Last summer I took a sabbatical and wrote a book about my first three years as pastor of Triune Mercy Center. If you’d like to take a look at the prologue and get back to me with comments, critiques or advice on potential publishers, please write me at deb@triunemercy.org.

Thanks for your input.

Deb

Prologue

            I had the dream again, the one where I’m in the back seat of a speeding car and it dawns on me there’s no one driving. Somehow the car remains on the road but I don’t know how, and the scenery whizzing by paralyzes me.

            I see a red light, and look around frantically for oncoming cars. There are none and my car whooshes through the intersection. My heart is hammering and I wonder if I should climb over the seat to take control, but I’m confused and heavy-limbed. I see a curve ahead and I panic, but the car hugs the white line and races on. Apparently the hairpin has triggered a ringing, and I turn to look behind us for a police car, maybe, or an ambulance. But no, those vehicles don’t ring, exactly, do they? My mind is foggy and I can’t figure out where that ringing is coming from.

             I rolled to Vince’s side of the bed, and clawed my way to consciousness, the ringing rising to the surface with me. Vince was already in the dining room, eating cereal and reading the newspaper, but our bedroom remained coolly shadowed. I could have slept another three hours on this Thursday off, if not for that ringing.

            “Hello,” I answered, my voice groggy.  

            “This is the alarm company. The alarm at 222 Rutherford Street has been activated. A police unit is on the way.”

            I groaned. I’d been on the job just eight weeks and this was at least the eighth time the alarm had gone off. Squirrels, it seemed, could set it off. Mice. Spiders. Not to mention, men.

            The facilities manager typically got the first call, but he was on vacation, so I tugged on a pair of jeans and a lightweight sweater. The morning looked foggy and gray, though it was late September, a summer month in this part of the South. I brushed my teeth and ran my fingers through my hair, not bothering with make-up.

           As I drove the seven miles from my house in the suburbs to the church just blocks from Main Street, the scenery changed from trimmed lawns and shaded houses to industrial buildings, windowless bars, a nursing home, abandoned gas stations. The closer I got, the deeper the dread settled in my stomach. I hated this job. I hated the creaky old church building. I hated what I’d gotten into, and I was close to hating God for getting me into it.

            I repeated a mantra I used to soothe myself. Eight weeks down, and what, maybe 30 to go? Forty-four at the outside. I doubted I could last a year.

            The early morning traffic was brisk on four-lane Rutherford Street, pronounced Rul-therford, a denizen of Old Greenville corrected me recently, rolling the absent “l” in his throat. I’m sure he summers on  Pawley’s – make that Pahhwl-ee’s – Island, which prints bumper stickers declaring itself “arrogantly shabby,” if that tells you anything.   

            Old Greenville passed this church every day. But it didn’t stop.

            The red brick sanctuary was handsome, especially compared to the three-story education building with its broken windows and rusted air-conditioners discoloring the façade in green streams. It was a brave little church, too, hanging on in this outpost of a dying mill village; I’d give it that.

            Rutherford Street was separated from the sanctuary stoop by only a sidewalk’s width and a strip of dead grass. No one was stirring at the Salvation Army Thrift Store across the street, but Tommy’s Country Ham House next door was filled with a breakfast crowd of businessmen, blue-collar workers and retirees getting their day started with bacon and eggs, toast and grits, coffee and conversation.

            I parked in the pitted lot behind the church and trotted up the sidewalk and around the corner to the sanctuary’s side door. This morning’s alarm was not the work of critters. Someone had kicked in the heavy wooden door, splintering the doorjamb. Someone, no doubt, who had eaten in the church’s soup kitchen, taken clothes from its clothes closet, received groceries from its pantry.

            A police officer met me at the broken door, and together we entered the chapel, hushed and lovely even with its leaky roof, streaks of mildew and blistered plaster. Despite the dimness, I could see that the brass cross and offering plates were undisturbed. The stained glass windows picturing the tablets of the Ten Commandments, Jesus in Gethsemane, and pinwheel designs in blues, golds and reds, were untouched. The honey-colored pews were as they’d been the previous Sunday, only vacant now of sleeping bodies reclined against bedrolls.

            The young policeman and I walked in silence down the maroon carpeting past the raised stage where the wooden pulpit stood, flanked by the thrones that pass for chairs in the world of religious furnishings. A paneled door leading to a rear hallway was flung open. There we found what the burglar was after – a plain, waist-high cabinet of cleaning supplies. Bottles of floor cleaner and cans of Pledge tumbled over the wood floor.           The policeman raised an eyebrow.

             “He was looking for something to huff,” I said.  

            He nodded, and asked what I wanted to do about the busted door. He then waited outside while I ran down to the basement and found a board, hammer and nails. He and I pulled the listing, gray door into its shattered doorjamb, and he pounded the board snugly across.   

            He stepped back, and smiled sympathetically. “Are you gonna be all right?” he asked. I swallowed the lump in my throat, and made a mental note to call the police chief and tell him how kind this young man had been.

            I leaned against the brick wall of the breezeway, where the smell of urine wafted through the morning mist. I stared at the ugly patch job, and wondered: What kind of church nails its doors shut?

            That would be the Triune Mercy Center.

            And I am its pastor.

           April 20, 2010
              On a sunny Sunday afternoon in May 2005, I was awarded a Master of Divinity degree.

            Master, mind you. I was no longer a dabbler in divinity, but a master.

            As it happened, I was at the beach just hours earlier. I woke before dawn, tugged on black pantyhose and my all-purpose funeral/wedding/cocktail party black dress and rushed to Erskine Seminary in Due West for the ceremony. The housemates I left snoozing, friends of 30 years, would happily tell you I’m not a master of humanity, much less divinity.

            But what do they know? Three years of theology, ministry and Bible, and in the eyes of higher education, I had mastered this divinity thing.

            So why do I hear Jerry Seinfeld in my head? Can you really master divinity? Isn’t the point of divinity that it’s over our heads? Just a tad out of our reach?

            I’m with you, Jerry. The understanding, the mastery of God’s identity, is totally out of our reach. Anyone with an M. Div. will tell you it provides just enough information to let you recognize your inadequacy.

            That’s why this on-the-job training is so fascinating. A pastor friend, staring balefully at a Christmas tree standing in his fellowship hall weeks after Christmas, lamented, “They don’t teach you in seminary who takes down the Christmas tree.”

             I’d add a few items to that list.

            They don’t teach you in seminary:

• How to pace a sermon’s dramatic pauses so they’re not filled by snores from the back pew.
• How to persuade the greeters to come into the sanctuary at 11 AM, rather than stand outside during the entire service.
• When to counsel and when to prosecute. A kicked-in sanctuary door? Burglary entrance through the coal chute? Stolen chain saw?

            I may request a refund.

            Church is important in Greenville. A well-traveled friend once said it was the only city she’d lived in where people asked not, “Where are you from?” but “Where do you go to church?”

            It’s probably a sneakily polite way to ask, “Are you a Christian, or shall I began evangelizing you right now?”

             I suspect we have more of our identities wrapped up in our church families than people from other areas do.

            Many of my current church family live on the street or in pay-by-the-night motels, or at best, in boarding houses. They don’t have cars or insurance or mortgages or fine clothes. They walk to church, often with everything they own in a backpack or duffle bag.

            But I have to hide a smile each Sunday morning when we pass the offering plates.

            From my seat up front, I see all the scurrying.  Some of the pews don’t have enough people to pass the plate, so the ushers miss them and then the people chase the ushers down to put in quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies.

            I know a lot of those pockets leave the sanctuary empty.

            After one service, I found a note in the plate. Written on a torn scrap of notebook paper were these neatly penciled words: “I have no money. But you have all my prayers and thanks for all you do for me.  May God be with you.”

            There’s not a pastor I know – or not one I respect, anyway — who wouldn’t treasure that offering above all others. I know I do.

             I tell you all this by way of introduction, for I will be writing in this spot every once in awhile. Clearly, I haven’t grown yet into the robe, the stole, the degree and ordination certificate hanging in my office. And I may never do so.

            But we need each other, this wounded flock and I. And they will undoubtedly help me to change and grow.

            Already, they have changed my name.  I was Deborah the first 22 years of my life, then Deb after my name wouldn’t fit in the narrow columns of 1970s’ newsprint.

            Now I’m Pastor, Rev, Pastor D, Pastor Deb, Reverend Moore, and my personal favorite, Preacher Debbie.

            I’m tempted to tell my parishioners to cut it out, to just call me “Deb,” but then I see the openness and trust on their faces. They need a master of divinity – even when there’s no such thing.