Five Rooms and a Path

On Tuesday I went to a retreat center in the middle of the state to spend a few hours with a group of retired Methodist ministers.

Because of unrelated events of the day before, I was under a lot of stress when I arrived. But within a few minutes I began to feel better. A big reason for going was to participate in a morning workshop called "Telling Our Stories." Most of these people are older than I am and I'm afraid that when they're gone the personal stories of what it was like to be a Methodist minister in the old days will go with them.

The stories about early parsonages are pretty scary. Traditionally, in the Methodist Church a minister and family go where the bishop tells them to go and live in the parsonage (furnished house) that is provided.

In the past I've heard wild stories about outhouses. A couple of years ago a couple told about living in a little house with no running water. The minister shaved every morning on the front porch in front of a mirror that had been nailed to a post for that purpose - while waving to his parsonioners walking by on their way to the fields.

A woman told about living in a house that "slanted." The first night they piled boxes against a wall and the next morning they were against the other wall.

And then another person said, "Yes, I remember, I lived in that house too."

There's a church in Florida where, for many years, a lady baked a lemon cake for the minister and delivered it to the parsonage. Every week. For many years. To every minister. Sometimes at this gathering there's talk about how many lemon cakes must be buried in the back yard of that parsonage.

On Tuesday there was talk about "dunking." In the Methodist tradition converts are sprinkled but occasionally - especially years ago - people would request immersion. Lots of funny conversations from these old ministers about how many people they almost drowned before they got the hang of it.

One wife told about how a family in the church just didn't like her so they went to the bishop and asked that SHE be moved - but they wanted her husband to stay. The bishop told them, to their disappointment, that the system didn't work that way.

My Real Husband and I came along a little later, when parsonages had much improved and Methodists hardly ever asked to be dunked.



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