This “steeple dropout” didn’t tell me to stay in this small steeple, but he came close. Whether I decided to go or to stay, he said, “The issue is not right or wrong, justice or injustice, good or bad. It’s human tragedy, and in a tragedy you can’t take up sides. You just have to minister to the hurt wherever you find it.” He continued: “Maybe some of your church members are assholes, but God loves them, and us, anyway,” echoing the words that became among his most quoted.
“Well shit!” I thought. This was harder than I realized. I sat in a pew of that country church one night and cried some more.
Of course I made the pilgrimage up to his cabin in Mt. Juliet, outside of Nashville. I spent the day with him and William Stringfellow, who was also visiting and who further subverted my hopes of becoming a successful large-steeple pastor.
The result? For the last twenty-four years I’ve been the shepherd of a small steeple. After reading and believing what I learned from the likes of Will Campbell, Wendell Berry, and the rest, what choice did I have? About the time I came to Nacogdoches, I also linked up with five other Texas clergy to form “the Neighborhood,” a group named after Will’s small band of radical believers in The Glad River. Like the friends in the book, our friendship has renewed us, kept us sane, and even saved some lives.
I learned a lot about being a pastor from Will. I learned to hold the institutional church lightly, even a small one, and not take myself too seriously. As he liked to say, “God is God, and we’re not.”
I learned that no ministry, no service, no action is the gospel of Jesus Christ if it is not incarnated in flesh and blood community, relationship and friendship. For me, that means keeping it small, living in hope in the midst of tragedy, and ministering to the hurt wherever we find it.
At the conclusion of The Glad River two members of that Neighborhood bury the third member, and one gives this eulogy: “We had good times together. And bad. We laughed together and we cried together ... We confessed our cares in unlikely places. We worked and piddled, sat on rushing riverbanks in the hills, and whiled away many a summer afternoon on sleeping bayous. We read books and learned to talk like each other, argued about trivial things and took hard counsel together about the things that mattered ... But mostly ... we just loved one another.”1
Will was this friend for me. He died just a month before his eighty-eighth birthday. I’ll cry one more time.
1. Campbell, Glad River, 373.
Texan and Comanche
Kyle Childress
One of my earliest memories, faint and vague, is of being held by one of my parents at the dedication ceremony of a monument out on the north edge of my small West Texas hometown. It was 1959 and I was three years old, but we were there, along with most everyone else in town, for the unveiling of the Mackenzie Trail Historical Marker commemorating the 1874 route of Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and the US Army Fourth Cavalry as they journeyed across northwest Texas toward the High Plains and the defeat of the famous and feared Comanches.
As a kid some of us would occasionally ride our bicycles out to the monument to reread it and talk about it. Somewhere nearby, less than 100 years before, the Fourth Cavalry camped on their way to fight the Comanches. In a town where the biggest event was the coming of a Dairy Queen, this was momentous. Our place meant something. Something important, at least to us, had happened where we lived and somehow or another it gave our small-town lives significance. On the way home, riding bicycles as fast as we could, we reenacted the battles between the soldiers and the Comanches. Of course, none of us wanted to be the Comanches.
Faulkner famously said, “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” Living in the early 1960s in that small west Texas town I was surrounded by the memories of the past. It seemed close enough that I could reach out and touch it, or at least listen to people face-to-face who could. My grandparents had not been alive at the close of the frontier. Indeed, neither were my great-grandparents, who were born in the decade after the removal of the Comanches and Kiowas to reservations in Oklahoma, but they had grown up dreading the nights with a full moon, known as a Comanche moon, for that’s when the Comanches preferred to raid the scattered farms and ranches. Stories of those fear-filled full-moon nights were passed along to their children and grandchildren. Even eighty or ninety years after the last Comanche had left the country, I didn’t hear, “My, look at that beautiful full moon,” from my grandparents, but “It’s a Comanche moon,” still carrying memories of the old dread.
On the nearby Clear Fork of the Brazos our family knew an old retired cowboy living in a decrepit cabin that had a den of rattlesnakes under the floor. Known to me by way of my grandfather as “Mister Bob,” he was over eighty, wore a large Stetson and boots that came up to his knees with spurs, and he didn’t pay the rattlesnakes any mind. Once asked by my uncle if he shot the rattlesnakes frequently found on his front porch, Mister Bob replied rather matter of factly, “No, I don’t waste shells on rattlers. I just stomp ’em.” Once Mister Bob rode his horse down to our campsite by the river and sat around the fire drinking scalding coffee. I was spellbound listening to his stories of cowboying before the turn of the century. There were times, he said, back during his youth when elderly Comanches would ride through the country looking for one last buffalo and remembering their own past back when West Texas belonged to them.
Years later, as a young Baptist preacher-in-the-making, I went to work for the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America based in Atlanta. By this time, I was more interested in the racial issues of the Deep South, justice and peacemaking, the nuclear freeze movement, and working with the homeless. The dusty West Texas plains and memories of cowboys and Comanches were far away. We had a Peace Fellowship board meeting at the historic Koinonia Farm in South Georgia, the home of Clarence and Florence Jordan, radical Baptists who lived out the call of Jesus of justice and peace. Clarence had long passed, but Florence was still around and we spent half a day listening to her tell stories of Koinonia and the work of reconciliation. Later we went around the circle of board members introducing ourselves. Across the way was a short, barrel-chested black-haired man, an American Baptist pastor of a Native American church in Nebraska. He introduced himself as a full-blooded Comanche from Oklahoma, and as soon as I heard him say that, my hair stood up on end. When the introductions came to me, I said I was from West Texas and he snapped his head, staring at me. As soon as we had a break he made a bee-line to me. “So you’re a Texan? From West Texas? You know that’s Comanche country.” No threat made or implied; just a simple statement of fact but made without a smile and to the point.
I turned red and my mouth was dry. “Yes, I know. Your ancestors and my ancestors were enemies.” Here we were, two brothers in Christ, both Baptist preachers, but one Comanche and one Texan and the past, my past, his past, our past, had suddenly intruded into our present. Nervously, I made a motion with my hand of a snake wiggling through the grass, something I had heard as a boy. He nodded. “That’s the sign of the Comanche. It’s a snake.” He smiled, “And it’s also the sign of peace.” And I smiled, breathing a little easier, “Yeah, I figure we could use some peace between us.” He reached over and we embraced, and he said, “Let’s go over and drink some iced tea and you tell me about how that Comanche country looks nowadays.”
I swear that iced tea tasted like Communion wine.
Two Christianities
Kyle Childress
During a haircut my barber asked me, “Do you believe that