I am sure that all of you enjoyed our anniversary celebrations as much as I did. We're all indebted to Grimes and Patti Byerly for welcoming us into their lovely home. It was certainly an ideal location for our celebration and the weather and surroundings were ideal. Several people at the party asked me questions that lead me to use today's, homily time to tell you just where I am coming from and how we got this far. So pardon the personal reference but I feel that you deserve the details. I am sure that you will feel the Holy Spirit in action throughout this story as much as I do.
My early church experience was a strange mixed bag. My father was the son of Lutheran minister, and he earned his living teaching at a Lutheran sponsored college. My mother, on the other hand, was the daughter of an English emigrant. Her father came to this country from England as a teenager. After my mother's mother died when she was quite young, she and her father moved into a boarding house owned by two English spinster sisters. So mother grew up attending the Episcopal Church with them. When I was a youngster my father attended the College Lutheran Church, St. Andrews, and my mother and I went to the Episcopal Church, where she also played the organ. I had two older brothers, seven and 11 years my senior. My oldest brother, Richard, had chosen to join the Episcopal Church. Dad caught so much criticism from his father and the higher-ups at the college over the decision that he was not about to let that happen again. My next older brother, Bill, willingly joined the Lutheran Church but he attended Holy Trinity Lutheran where several of his friends attended. When it came time for me to be confirmed I wanted to go Episcopal but my dad said,” no way!”. “As long you live under my roof and eat at my table you will be a Lutheran.” I raised such a stink about it that we had a family meeting it was decided that from then on we would all attend Holy Trinity Lutheran Church together. So I was confirmed a Lutheran.
To his credit my father gave me a book of common prayer for my 21st birthday and inscribed it,” be a good Christian where ever you choose to worship.” I didn't wait till I was 21 though, as soon as I went away to college I started going to the Episcopal church, and participated as an acolyte and crucifer etc.
When I graduated from UNC I went on active duty in the Navy and married young lady who grew up in the Baptist Church. I did have the nerve to request that we use the marriage rite from the 28 book of common prayer and she and her minister agreed to that request.
It must have worked as we're still married to each other after 56 years.
After the Navy we went to Atlanta for dental school and while there we didn't join any particular church, we just visited around. And after dental school we settled in Charlotte. We visited several churches in Charlotte. Some Lutheran, some Episcopal, but after visiting St. John's Episcopal we both agreed that it felt like being at home so we joined there and attended confirmation classes together and were both confirmed in the Episcopal church there.
I soon became very active there, lay reader, hospital visitor, vestry, Sunday school teacher. I am proud to tell you that I was the first lay reader to get permission from the Bishop to administer the Chalice in the Diocese of North Carolina. I was so involved there that my wife complained about the time that I spent away from home and family. She actually said,”you spend so much time out there why don’t you go to seminary and become a priest?” I don't think she actually expected it to happen.
After our children were grown and gone, my father died and left mother alone here in Hickory and she insisted on staying on in her own home alone. Anyone I hired to stay with her she ran off rather quickly. So we decided to move back here to Hickory where we could at least be close by. I sold my practice in Charlotte to a young man who had been my associate for several years. After we moved we chose to join St. Albans church and I was soon very involved there. Soon after that I heard about the permanent diaconate and after attending the ordination of a Deacon I was inspired and decided that that was what I had been called to do all along. As a prerequisite I completed the seminary course from Sewanee, University of the South. I met with a lay committee and the Bishop and the Diocese psychiatrist and then I attended several overnight discernment weekend meetings. at that time the procedure was at the second discernment weekend meeting the committee would give you a decision as to whether to proceed or not. The second overnight that I attended ended in something of a debacle. An attorney from Asheville who had not even attended the Friday afternoon questioning sessions came in just in time for the committee meeting Saturday morning and stormed in. He said, “I don’t think we should approve any of them because we have too many deacons already." I think that he stampeded the committee. So the powers that be decided to approve only two of the 21 candidates at that meeting. Both of them were from Morganton. The male had his own particular focus of ministry that he called the towel ministry, it was a sort of footwashing Ministry for the homeless. The other was a female, whose son was homosexual, and her focus was supplying a support group for her son and his friends.
Because I felt a lack of support we moved our membership to Ascension and I started all over again. At an early committee meeting it was suggested to me that I meet with the aforementioned Deaconess to find out what being a deacon really meant. When I failed to contact her for an interview I was informed that they felt that I was not spiritual enough for the diaconate and they advised me to stop pursuing it. In other words you're not liberal enough for us.
Not too long after that I attended a class reunion of my dental school class. At the reunion I started talking with a classmate of mine and for some reason or another he asked me if I was very involved in my church. From here on you simply must feel as I did the Holy Spirit at work.
I told him the story of offering myself and being denied. He said that was a strange coincidence, that he was about to be ordained a deacon in the Anglican church in Winchester Virginia. He invited me to come up for that service. For some reason I surprised him by driving up there to Virginia and attending his ordination. As you know ordinations attract large numbers of clergy and at the reception following the service I got to meet and talk with his bishop and other clergy of his diocese. I was very favorably impressed with each and every one of them. I sensed in them a genuine spirit of godliness.
I came home from there and prayed often and at length about what I should do. I seriously wondered if I was truly called for this or if it was just an ego trip trying to undo the wrong that I felt had been done to me. One evening while I was praying about this I distinctly heard,” they need you.”
So I wrote to the Bishop and started the discernment and training. Bishop Clark asked the priest in Columbia South Carolina to be my mentor and he and I worked together. He suggested a reading list and asked me to write a homily and deliver it in his church in Columbia South Carolina. I took and passed the written exam given by the examining chaplains at a Synod meeting down in Georgia.
At a subsequent meeting of synod I interviewed with the examining chaplains and passed their oral exam, The Bishop said that I was approved but he didn't like to ordain deacons just to have them floating around with nothing to do and so he would ordain me only when he had some particular place to put me to work.
Not too long after that he called about a church in Durham North Carolina that needed some help. They were being served by two retired Episcopal priests who alternated with each other. The former Bishop of one of those priests found out what he was doing and threatened him with the loss of his pension if he didn't stop. So the Bishop asked me to replace him. I went for several months as a lay reader, reading morning prayer but soon after that the parish asked the Bishop to ordain me so I was ordained to the diaconate at St. Mark's Anglican church in Durham North Carolina in 1998. That group grew to the point that they could afford to pay a full-time priest and so when he came on board the retired priest and I were no longer needed there.
Pretty soon the Bishop called me about another situation. A retired priest in Landrum South Carolina had started a parish but his health dictated that he needed to cut back on his every Sunday service so I started driving down to Landrum every other Sunday and alternating with him.
This went on for a couple of years and I guess the people there tired of having just the deacons mass every other Sunday so they requested that the Bishop ordain me to the priesthood and he agreed so on October 1, 2005 it was done.
My wife's unlikely suggestion came to fruition.
All during these years Jim Besse had been needling me and bugging me to do something here in Hickory. I didn't have anything else to do on those off Sundays so I gave in to him. We got permission from the Bishop and with his blessing we started looking for a place. Jim provided the initial capital for us to get started, the proceeds from a pickup truck that he had sold. We settled on an elementary school and signed an agreement with them. A note in the Bishop's biweekly newsletter about our start up caught the eye of someone in Florida and he contacted his daughter here in Hickory and we got our first member that way.
Jim Besse and I interviewed a reporter from the newspaper and we got a little bit of press from there so with a great leap of faith and a push from the Holy Spirit we had our first service on the second Sunday in August 2007 in the gymnasium of Oakwood school. It became obvious pretty soon that we could not afford s these accommodations. The school system was charging us $100 a week for that space and they also required us to have some expensive liability insurance.
Because of my college connections I started inquiring about some classroom or meeting space that we could use out here. The person in charge of scheduling uses of college spaces said that since we were a church organization I would have to go through the college chaplain. I made my pitch to him and he agreed to think about it. In a few days he called and suggested that I contact the pastor of St. Andrew's Lutheran Church. I must say the people of St. Andrew's have been very hospitable and kind and generous to us. We found the perfect place to worship and to grow.
I have to admit that when I read about the Anglican Church in Pinehurst who worshiped in a Lutheran Church and now have moved into their own building, And I see the church in Winchester Virginia who met in a Baptist church now having their own building, I wish we were growing faster but I realize that everything will happen in God's own good time. The Holy Spirit is working so far and we must trust his timetable. AMEN