“Speaking Southern”
One of my goals in retirement has been to write a book about each of the six churches I served during my active ministry.
In 2023, I revised and expanded my first book on the small church I served in Carthage, Tennessee, titled It Don’t Get Any Better Than This. Last year, I wrote Pew & Pavement about Compton Heights Christian Church, my first full-time church in St. Louis (1985-1989).
I just completed Gone to Carolina about Jennie’s and my nine years (1989-1998) at First Christian in Wilmington, NC. Here’s a sample chapter that tells of my bumbling effort to discern my call there.
“Speaking Southern”
I called Jennie from the hotel after my interview with the search committee.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“This isn’t the place,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t understand these people.”
My midwestern ears had not acclimated to the southeastern North Carolina dialect. I had to make a similar adjustment seven years earlier while a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School when I began serving Carthage Christian Church (average worship attendance 15) in Smith County, TN, sixty miles east of Nashville. The first Sunday I preached, Miss Margaret, the church’s organist since the Great Depression, invited me to lunch.
“Preacher,” she said, “if you’d be so kind as to carry me to the restaurant down the street, it would be my pleasure to buy you a plate of the best fried chicken around.”
I took one look at Margaret, a woman of generous proportions, and envisioned myself in coat and tie walking down Main Street cradling an octogenarian woman in my arms. Thankfully, she noted the puzzled expression on my face and explained what it meant to carry somebody somewhere. I breathed a sigh of relief, opened the passenger door for her, and drove down the block for a delicious Sunday dinner. Afterward, I carried her home, my first lesson in Southern vernacular complete.
More lessons followed. When I floated a harebrained idea for the Carthage church to Johnny Wray, my Mississippi born and bred colleague in nearby Oak Ridge, he told me curtly, “That dog won’t hunt.” When he explained, I kenneled the idea in the back of my mind.
“Y’all” I understood without interpretation and used in place of my customary and less mellifluous “You guys.” “Over yonder” and “fixin’ to do something” needed no translation, either.
“Bless your heart” was a different story. My friend and colleague Gary Straub, in Chattanooga at the time, explained how the meaning of that phrase depends on the pronouncer of the benediction’s appraisal of the person being blessed. It could be a sincere expression of affection or a genteel way of calling someone a blithering idiot.
In time, I became more fluent in Southern thanks to serving churches in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky and my Virginia born wife translating for me. I understood and spoke phrases like “full as a tick,” “tore up,” “hankerin’,” “piddlin’,” “hug your neck,” “Well, I s’wanee,” “cattywampus,” “hissy fit,” and “The porch light’s on, but nobody’s home.” But that first day in Wilmington I was linguistically illiterate. I couldn’t understand those people. The search committee likely noted my cluelessness and went home shaking their heads, muttering, “Bless his heart.”
After I returned to St. Louis, Harvey called. The search committee was unanimous in wanting me to return, this time with Jennie. I balked. In a bid to buy time, I told Harvey I would share the invitation with Jennie and get back to him. I then commenced pacing around the apartment, hands in pockets, head wagging from side to side, sighing.
“Your head’s going to come unscrewed if you keep shaking it like that,” Jennie said. Turning to our three-year-old, she added, “Will, I believe your daddy’s about to come undone.”
My incessant brooding was a sour sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible struggle. I was in discernment. “I don’t know what to do,” I’d mutter aloud. I took long walks through Tower Grove Park, made charts listing pros and cons, and scribbled elaborate decision trees to no avail. I was stymied.
Seeking advice, I called my brother-in-law, a pastor older and wiser than I. After I hemmed and hawed about how far Wilmington was, how inadequate I felt, and how I couldn’t understand those people (David is a native North Carolinian), he asked a question.
“David, do you know the story of Abraham?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Do you teach it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you preach it?”
"Yes.”
“Do you want to live it?”
“Huh?”
“Sometimes God calls people to pack their bags and journey to a distant country.”
“Oh, pu-leeze. Don’t start quoting the Bible!”
We both laughed.
“Well played,” I said.
That should have been game, set, and match. But it wasn’t. After several more laps around the apartment, I picked up the phone, called Harvey, and declined the invitation to return. Thud.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, “but I respect your decision. We sure wish you, Jennie, and Will the best.”
I thanked him for his understanding and told him I’d send a letter explaining my decision. After I hung up, I wrote the letter, signed, sealed, and addressed it, then put on my running shoes and went for a long, aimless run. Wanna get away?
Before leaving for the church the next morning, I placed a letter addressed to First Christian Church Search Committee c/o Mr. Harvey Jarman on the kitchen table. I told Jennie, “Put a stamp on this and put it in the mail for me.” I went to the church, into the sanctuary, and sat in my normal spot six pews back, lectern side, where the mid-morning sun streamed in from the southeast – the direction of Wilmington. I no sooner sat down than I was overwhelmed by the feeling I had made a mistake. The feeling did not abate.
When I went home for lunch, I told Jennie what happened. “I think I made the wrong decision,” I said. “I wish I hadn’t left that letter for you to mail.”
She got up from the table, walked into the next room, returned, and without saying a word, placed the letter in front of me.
“You didn’t mail it?”
“I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t?”
“Something stopped me from putting it in the mailbox.”
I suspected it was the same Something I had experienced in the sanctuary.
I called Harvey that evening and got straight to the point. “Harvey, I told you yesterday I had decided to decline further conversation. I made a mistake. Would you be open to my reconsidering?”
“David,” he said, “Take a few days to think it over. Call me back when you’re ready.”
I’ve been in ministry forty-three years now. I still strain at understanding God’s dialect. Discernment is difficult. But I can tell you from personal experience that when we cannot understand God’s call or when we do understand it but resist it, God persists – whispers, woos – until we understand and respond rightly. And I can also tell you that sometimes God speaks in Southern.
I called Harvey the next day and told him Jennie and I would be honored to accept the invitation to visit Wilmington together.
“David,” he said, “I know I speak for the search committee when I say we’re delighted to hear that. Let’s set a date.”
Bless his heart. I wanted to hug his neck.
