okieinexile
Well-Known Member
(This is a short story rather than my usual column. It is a first draft, and all comments are appreciated.)
By Bobby Neal Winters
I still remember the very first time that I saw Enoch. I was on an almost empty city street with Y-mount rising at my back and Mount Timpanogos scantily clad in white off to my right. It was when I was fresh out of seminary and on my first assignment.
I had just finished up three years of seminary—which had cost me $40,000, a marriage, and most of my faith in God—only to be assigned to Provo, Utah. This is not the place that most liberal Protestant ministers would choose to be assigned, but if my seminary education had taken almost everything else away from me, it had not destroyed my sense of duty.
I was raised as the son of an old-style Methodist minister who had earned his ordination by going to "licensing school" for two weeks every summer and was of the tradition that you go where the bishop sends you regardless of your own desires, and Provo, Utah is where the bishop had sent me.
On the up side, Provo is in a beautiful part of the world. The Wasatch Mountains rise like a wall on the eastern half of the sky. During the bulk of the year, the 12,000 foot tall Mount Timpanogos lies like a princess sleeping under a white blanket that only gradually disappears as the western sun removes it like a lover. There are certain spots where you can stand for a short while and pretend that you are in a place that is being seen by man for the first time and then turn around see a metropolitan area of a quarter of a million people in a single glance.
That is where the downside comes in. It's not that I don't like cities. I do. They are great places for church growth. There is a myth in this country that rural areas are religious and great places for churches, but the data does not bear that notion out. It is the cities that are religious, and it is the cities that are great places in which to plant churches, because they are where the people are. The problem for a minister with Provo and the surrounding area can be summarized in one word: "Mormons."
I've haven't got a thing in the world against Mormons. They are as fine a group of people who ever walked the face of the earth. The problem, however, is that Utah County, in which the Provo metro area sits, is ninety percent Mormon. These people belong to a church already and one that has a pretty tight grip on them to say the least. That leaves about 25,000 people in the rest of the county for the Protestants and the Catholics to fight over.
The bishop said, "Well, if you were in a town of 25,000 in the Midwest, there would probably be three or four of Methodist Churches there. All we want you to do is to start one. After all, the Lord said, 'Feed my sheep.'"
The Bishop somehow knows where my buttons are; I suppose that's why he's the bishop. But it's kind of hard to reconcile that old-fashioned sort of God-talk with the kind of education that I received in seminary. Some of my professors were positively offended by any notion of a personal God. To them, God is at most a "ground of being" or an "essence," and the Bible is just a collection of old stories written by savages. There were exceptions among the professors at the seminary that I attended, but not enough of them to help me past the shock of having my naïve faith kicked out from under my feet.
Somehow I survived it even though my marriage didn't. At the end, I was without a helpmate, 40K in debt and needed a job. Regardless of the state of my faith, there is precious little else that an M. Div. degree prepares you for besides being a minister, and so I went ahead and became one and in Provo, Utah to boot. Go figure.
And it was walking on 100 North in Provo that I first laid eyes on Enoch.
There is a little mainline Protestant enclave in Provo near the corner of 100 North and University Avenue. A United Church of Christ sits directly on the southwest corner and an Episcopal Church is a half a block west on the north side of 100 North. I had been there to visit the pastor of the United Church of Christ. She was a lady in her fifties more than ten years my senior, divorced, like me, but remarried, unlike me. Her once light brown hair was shoulder length and streaked with white, but she had made the decision not to dye it. More likely, she had failed to make the decision to dye it.
My hopes were that she would allow me to use the fellowship hall of her church as a location in which to hold worship services while I put a congregation together. To say that she was enthusiastic about the idea would be a slight overstatement, but there was that feeling of camaraderie among Protestants in Utah County that is hard to describe if you haven't been there. I suppose it is that way anywhere one group has a ninety percent majority.
"This is something that the board has to decide, and my congregation will be taking vacations on and off until after Labor Day," she said. "There is no point in even trying to meet until then." There was no hint that she was willing to simply let me meet there temporarily until a decision was made, nor did I think there would be, but that didn't surprise me. One of the first things they teach you in seminary is to never turn over control of your building to an outside group.
"Could you give me your number?" she asked.
I gave her the number of the basement apartment that I was renting, said goodbye, and left from her office door onto University Avenue. I was walking slowing while thinking about my next action. I could not wait until after Labor Day to start my church. For some reason, I was beginning to have a feeling of urgency. It wasn't from my District Superintendent or my bishop; it was somewhere from deep within myself that I hadn't felt since before seminary.
I reached the corner, turned, and started walking west on 100 North toward the place I had parked my car across from the Episcopal Church. When I had first arrived, there had been a homeless Japanese man asleep on the landing of the church. I had shaken my head and left him undisturbed, thankful that it was not my church, so I was spared the painful necessity of having him arrested for trespassing. I did not envy the Episcopal Priest, with whom I had a meeting later in the week, this heart-rending chore. When we are youngsters in Sunday school, we are taught the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, when you become a minister, you learn the realities of being the pastor of a church with deep pockets, in a litigious society. There are all sorts of legal problems that present themselves when you indulge in "random acts of kindness" like letting the homeless take up residence on your porch. The Good Samaritan would have been sued for his trouble.
As I looked down the street now, I saw that the Japanese man was now awake and been joined by another man who was carrying a walking stick and had a beard that was full, wild, and dark but salted with gray and whose head was topped off with a mop of curly hair, also salted with gray. With the hair, the beard and the walking stick, he would have looked like one of the prophets of old, but he was dressed in khaki, and as both he and the Japanese man were dressed a bit too warmly for the 100-degree weather, in the manner of the homeless, I took the newcomer to be a homeless person too. This impression was reinforced when I saw the newcomer reach into his left hip pocket and pull out a half-pint bottle of what appeared to me to be rum. He took a short swig, and then handed it to the Japanese man who then began to give his attention to the remaining contents of the bottle.
While the Japanese man drank, the newcomer turned left to empty space beside him and said with a booming voice, "Yes, Lord?" He nodded his head up and down as if receiving an answer, and then turned his body around to the right in order to look directly at me. Our eyes met, he set his jaw, shook his head as if not believing what he saw, and then turned back around to talk to the Japanese man.
The Japanese man looked up from his rum bottle, now empty, and then looked at me just as the newcomer had. A short conversation that I couldn't overhear passed between them at the end of which the newcomer left. I watched him walk half a block to the west and then turn north.
I walked over to talk with the Japanese man.
"Hello there," I said. "You know, if you keep sleeping on their porch, the Episcopals are going to call the cops. The priest won't have any choice."
"Yes, that's what Enoch told me," came the reply. "I'll be moving on now."
"Enoch," I asked, "is that your friend's name?"
"Yes," he said, "and he's got a message for you too. He said that you should put your church at the old movie theater."
/***/
At first I had been powerfully confused by the fact that a total stranger had known about my business, but upon thinking about it, I found an answer. The mentally ill and homeless are not necessarily stupid. In fact, many of them are quite intelligent and articulate. I've talked to homeless men on numerous occasions and have been stricken by the fact that some of them remind me of no class of human beings so much as my professors in college. They are articulate, independent, and absolutely certain that they are right. The most apparent difference is that one spends his days in the ivy-covered halls of academe, and the other spends his days on the street.
This fellow, Enoch, had obviously spent some time talking with the UCC minister before I arrived. This is what ministers do for the most part—right—talk with people. She had probably mentioned somewhere in the conversation that she was having a meeting with me about starting a church, and he, being intelligent though mentally ill, had correctly inferred my identity. In the manner of the mentally ill, he had simply interpreted remembering his earlier conversation with the minister as a current conversation with God. Simple.
This explanation came to me after a few moments thought, so I wasn't bothered by the seeming divine visitation for very long. Besides, I thought that I knew which movie theater he was talking about because I had passed an abandoned one while seeking out a grocery store when I first arrived in town a few days before.
I got into my car, and started driving west on 100 North. After a few blocks, I came onto a nearly deserted strip mall that had once boasted a theater. By all indications, the theater had evolved into a "dollar theater" and then into bankruptcy. There was now the number of a realtor in the cashier's window that I copied down.
When I got back to my basement apartment, I called the realtor and told him what I needed.
"Starting a Methodist church, huh?" he said. "My mother was a Methodist." He paused, possibly thinking warm thoughts about his mother. "Tell you what, you can have it rent-free until after Christmas at least. Clean it up and don't do any destructive remodeling, and you can use it."
I spent a few minutes with him discussing various aspects of liability insurance and the like, and when I hung up the phone, I smiled to myself saying out loud, "Well, I guess I have myself a church."
/***/
By Bobby Neal Winters
I still remember the very first time that I saw Enoch. I was on an almost empty city street with Y-mount rising at my back and Mount Timpanogos scantily clad in white off to my right. It was when I was fresh out of seminary and on my first assignment.
I had just finished up three years of seminary—which had cost me $40,000, a marriage, and most of my faith in God—only to be assigned to Provo, Utah. This is not the place that most liberal Protestant ministers would choose to be assigned, but if my seminary education had taken almost everything else away from me, it had not destroyed my sense of duty.
I was raised as the son of an old-style Methodist minister who had earned his ordination by going to "licensing school" for two weeks every summer and was of the tradition that you go where the bishop sends you regardless of your own desires, and Provo, Utah is where the bishop had sent me.
On the up side, Provo is in a beautiful part of the world. The Wasatch Mountains rise like a wall on the eastern half of the sky. During the bulk of the year, the 12,000 foot tall Mount Timpanogos lies like a princess sleeping under a white blanket that only gradually disappears as the western sun removes it like a lover. There are certain spots where you can stand for a short while and pretend that you are in a place that is being seen by man for the first time and then turn around see a metropolitan area of a quarter of a million people in a single glance.
That is where the downside comes in. It's not that I don't like cities. I do. They are great places for church growth. There is a myth in this country that rural areas are religious and great places for churches, but the data does not bear that notion out. It is the cities that are religious, and it is the cities that are great places in which to plant churches, because they are where the people are. The problem for a minister with Provo and the surrounding area can be summarized in one word: "Mormons."
I've haven't got a thing in the world against Mormons. They are as fine a group of people who ever walked the face of the earth. The problem, however, is that Utah County, in which the Provo metro area sits, is ninety percent Mormon. These people belong to a church already and one that has a pretty tight grip on them to say the least. That leaves about 25,000 people in the rest of the county for the Protestants and the Catholics to fight over.
The bishop said, "Well, if you were in a town of 25,000 in the Midwest, there would probably be three or four of Methodist Churches there. All we want you to do is to start one. After all, the Lord said, 'Feed my sheep.'"
The Bishop somehow knows where my buttons are; I suppose that's why he's the bishop. But it's kind of hard to reconcile that old-fashioned sort of God-talk with the kind of education that I received in seminary. Some of my professors were positively offended by any notion of a personal God. To them, God is at most a "ground of being" or an "essence," and the Bible is just a collection of old stories written by savages. There were exceptions among the professors at the seminary that I attended, but not enough of them to help me past the shock of having my naïve faith kicked out from under my feet.
Somehow I survived it even though my marriage didn't. At the end, I was without a helpmate, 40K in debt and needed a job. Regardless of the state of my faith, there is precious little else that an M. Div. degree prepares you for besides being a minister, and so I went ahead and became one and in Provo, Utah to boot. Go figure.
And it was walking on 100 North in Provo that I first laid eyes on Enoch.
There is a little mainline Protestant enclave in Provo near the corner of 100 North and University Avenue. A United Church of Christ sits directly on the southwest corner and an Episcopal Church is a half a block west on the north side of 100 North. I had been there to visit the pastor of the United Church of Christ. She was a lady in her fifties more than ten years my senior, divorced, like me, but remarried, unlike me. Her once light brown hair was shoulder length and streaked with white, but she had made the decision not to dye it. More likely, she had failed to make the decision to dye it.
My hopes were that she would allow me to use the fellowship hall of her church as a location in which to hold worship services while I put a congregation together. To say that she was enthusiastic about the idea would be a slight overstatement, but there was that feeling of camaraderie among Protestants in Utah County that is hard to describe if you haven't been there. I suppose it is that way anywhere one group has a ninety percent majority.
"This is something that the board has to decide, and my congregation will be taking vacations on and off until after Labor Day," she said. "There is no point in even trying to meet until then." There was no hint that she was willing to simply let me meet there temporarily until a decision was made, nor did I think there would be, but that didn't surprise me. One of the first things they teach you in seminary is to never turn over control of your building to an outside group.
"Could you give me your number?" she asked.
I gave her the number of the basement apartment that I was renting, said goodbye, and left from her office door onto University Avenue. I was walking slowing while thinking about my next action. I could not wait until after Labor Day to start my church. For some reason, I was beginning to have a feeling of urgency. It wasn't from my District Superintendent or my bishop; it was somewhere from deep within myself that I hadn't felt since before seminary.
I reached the corner, turned, and started walking west on 100 North toward the place I had parked my car across from the Episcopal Church. When I had first arrived, there had been a homeless Japanese man asleep on the landing of the church. I had shaken my head and left him undisturbed, thankful that it was not my church, so I was spared the painful necessity of having him arrested for trespassing. I did not envy the Episcopal Priest, with whom I had a meeting later in the week, this heart-rending chore. When we are youngsters in Sunday school, we are taught the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, when you become a minister, you learn the realities of being the pastor of a church with deep pockets, in a litigious society. There are all sorts of legal problems that present themselves when you indulge in "random acts of kindness" like letting the homeless take up residence on your porch. The Good Samaritan would have been sued for his trouble.
As I looked down the street now, I saw that the Japanese man was now awake and been joined by another man who was carrying a walking stick and had a beard that was full, wild, and dark but salted with gray and whose head was topped off with a mop of curly hair, also salted with gray. With the hair, the beard and the walking stick, he would have looked like one of the prophets of old, but he was dressed in khaki, and as both he and the Japanese man were dressed a bit too warmly for the 100-degree weather, in the manner of the homeless, I took the newcomer to be a homeless person too. This impression was reinforced when I saw the newcomer reach into his left hip pocket and pull out a half-pint bottle of what appeared to me to be rum. He took a short swig, and then handed it to the Japanese man who then began to give his attention to the remaining contents of the bottle.
While the Japanese man drank, the newcomer turned left to empty space beside him and said with a booming voice, "Yes, Lord?" He nodded his head up and down as if receiving an answer, and then turned his body around to the right in order to look directly at me. Our eyes met, he set his jaw, shook his head as if not believing what he saw, and then turned back around to talk to the Japanese man.
The Japanese man looked up from his rum bottle, now empty, and then looked at me just as the newcomer had. A short conversation that I couldn't overhear passed between them at the end of which the newcomer left. I watched him walk half a block to the west and then turn north.
I walked over to talk with the Japanese man.
"Hello there," I said. "You know, if you keep sleeping on their porch, the Episcopals are going to call the cops. The priest won't have any choice."
"Yes, that's what Enoch told me," came the reply. "I'll be moving on now."
"Enoch," I asked, "is that your friend's name?"
"Yes," he said, "and he's got a message for you too. He said that you should put your church at the old movie theater."
/***/
At first I had been powerfully confused by the fact that a total stranger had known about my business, but upon thinking about it, I found an answer. The mentally ill and homeless are not necessarily stupid. In fact, many of them are quite intelligent and articulate. I've talked to homeless men on numerous occasions and have been stricken by the fact that some of them remind me of no class of human beings so much as my professors in college. They are articulate, independent, and absolutely certain that they are right. The most apparent difference is that one spends his days in the ivy-covered halls of academe, and the other spends his days on the street.
This fellow, Enoch, had obviously spent some time talking with the UCC minister before I arrived. This is what ministers do for the most part—right—talk with people. She had probably mentioned somewhere in the conversation that she was having a meeting with me about starting a church, and he, being intelligent though mentally ill, had correctly inferred my identity. In the manner of the mentally ill, he had simply interpreted remembering his earlier conversation with the minister as a current conversation with God. Simple.
This explanation came to me after a few moments thought, so I wasn't bothered by the seeming divine visitation for very long. Besides, I thought that I knew which movie theater he was talking about because I had passed an abandoned one while seeking out a grocery store when I first arrived in town a few days before.
I got into my car, and started driving west on 100 North. After a few blocks, I came onto a nearly deserted strip mall that had once boasted a theater. By all indications, the theater had evolved into a "dollar theater" and then into bankruptcy. There was now the number of a realtor in the cashier's window that I copied down.
When I got back to my basement apartment, I called the realtor and told him what I needed.
"Starting a Methodist church, huh?" he said. "My mother was a Methodist." He paused, possibly thinking warm thoughts about his mother. "Tell you what, you can have it rent-free until after Christmas at least. Clean it up and don't do any destructive remodeling, and you can use it."
I spent a few minutes with him discussing various aspects of liability insurance and the like, and when I hung up the phone, I smiled to myself saying out loud, "Well, I guess I have myself a church."
/***/
