AIA letter for January

Associates in Advocacy
http://www.aiateam.org
January 6, 2009

Dear Bishop,

At the end of my first year at Perkins (1959), I visited the North Texas Annual Conference to see how they operated. Despite the thousand delegates present, the bishop granted the floor to only ten people during the plenaries I observed. Albert Outler, of course, four big church pastors, and five DSs. No laity. No other clergy.

The June before I left for Perkins (1958), I was ordained Deacon at the Wisconsin Conference whose delegates numbered about 500. I spent a day observing there before the ordination. During the course of business, a friend who had been ordained Deacon the year before was recognized and rose to speak to the matter on the floor. A few minutes later, following a report by one of the DSs, a minister rose and in a diplomatic manner, severely criticized the report while the DS was still at the podium. I saw the two men laughing over lunch together an hour later.

Rev. William Blake, my pastor during high school and college, was conference historian and I asked him about the difference between the two conferences.

“I can’t tell you how that Texas conference operated during the 1930s. But let me tell you what we did during the Great Depression. Even before President Roosevelt took office, things were very bad in the rural and small town areas of our conference. The churches serving those areas were really struggling to pay their bills and to pay their pastors. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be serving churches whose incomes were still fairly strong set up a fund which was then distributed to help pay the salaries of the pastors in the struggling churches.

“The best thing about that was the collegiality that developed in our conference among the ministers. The relationships between the older better-off pastors and the younger struggling ones continued as some of those younger ones received more financially solid appointments. They continued the sharing with the new pastors who joined late in that decade.

“That program ended in 1945 as the war economy improved everyone’s lot. But those last ones who benefited never forgot and passed along the collegiality to this day.”

My conversation with Rev. Blake was in the early 1960s.

By 1980, nearly all those pastors were retired and with them went that memory of the close bonds they had experienced because of the grace shown among clergy during the Depression. That memory’s impact lasted fifty years.

In the covenant of the clergy,

Jerry