened her eyes. Her face lighted up. She was glad to see me. I took her hand. She gripped it with surprising strength.
“I’m so glad you came. I want you to pray for me.”
“I’d be honored to do that.”
“I want you to pray that God will heal me of this cancer.”
I hesitated. She was clearly dying. Her daughter and I had already talked a little bit about her funeral. Praying for healing seemed to me like a trick to avoid facing reality.
“Mrs. Cusik,” I answered, “I think what you really need is to make your peace with God. Let me pray that God will give you peace and enable you to rest in his mercy and forgiveness.”
“No, I want you to pray that I will get well. I am not ready to die. I need God to cure me of this cancer.”
“Mrs. Cusik, I will pray for your healing if that’s what you want. But nobody lives forever in this world. God offers such rich promises of forgiveness, pardon and redemption. If you will accept it, God can give you peace of mind and reassurance right now. You don’t have to wait.”
“Pastor, you know I wasted all those years . . . more than forty years I lived in the world. Forty years I turned my back on him. . . .” Her eyes teared up. “Forty-five years, actually. How can he ever forgive me? How can I make up for misleading my children? I want you to pray God will cure me of this cancer.”
I yielded. “Okay, Mrs. Cusik, let’s pray.”
I wrapped her hand in both of mine and prayed aloud. “Our Father in heaven, thank you for loving Mrs. Cusik and giving her a chance to be converted and live for you. Thank you for your mercy and forgiveness. Thank you for forgiving her for her forty-five years of doing her own thing and rejecting your love and your law. Please help her to trust in your mercy and pardon.
“Now, Lord, Mrs. Cusik has asked me to pray that you will heal her cancer. I don’t think that what she really needs. I think she needs to accept your mercy and grace and let go of her insistence that you heal her, but she wants me to ask you to heal her. So because she has asked me to do so, I pray that you will heal her. I pray that you will send this cancer into remission. I pray that she can get out of this hospital and return to her children. In Jesus name, Amen.”
We opened our eyes. “I’ll see you again soon,” I promised, squeezed her hand and left.
I should have visited her the next day, Saturday, but I was at the Babylon Church that week and with all the activity I completely forgot about Mrs. Cusik. Sunday I was busy. Finally late Monday morning, I suddenly remembered Mrs. Cusik. I headed to the hospital. Her bed was empty. Had they moved her to intensive care? Had she died? I went to the nurses’ station.
“What happened to Mrs. Cusik?”
“She went home yesterday.”
I was astonished the hospital would have released her in her extreme condition, but I figured she wanted to die at home. I drove to her daughter’s house. The daughter answered the door and invited me in. “Mother will be glad to see you.”
Mrs. Cusik was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, looking amazingly well. I pulled a chair over and sat down beside her.
“How are you?” I asked, still trying to adjust to the fact that she was sitting up and not comatose in bed.
“Oh, not so good,” she complained. “I still have to use this silly walker to get around the house. I’m not as strong as I should be.”
“Mrs. Cusik,” I sputtered. “When I last saw you in the hospital, I thought you were dying. The nurses thought you were dying. Your family thought you were dying. Isn’t that right?” I said, turning to her daughter.
She nodded her head.
“None of us thought you’d ever get out of bed again” I continued scolding her. “And here you are, complaining about using a walker!!!
“You better repent of your ingratitude. You’ve just experienced a miracle. You better tell God you’re sorry for not paying attention to his miracle.”
She smiled sheepishly. “Well, all right.”
I prayer again. “God in heaven, thank you for this wonderful miracle. Thank you for giving Sister Cusik more time to be with her family. Give her joy and peace. Give her rest in your mercy and grace. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
I left amazed. Amazed at Mrs. Cusik's recovery. Amazed even more, perhaps, at God's willingness to involve me, an unbelieving pastor whose prayer actually voice disbelief, in such a miracle. What did such a healing after such a prayer teach about the nature of prayer?
God gave Mrs. Cusik what she wanted, not what I could see so clearly she needed. He gave her three more years. During those extra years she came to trust in forgiveness and grace. She died at peace.
I met Mrs. Cusik my first Sabbath in Huntington. She was miserable. You couldn’t miss it. It was written all over her face. And the look never changed. When I visited, she told me her story.
Her mother had become an Adventist when Mrs. Cusik was five. Her dad allowed mom to raised the kids as Adventists. When Mrs. Cusik turned seventeen, she left home and church and God. She drank and smoked and partied. She married and had kids. Later she got a job. Then, when she was sixty-three she came back to church and God.
But her conversion brought her no peace. She could not get past her regret at all the wasted years. She was eighty-one when I first began listening to her story. She had been rebaptized eighteen years ago. She had been coming to church for eighteen years, singing hymns about God’s love, taking Communion, listening to sermons. And for eighteen years she had been miserable, and, in her mind, unforgiven.
I visited her occasionally. And always our conversation circled back to laments about the lost years. It was not possible that God could ever really, truly forgive her. She had deliberately, knowingly, rebelled. She had failed to raise her children right. No amount of lecturing, counseling, praying, Bible quoting by me made any difference. She was sure she was lost. She came to church and nursed her guilt.
She was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had already metastasized. There was no point in doing surgery. They did radiation to shrink the tumor in her lung. Then watched. She lost weight. When she wasn’t in the hospital she was at her daughter’s home. As I got acquainted with her daughter, I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the picture I had in my mind from Mrs. Cusik’s constant laments about failing to lead her children in the right path and what I actually observed in the life of her daughter. Her daughter was pleasant, attentive, careful of her mother’s needs.
Mrs. Cusik was back in the hospital. I visited her on a Friday. She was a mere bag of bones. She had lost so much weight that I would not have recognized her if her name had not been on the foot of her bed. Her daughter had called me. “I don't think Mom has much more time.” she said.
As I stood beside the bed, Mrs. Cusik opened her eyes. Her face lighted up. She was glad to see me. I took her hand. She gripped it with surprising strength.
“I’m so glad you came. I want you to pray for me.”
“I’d be honored to do that.”
“I want you to pray that God will heal me of this cancer.”
I hesitated. She was clearly dying. Her daughter and I had already talked a little bit about her funeral. Praying for healing seemed to me like a trick to avoid facing reality.
“Mrs. Cusik,” I answered, “I think what you really need is to make your peace with God. Let me pray that God will give you peace and enable you to rest in his mercy and forgiveness.”
“No, I want you to pray that I will get well. I am not ready to die. I need God to cure me of this cancer.”
“Mrs. Cusik, I will pray for your healing if that’s what you want. But nobody lives forever in this world. God offers such rich promises of forgiveness, pardon and redemption. If you will accept it, God can give you peace of mind and reassurance right now. You don’t have to wait.”
“Pastor, you know I wasted all those years . . . more than forty years I lived in the world. Forty years I turned my back on him. . . .” Her eyes teared up. “Forty-five years, actually. How can he ever forgive me? How can I make up for misleading my children? I want you to pray God will cure me of this cancer.”
I yielded. “Okay, Mrs. Cusik, let’s pray.”
I wrapped her hand in both of mine and prayed aloud. “Our Father in heaven, thank you for loving Mrs. Cusik and giving her a chance to be converted and live for you. Thank you for your mercy and forgiveness. Thank you for forgiving her for her forty-five years of doing her own thing and rejecting your love and your law. Please help her to trust in your mercy and pardon.
“Now, Lord, Mrs. Cusik has asked me to pray that you will heal her cancer. I don’t think that what she really needs. I think she needs to accept your mercy and grace and let go of her insistence that you heal her, but she wants me to ask you to heal her. So because she has asked me to do so, I pray that you will heal her. I pray that you will send this cancer into remission. I pray that she can get out of this hospital and return to her children. In Jesus name, Amen.”
We opened our eyes. “I’ll see you again soon,” I promised, squeezed her hand and left.
I should have visited her the next day, Saturday, but I was at the Babylon Church that week and with all the activity I completely forgot about Mrs. Cusik. Sunday I was busy. Finally late Monday morning, I suddenly remembered Mrs. Cusik. I headed to the hospital. Her bed was empty. Had they moved her to intensive care? Had she died? I went to the nurses’ station.
“What happened to Mrs. Cusik?”
“She went home yesterday.”
I was astonished the hospital would have released her in her extreme condition, but I figured she wanted to die at home. I drove to her daughter’s house. The daughter answered the door and invited me in. “Mother will be glad to see you.”
Mrs. Cusik was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, looking amazingly well. I pulled a chair over and sat down beside her.
“How are you?” I asked, still trying to adjust to the fact that she was sitting up and not comatose in bed.
“Oh, not so good,” she complained. “I still have to use this silly walker to get around the house. I’m not as strong as I should be.”
“Mrs. Cusik,” I sputtered. “When I last saw you in the hospital, I thought you were dying. The nurses thought you were dying. Your family thought you were dying. Isn’t that right?” I said, turning to her daughter.
She nodded her head.
“None of us thought you’d ever get out of bed again” I continued scolding her. “And here you are, complaining about using a walker!!!
“You better repent of your ingratitude. You’ve just experienced a miracle. You better tell God you’re sorry for not paying attention to his miracle.”
She smiled sheepishly. “Well, all right.”
I prayer again. “God in heaven, thank you for this wonderful miracle. Thank you for giving Sister Cusik more time to be with her family. Give her joy and peace. Give her rest in your mercy and grace. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
I left amazed. Amazed at Mrs. Cusik's recovery. Amazed even more, perhaps, at God's willingness to involve me, an unbelieving pastor whose prayer actually voice disbelief, in such a miracle. What did such a healing after such a prayer teach about the nature of prayer?
God gave Mrs. Cusik what she wanted, not what I could see so clearly she needed. He gave her three more years. During those extra years she came to trust in forgiveness and grace. She died at peace.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Chapter 45 Funerals
Mr. Dennis, the head elder of the Huntington Church, was my first funeral. It was bittersweet. He had lived well. He was widely respected. The funeral marked the end of a well-lived life. I was not yet old enough to think of a funeral as a celebration, but conducting Mr. Dennis' funeral was not difficult. Kind words about his past came easily and words of hope and confidence regarding his eternal future were perfectly congruent with Christian faith and the expectations of his family and friends inside and outside the church. The only real concern was what was going to happen to his wife and one of her sisters. His wife had severe dementia and his sister-in-law was not capable of taking care of herself. But for the purposes of the service, we could ignore those practical concerns.
Not all the funerals in those early years were so easy. During my second year at Babylon, I got a phone call on a Friday afternoon from a funeral director I had worked with.
“Pastor McLarty, I have a family coming in who needs a minister. I was wondering if you would be willing to help us out. The service will be tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.”
“Ordinarily, course, I couldn’t. We have our services tomorrow, but I have a guest speaker scheduled. So I can make it.” (I remembered the counsel of some seminary professor, I don’t remember who. He said, “Death trumps all. No matter what else you’re involved in, when there’s a death, that’s your first priority.”)
“I would really appreciate it if you could,” the funeral director said. “It’s a real tragedy. They are a Spanish family, from Guatemala originally. They had a house fire. The grandad and two little girls died. They don’t have any church connection here, but they need a minister for their service.”
“Is any chance I could meet the family before I do the service?”
“They’re going to be here at the funeral home about four this afternoon.”
"I'll be there."
When I met with the family I didn't say much. Most of the family spoke English but what is there to say when a family has lost their babies and their grandfather? The next morning I left my church at 10:30. The funeral home parking lot was overflowing. Inside the room was packed. Finally, it was time for me to speak. What to say?
I supposed my job was to voice confidence in God's love and hope of eternal life through Jesus Christ. But what about the grief and chaos of now? In the face of this family's staggering loss, how could I affirm God’s goodness and speak sweetly of a blessed future without sounding heartless were stupid? I played in my mind scenes of fat, old, rich clergy I’d seen in movies.
I have no memory of what I actually did manage to say ,but I have never forgotten the terror of being expected to say something appropriate when there seemed to be no words available that would not add to the pain and confusion.
Then there was Himmel funeral. Mrs. Himmel, the primary organist for the Babylon Church, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Surgery and radiation provided relief for a year or two, but now the tumor was back. She was in Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan and not expected to come home. She looked terrible. Her hair was gone from chemo, face puffy from the side effects of medication.
Her husband was not a member of the church. He was famous for his rages and general obnoxiousness. Their two sons were deeply alienated from him, but Mom was dying, so the family gathered. The oldest son, Heinrich, came home from the Marines on emergency leave. That evening after they got back to the house from the hospital, Dad and son had a furious, cussing, shouting fight. The son stormed out, climbed on his motorcycle and roared off. He came back home some time after two, after the bar closed. His dad heard him come in and go to his room. The son must have gone to bed and had a last cigarette before going to sleep.
The fire damage was confined mostly to the bedroom. Dad and an uncle who was staying at the house suffered burns and smoke inhalation. They were hospitalized for a couple of days. Heinrich died. He never got out of bed.
Again the funeral home was packed. Mrs. Himmel was there, propped up in a wheel chair, looking awful. Her husband was there with his burns. From the way he talked, it seemed he was proud of his burns. I thought he needed them as evidence of his devotion to his son–see, I risked my life to try to save him. I really did my very best. His bandages were marks of a penance he hoped would atone for that last fight with his son.
I must have said something. After all I was the officiating minister. But all I can remember is my overwhelming awareness of the futility of words. Should I talk about forgiveness or about taking fresh resolve to be careful with our words? To say much about faith would be a mockery. The only evident faith in the family was Mother’s faith. And that had never been very confident.
How do I speak of God in the real world, without mocking either God or the people who live here? We need hope and meaning. It is a hunger written in the very core of our existence as humans. It is the job of the church to be a place where people can renew their hope and find strength to affirm there is purpose and meaning in our lives. But sometimes putting this into words appears either blasphemous or rudely naive.
Then Lori Gambino called. She could barely talk. Through her stumbling, hesitating speech I got the message: her son was dead. Eighteen years old. Suicide. He hung himself in the basement. There was going to be a funeral on Wednesday evening. Their priest doing the service. She didn't want to offend, but wasn't possible I could do something, too? Maybe in the afternoon when the family was going to gather for the viewing?
Lori was a recent convert to Adventism. Her entire family was Catholic, of course. They had to have a service with the priest. I was not offended.
Wednesday afternoon I conducted a service for a small group of Lori's friends from church and close family members. I quoted Jesus words about his friend Lazarus who had died, “He is sleeping.” Louis, Lori's son, must have been in horrific pain. He committed suicide because he saw no way out, no possible relief. The pain had become unendurable. Now he was sleeping. He was resting. He was not hurting any longer.
We bore the cost of his decision. We were now grieving. But we could take some small solace in Jesus’ assurance that Louis was sleeping. He was not in torment. He was resting. And we could leave his future in the hands of a God who loved him so much he died for him.
That evening I attended the funeral. The priest was gracious. He spoke explicitly about the suicide then talked about reasons for hope. Louis had been baptized. He had made his first communion. Through the years he had participated in church, had gone to confession and received holy communion. He had the saints to pray for him, the goodwill and prayers of the church, his mother’s love which mirrored the Blessed Mother’s love. So while his life ended tragically, we could find hope in all the resources of grace God had placed in his church.
I admired the pastoral concern the priest exhibited. He did what a pastor is supposed to do–mine the spiritual resources of his community for treasures of hope in the darkness. I was glad I was not saddled with the theology of his community. I was glad I did not have to imagine some phantom interaction with the church that could serve as a basis for salvation. Based on my Adventist understanding of the judgment, I pictured God examining the totality of a person’s life, looking for evidence of faith. God's ability to save was not limited to the resources available through his church. Then there was our prophet’s famous statement that one’s eternal destiny was not determined by the occasional deed or misdeed, but by the trend of the life. And obviously suicide could not be a trend in someone's life. But whether I was Adventist pastor working with our theology or a Roman Catholic priest working with his theology, pastoral role was the same. Finding hope in the darkness, giving voice to meaning and purpose in the face of tragedy, saying good words on behalf of our people.
The proper role of a preacher at a funerals is not that of a prophet heedlessly declaiming God's truth. Rather, at funerals the preacher is a priest. He/she is one of the grieving. The words of a good pastor are conditioned by his/her deep empathy with the ache and questioning of the grieving. The ultimate purpose of our words is not to declaim truth but to offer solace.
Not all the funerals in those early years were so easy. During my second year at Babylon, I got a phone call on a Friday afternoon from a funeral director I had worked with.
“Pastor McLarty, I have a family coming in who needs a minister. I was wondering if you would be willing to help us out. The service will be tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.”
“Ordinarily, course, I couldn’t. We have our services tomorrow, but I have a guest speaker scheduled. So I can make it.” (I remembered the counsel of some seminary professor, I don’t remember who. He said, “Death trumps all. No matter what else you’re involved in, when there’s a death, that’s your first priority.”)
“I would really appreciate it if you could,” the funeral director said. “It’s a real tragedy. They are a Spanish family, from Guatemala originally. They had a house fire. The grandad and two little girls died. They don’t have any church connection here, but they need a minister for their service.”
“Is any chance I could meet the family before I do the service?”
“They’re going to be here at the funeral home about four this afternoon.”
"I'll be there."
When I met with the family I didn't say much. Most of the family spoke English but what is there to say when a family has lost their babies and their grandfather? The next morning I left my church at 10:30. The funeral home parking lot was overflowing. Inside the room was packed. Finally, it was time for me to speak. What to say?
I supposed my job was to voice confidence in God's love and hope of eternal life through Jesus Christ. But what about the grief and chaos of now? In the face of this family's staggering loss, how could I affirm God’s goodness and speak sweetly of a blessed future without sounding heartless were stupid? I played in my mind scenes of fat, old, rich clergy I’d seen in movies.
I have no memory of what I actually did manage to say ,but I have never forgotten the terror of being expected to say something appropriate when there seemed to be no words available that would not add to the pain and confusion.
Then there was Himmel funeral. Mrs. Himmel, the primary organist for the Babylon Church, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Surgery and radiation provided relief for a year or two, but now the tumor was back. She was in Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan and not expected to come home. She looked terrible. Her hair was gone from chemo, face puffy from the side effects of medication.
Her husband was not a member of the church. He was famous for his rages and general obnoxiousness. Their two sons were deeply alienated from him, but Mom was dying, so the family gathered. The oldest son, Heinrich, came home from the Marines on emergency leave. That evening after they got back to the house from the hospital, Dad and son had a furious, cussing, shouting fight. The son stormed out, climbed on his motorcycle and roared off. He came back home some time after two, after the bar closed. His dad heard him come in and go to his room. The son must have gone to bed and had a last cigarette before going to sleep.
The fire damage was confined mostly to the bedroom. Dad and an uncle who was staying at the house suffered burns and smoke inhalation. They were hospitalized for a couple of days. Heinrich died. He never got out of bed.
Again the funeral home was packed. Mrs. Himmel was there, propped up in a wheel chair, looking awful. Her husband was there with his burns. From the way he talked, it seemed he was proud of his burns. I thought he needed them as evidence of his devotion to his son–see, I risked my life to try to save him. I really did my very best. His bandages were marks of a penance he hoped would atone for that last fight with his son.
I must have said something. After all I was the officiating minister. But all I can remember is my overwhelming awareness of the futility of words. Should I talk about forgiveness or about taking fresh resolve to be careful with our words? To say much about faith would be a mockery. The only evident faith in the family was Mother’s faith. And that had never been very confident.
How do I speak of God in the real world, without mocking either God or the people who live here? We need hope and meaning. It is a hunger written in the very core of our existence as humans. It is the job of the church to be a place where people can renew their hope and find strength to affirm there is purpose and meaning in our lives. But sometimes putting this into words appears either blasphemous or rudely naive.
Then Lori Gambino called. She could barely talk. Through her stumbling, hesitating speech I got the message: her son was dead. Eighteen years old. Suicide. He hung himself in the basement. There was going to be a funeral on Wednesday evening. Their priest doing the service. She didn't want to offend, but wasn't possible I could do something, too? Maybe in the afternoon when the family was going to gather for the viewing?
Lori was a recent convert to Adventism. Her entire family was Catholic, of course. They had to have a service with the priest. I was not offended.
Wednesday afternoon I conducted a service for a small group of Lori's friends from church and close family members. I quoted Jesus words about his friend Lazarus who had died, “He is sleeping.” Louis, Lori's son, must have been in horrific pain. He committed suicide because he saw no way out, no possible relief. The pain had become unendurable. Now he was sleeping. He was resting. He was not hurting any longer.
We bore the cost of his decision. We were now grieving. But we could take some small solace in Jesus’ assurance that Louis was sleeping. He was not in torment. He was resting. And we could leave his future in the hands of a God who loved him so much he died for him.
That evening I attended the funeral. The priest was gracious. He spoke explicitly about the suicide then talked about reasons for hope. Louis had been baptized. He had made his first communion. Through the years he had participated in church, had gone to confession and received holy communion. He had the saints to pray for him, the goodwill and prayers of the church, his mother’s love which mirrored the Blessed Mother’s love. So while his life ended tragically, we could find hope in all the resources of grace God had placed in his church.
I admired the pastoral concern the priest exhibited. He did what a pastor is supposed to do–mine the spiritual resources of his community for treasures of hope in the darkness. I was glad I was not saddled with the theology of his community. I was glad I did not have to imagine some phantom interaction with the church that could serve as a basis for salvation. Based on my Adventist understanding of the judgment, I pictured God examining the totality of a person’s life, looking for evidence of faith. God's ability to save was not limited to the resources available through his church. Then there was our prophet’s famous statement that one’s eternal destiny was not determined by the occasional deed or misdeed, but by the trend of the life. And obviously suicide could not be a trend in someone's life. But whether I was Adventist pastor working with our theology or a Roman Catholic priest working with his theology, pastoral role was the same. Finding hope in the darkness, giving voice to meaning and purpose in the face of tragedy, saying good words on behalf of our people.
The proper role of a preacher at a funerals is not that of a prophet heedlessly declaiming God's truth. Rather, at funerals the preacher is a priest. He/she is one of the grieving. The words of a good pastor are conditioned by his/her deep empathy with the ache and questioning of the grieving. The ultimate purpose of our words is not to declaim truth but to offer solace.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Chapter 44 Geology 101
Maybe if I had lived in Arizona, the geology class would have had a different impact on me. I had read articles by creationists who told of observing the layers exposed in Grand Canyon. And some layers were missing. The evidence was right there in your face. The standard geological story did not seem plausible. How could you reconcile a million years between two apparently smoothly adjoining layers? So maybe, if I had taken geology at Flagstaff Community College it would have been different. But I didn't live in Arizona.
When I signed up for Geology 101 at Suffolk County Community College, I had my guard up. I knew the professor would teach stuff I didn't believe. He would talk about about millions of years and evolution and horse fossils. But, I figured, it was time to face it. I had read everything the church had published on earth history. Intellectual integrity obliged me to find out what the other side had to say. And not from secondary sources. Besides, quite apart from the evolution/creation controversies rocks had fascinated me all my life.
Tom showed up in classic science professor attire, jeans and sweatshirt. He was only a couple of years older than I was. Everyone else in class was under twenty. They wore standard student uniforms–blue jeans and sweat shirts at beginning of the term in January, shorts and T-shirts come May. I wore my ministerial uniform–wool tweed jacket, dress slacks and knitted wool tie.
In the first few weeks of class we learned basic geological jargon, the major periods of geologic column–Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Pleistocene, etc.–with their putative dates, states of matter. It was elementary, pedestrian stuff, but since it was geology, I loved it. In lab we broke rocks with hammers, analyzed them with chemicals, stared at them through magnifying lenses. There was not a lot of room for evolutionary “opinions” or bias or prejudice. We were dealing with down-to-earth, concrete stuff.
I kept waiting for the teacher to get around to evolution.
We took field trips. We visited the central ridge of the island. Boulders and sand. On south shore beaches we observed erosion patterns created by winter storms. We visited construction sites where precautions against cave-ins had to be taken during any excavation. We checked out areas where we could smell the septic system seapage polluting creeks.
Geology, as Tom taught it, was not about theoretical links between dinosaurs and birds or the resetting of radiometric clocks during volcanic eruptions. Geology was primarily about providing essential knowledge for present living. Geology offered crucial information with a direct bearing on managing gasoline tanks, siting land fills, handling sewage, placing wells, and doing construction. For a bunch of godless scientists, geologists appeared to be unusually concerned about the health and well-being of society.
We couldn't completely escape history. The very land we lived on begged for an explanation. Why was the soil in my backyard so utterly different from any soil I had ever encountered before? When I dug my garden why did I encounter rocks of all different sizes and compositions? Why were the forests of eastern and southern Long Island so anemic? There was plenty of rain. Why didn't the trees grow? Why were there rocks in my yard and none in the yard of the Babylon Church? Why were there endless beaches all along the Atlantic shore?
The only plausible explanation for Long Island was glaciers. Huge glaciers. Glaciers a thousand feet thick that covered the entire states of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Ironically, the conference office was located on Shelter Rock Road a few hundred yards from the eponymous Shelter Rock, an 1800-ton glacial erratic. The mineral composition of this forty feet long, twenty feet wide, fifteen feet high rock matched bedrock in Connecticut, a hundred miles north across Long Island Sound. The only plausible method of transport for Shelter Rock and other large boulders imbedded in the sand and gravels of Long Island was the movement of massive ice sheets across New England.
The position, shape and composition of Long Island made perfect sense if you accepted continental glaciers. Long Island made no sense at all if you tried to explain it using Noah’s flood. The visible, obvious features of my everyday world shouted about an element of earth history—continental glaciers, an ice age—that was not even hinted at in the Bible, and, in fact, could not be fit into most creationist narratives.
One chapter in our book did offer a bit of hope for creationist theories. When plate tectonics was first proposed, the leading professors, the papa bears of the geological establishment, vociferously opposed it, ridiculed it. When these men died off, they were replaced by their graduate students who embraced this new understanding of earth history. As a creationist, I could hope that perhaps some day there would be a similar upheaval in the conventional understanding of geochronology.
We never did get around to spending much time talking about evolution. Geology 101 did not challenge my creationist beliefs by presenting evolutionary theories. What it did do was erode my confident dismissal of geology as a hopelessly bias-dominated philosophy. I experienced geology as a science, as a system of knowledge-seeking firmly rooted the the real world. The geological theory about Long Island readily lined up with evidence that was available to me through direct observation. I didn't need a microscope or sophisticated machinery for measuring radio isotopes. I wasn't dependent on diagrams in books. The evidence was large, visible and ubiquitous. Then, perhaps most importantly, the geological theory about our island offered concrete guidance for public policy and wise living.
Geologists might be wrong on this or that particular point, but their connection with the real world and their versions of truth were at least as credible as the science of creationists.
When I signed up for Geology 101 at Suffolk County Community College, I had my guard up. I knew the professor would teach stuff I didn't believe. He would talk about about millions of years and evolution and horse fossils. But, I figured, it was time to face it. I had read everything the church had published on earth history. Intellectual integrity obliged me to find out what the other side had to say. And not from secondary sources. Besides, quite apart from the evolution/creation controversies rocks had fascinated me all my life.
Tom showed up in classic science professor attire, jeans and sweatshirt. He was only a couple of years older than I was. Everyone else in class was under twenty. They wore standard student uniforms–blue jeans and sweat shirts at beginning of the term in January, shorts and T-shirts come May. I wore my ministerial uniform–wool tweed jacket, dress slacks and knitted wool tie.
In the first few weeks of class we learned basic geological jargon, the major periods of geologic column–Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Pleistocene, etc.–with their putative dates, states of matter. It was elementary, pedestrian stuff, but since it was geology, I loved it. In lab we broke rocks with hammers, analyzed them with chemicals, stared at them through magnifying lenses. There was not a lot of room for evolutionary “opinions” or bias or prejudice. We were dealing with down-to-earth, concrete stuff.
I kept waiting for the teacher to get around to evolution.
We took field trips. We visited the central ridge of the island. Boulders and sand. On south shore beaches we observed erosion patterns created by winter storms. We visited construction sites where precautions against cave-ins had to be taken during any excavation. We checked out areas where we could smell the septic system seapage polluting creeks.
Geology, as Tom taught it, was not about theoretical links between dinosaurs and birds or the resetting of radiometric clocks during volcanic eruptions. Geology was primarily about providing essential knowledge for present living. Geology offered crucial information with a direct bearing on managing gasoline tanks, siting land fills, handling sewage, placing wells, and doing construction. For a bunch of godless scientists, geologists appeared to be unusually concerned about the health and well-being of society.
We couldn't completely escape history. The very land we lived on begged for an explanation. Why was the soil in my backyard so utterly different from any soil I had ever encountered before? When I dug my garden why did I encounter rocks of all different sizes and compositions? Why were the forests of eastern and southern Long Island so anemic? There was plenty of rain. Why didn't the trees grow? Why were there rocks in my yard and none in the yard of the Babylon Church? Why were there endless beaches all along the Atlantic shore?
The only plausible explanation for Long Island was glaciers. Huge glaciers. Glaciers a thousand feet thick that covered the entire states of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Ironically, the conference office was located on Shelter Rock Road a few hundred yards from the eponymous Shelter Rock, an 1800-ton glacial erratic. The mineral composition of this forty feet long, twenty feet wide, fifteen feet high rock matched bedrock in Connecticut, a hundred miles north across Long Island Sound. The only plausible method of transport for Shelter Rock and other large boulders imbedded in the sand and gravels of Long Island was the movement of massive ice sheets across New England.
The position, shape and composition of Long Island made perfect sense if you accepted continental glaciers. Long Island made no sense at all if you tried to explain it using Noah’s flood. The visible, obvious features of my everyday world shouted about an element of earth history—continental glaciers, an ice age—that was not even hinted at in the Bible, and, in fact, could not be fit into most creationist narratives.
One chapter in our book did offer a bit of hope for creationist theories. When plate tectonics was first proposed, the leading professors, the papa bears of the geological establishment, vociferously opposed it, ridiculed it. When these men died off, they were replaced by their graduate students who embraced this new understanding of earth history. As a creationist, I could hope that perhaps some day there would be a similar upheaval in the conventional understanding of geochronology.
We never did get around to spending much time talking about evolution. Geology 101 did not challenge my creationist beliefs by presenting evolutionary theories. What it did do was erode my confident dismissal of geology as a hopelessly bias-dominated philosophy. I experienced geology as a science, as a system of knowledge-seeking firmly rooted the the real world. The geological theory about Long Island readily lined up with evidence that was available to me through direct observation. I didn't need a microscope or sophisticated machinery for measuring radio isotopes. I wasn't dependent on diagrams in books. The evidence was large, visible and ubiquitous. Then, perhaps most importantly, the geological theory about our island offered concrete guidance for public policy and wise living.
Geologists might be wrong on this or that particular point, but their connection with the real world and their versions of truth were at least as credible as the science of creationists.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)