My Journey as a Recovering Racist

My Journey as a Recovering Racist

In Martin Luther King, Jr.”s eulogy for the six martyred heroines and heroes of the Holy Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama for freedom and human dignity, he said, “Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, Carol Robinson , Addie Mae Collins, Johnny Robinson and Virgil Wade have something to say to us.” “They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” (p96, Call to Conscience).  So the spilled blood of these children have served a redemptive force in my life.  Indeed this tragic event has been used by Jesus Christ to cause me to come to terms with my conscience as a white southern male and to struggle to transform my white supremacists church that is a part of the system of inhumanity and insanity that flows out of a non-Christian community that chose to deny Christ and turn our backs on John Wesley so our bishops could own slaves and created and supported Jim Crow segregation to maintain ab affluent life style on the backs of the marginalized and poor people of color in Alabama.  This non-Christian way of life and philosophy is still powerfully alive and well.  Pastors and lay people, Black, White, Brown and Red who struggle against this evil way we have inherited from our ancestors still suffer.  I write the story of my struggle with conscience and Church to encourage as many who will, to enter the struggle that will bring light and justice to Alabama and Birmingham so that we may lead the world into racial reconciliation and peace. 

As I break the bread of my struggle as one old white man in Birmingham, Alabama, may God continue to open our eyes that we may behold all of the reconciling work of Christ.  For God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self not counting our trespasses against us and giving us a ministry of reconciliation.

My journey in Birmingham began three years after the four little girls and two boys were killed.  I moved to Birmingham with my wife Nancy and our two sons, Lawton, Jr. and Kevin in 1966 to begin work as a power distribution engineer with Alabama Power Company.  I had just graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in Electrical Engineering that spring.  We rented a red brick house on the south west corner of Woodland Ave and 12^th Street in West End.  We joined the West End Methodist Church.

A white southern male working for Alabama Power Company and a member and soon to be leader in the Methodist Church I was swimming in a system created for my success and power.  A system defended by unbelievable violence; supported by the suffering of untold numbers of people of color.  I was blind and deaf to the cries.  Unconsciously thinking that this was the way God designed the world to be.  I was comfortably asleep in a satiny coffin of death.  Viet Nam and the Civil Rights Movement were not even on my radar.

Five and ½ years earlier in 1960 I had experienced a call to ordained ministry.  Lying on my bed in Huntsville Alabama, one day, I heard God say, “Lawton preach my word.”  God doesn’t try to talk you into something, God just speaks!   I tried to respond.  Nancy and I were members of Holmes Street Methodist so I immediately went to my preacher and shared the news.  I stepped into a void.  It was like the pastor did not know what to do with me.  He handed me off to a young man that had just started college that had also experienced a call to ministry.  He was preaching a revival in a small church on the outskirts of Huntsville and I was encouraged to go with him.  Before the service we would pray in a back room with long, loud prayers that I experienced as a effort to manipulate God into doing something that night in the revival that was the result of an emotional frenzy.  Confused and without clear direction from the church about what the “Lawton preach my word” meant I began to turn away from the call.

I received another unsupportive response from my family.  It was like I had gotten sick or something.  They seemed grieved that I would even consider this call as a valid endeavor at all, even though my family was multi-generational church folks.  My dad’s advice was, “Whatever you do don’t share this with the people at work.”  So I swallowed the call and completed an Electrical Engerning Degree at the University of Alabama and began a career at Alabama Power Company.

 

Birmingham’s West End was Bull Connor’s political support base.  He like me was a Sunday School teacher, he at Walker Memorial and Woodlawn Methodist Churches and I at West End Methodist Church.  Nancy and I had been active in the Methodist Church from the time we met at Alabama College.  Our first date was for an activity at Montevallo First Methodist Church.  We were members at Holms Street Methodist in Huntsville and Forrest Lake Methodist in Tuscaloosa.  Active in worship, Sunday School, and prayer groups.  Nancy was president of the Methodist Women at Forrest Lake when I was in school at the University of Alabama.

I remember one prayer group at Forrest Lake Methodist that was led by the Rev. Dick Wright.  We were studying E. Stanley Jones’s book Conversion.  In the process of that journey, I asked Dick if he could recommend some good books on the Christian Faith.  His response was, “Lawton have you tried the Bible?”  I had to honestly admit that I had not ever done any serious reading of the Bible.  Dick purchased a J. B. Phillips translation of the New Testament and presented it to me as a gift.  I consumed it!  Romans 12 in that translation became a daily fare for me. So it was not surprising that Nancy and I were soon Sunday School teachers, youth counselors and officers in the West End Methodist Church.

Each Sunday at West End Methodist had an amazing liturgical pattern, teach Sunday School, then discuss the Negro problem, and then worship God.  The high passion on Sunday was the Negro problem.  The passion was not about trying to achieve racial justice, but for the struggle to maintain racial injustice.  How are we going to keep these niggers in their place, out of our church and schools?  There were always plenty of stories to denigrate and discount Fred Shuttlesworth,  Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC.

It may seem surprising to you and it does now to me in retrospect, from where I stand now, that there was no feeling that supporting racial injustice was inconsistent with what we taught in Sunday School and our worship experience at Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.  It was an unspoken but well communicated and understood rule that only white heterosexual males with financial means were the only possible candidates for first-class Christian status.  This is still the creed of most white churches in the south today.  I want to be clear here.  I was not silent about all this then out of fear, while secretly wanting to speak up for racial justice.  I fully affirmed this unspoken but dominate part of our white male supremacist creed at West End Methodist Church.

I remember one Sunday that demonstrated our non-Christian creed.  A black man came to worship  with us.  The tension was so great that I can remember the pew he sat in today.  He was not asked to leave nor were police officers hired to keep blacks out in the future.  Our pastor did a creative thing in support of the white male supremacists creed by not giving an invitation to church membership that day.  It had been standard practice every other Sunday to open the doors of the church.  After worship we congratulated the pastor for his creativity.  And it became an unwritten policy in the future if blacks showed up no invitation to church membership.  It was not suprising, but I don’t remember any other black visitors.  They were conscious, I am sure of the lack of hospitality for black people at West End Methodist Church.

The remembrance of God’s call on my life would not go away.  It demanded action.  Somehow or another, I ended up with a copy of Richard Bach’s book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  The seagull’s struggle to be all that he could be moved me to give my call from God some air, to make it visible again, and to confirm its validity or emptiness.

My Dad’s words, “Don’t tell anybody at work about your call to ministry.” still rung loud in my ears.  The previous lack of support from the church and confusing nature of the little support I had received led me to conclude that sharing my call with the people I worked with needed to be my first action.  I shared my sense of call to ordained ministry and my desire to “give it air,” to test its validity with my supervisors and friends at Alabama Power Company. They were not surprised and reflected their support and also affirmed their appreciation of my work as an engineer. Next I shared my sense of call with my pastor. He affirmed his discernment of the gifts in my life suitable for ordained ministry and offered his support. I then made my call public at the end of a worship service on a Sunday morning. The pastors at West End Methodist were more helpful than the pastors at Holmes Street Methodist and got me connected to the District Board of Ministry to begin the process to become a licensed to preach, the first step to ordained ministry in those days.

 

My wife Nancy’s love, support and energy is an awesome gift in my life.  She had earned a PHT, Putting Hubby Through.  She had sacrificed much for me to earn my Electrical Engineering degree at the University of Alabama.  She had always wanted to get her degree in Elementary Education and teach school.  So part of my call validation work was to delay entering seminary for two years so that she could complete her degree.  Nancy enrolled in the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the School of Education to obtain an elementary education degree.  I became a house husband, as well as a Distribution Engineer with Alabama Power Company. I continued to work on my license to preach, caring for three children, our beautiful daughter Beth Ann was born in 1968, keeping house, working full time, and supporting my wife in college.  All of this was a good validation test for God’s call to all time ministry.

In the process of completing the requirements od a license to preach in the Methodist Church, I discovered that one of the primary components of the Doctrine of the Methodist Church is the Standard Sermons of John Wesley.  This was 1972.  I was 32 years old. A lifetime Methodist and I had never heard of the Standard Sermons of John Wesley! I thought it would be a good idea if I was planning to be a Methodist preacher to be familiar with this principal doctrinal source.  I tried to buy a copy.  One was not to be found.  There was not a copy at Cokesbury, the Methodist book store.  These were the days before Amazon.com.  I ended up having to order a copy of John Wesley’s Forty Four Sermons from Epworth Press in London England.

When my book of Wesley’s 44 Sermons arrived, I decided to make it a practice to read one of his sermons each morning.  The light of a Christian spirituality, biblical wisdom, and scriptural Christianity began to dawn for me.  I knew nothing of what Wesley was talking about.  I began an ongoing argument with him.  He would speak of free unmerited love and forgiveness and I would insist that you have to earn that.  Why was I doing what I was doing if not to put God in debt to me?  Or to manipulate God?  Faith as a sure trust and confidence in the merits of Christ and not as a set of opinions about the Bible was unknown to me.  I had no idea what the merits of Christ are.  This talk of inside religion, outside religion was foreign.  What is a religion of the heart anyway?  Or this talk of the Spirit bearing witness with my spirit that I am a child of God,  and if a child an heir, an heir of God and Christ.  That was outside my experience.  I had always thought the Holy Spirit stuff was about exceptional, out of the ordinary, thrill based religion.  But Wesley was saying the Spirit is given to give ordinary people the mind of Christ, to love God and all humanity as Christ loved us.  I thought that to be saved was not to go to Hell and to hope to go to Heaven, speculative stuff, based on holding irrational, illogical opinions about God and the Bible.  Wesley was saying that to be saved is to be saved from the effects and power of sin in everyday life here and now as the rational plane way to Heaven.

 

Then on Easter Sunday, 1973, after church, our family, Nancy, Lawton, Jr., Kevin, Beth Ann and I were with Nancy’s mother and dad at 167 Pinewood Ave. in Hueytown, Alabama to celebrate Easter with a family meal and fellowship.  After a great meal Nancy’s dad asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him.  We loved to fish together and had enjoyed many a day on the Warrior River and Lake Guntersville fishing for bass and crappie.  I was offended actually that he asked me to go fishing on Sunday.  I never went fishing on Sunday.  It was part of my righteousness!  So I got me a lawn chair and sat down in the backyard (the place would be under the back deck now) to read some more of John Wesley’s sermons.  When I finished the book of his 44 Sermons on Several Occasions I would return to the beginning and start over.  That Easter Day I was on the sermon, “The Righteousness of Faith.”  In what I read that day I saw, with God’s help, for the first time how foolish I was to think that I could put God into debt to me with my weak religious works. I understood that, “My very first step in religion was a fundamental mistake.” (p.67).  I thought that I could, by my own efforts earn my salvation from the effects and power of sin. I came to the conclusion by God’s help in Christ, that I needed help and could not help myself, I was helpless and that God was my helper by his free gift of grace.

While we are yet sinners, Christ died for us and that is God’s own proof of God’s love for us and that it is God’s will to freely accept and totally forgive all our sin even those I was unwilling to acknowledge to myself. I trusted this. It was like a dam broke and waves and waves of peace and love flowed over me and I knew I did trust the merits of Christ for my acceptance as a child of God and my forgiveness of God and that now I was free. 

The world changed for me that moment!  My eyes were opened to the redeeming and reconciling work of Christ.  Washed in the light of the insight of grace, I was also a free man in God’s love.  I no longer thought that I was saved by a set of irrational, illogical opinions about the Bible, Jesus or God. I was especially free from the bondage of thinking that there was some religious merit based on not going fishing on Easter Sunday afternoon.

So  got up and put away Wesley’s sermons for a while and found Papa (Nancy’s dad) and said, “Papa do you still want to go fishing?  He said yes and we were off.  We went to Bankhead Lake on the Warrior River.  I don’t remember if we caught any fish, but I have an eternal memory of the beauty of creation I experienced that day. I was filled with awe from the light on and in the water; the mystery of Spring on the cliffs and rolling hills surrounding the river still fills me with the glory of God.  I saw and loved God in all things, because God first loved me!

 

It was one of the best decisions of my life to put off seminary for two years for Nancy to complete her degree in Elementary Education.  It made her a full partner in our life together in serving the church and the world.  She began a new career when I began a new career.  But the gifts of delaying were more than Nancy’s empowerment, they were also many discoveries about God, God’s concerns and how God works in human life.  Of course, as I have shared I met John Wesley and through his teaching discovered the meaning of grac3e, faith and love.  What an eternal gift!  I also learned many other things.

 I discovered the truth that Jesus is the guardian and shepherd of our life and will met our needs as we follow his voice.  I learned this through a trumpet.  As the months passed following my giving my call from God some air to confirm its validity more and more people in the West End Methodist Church began to share their feelings with me.  They were sure that if I quit my engineering job with Alabama Power Company and entered ordained ministry in the Methodist Church I would starve to death.  I would not be able to feed or educate my family. They tried to convince me that I would be in a hopeless economic situation in which I would not be able to meet the needs of my growing family.  This question, “Would God care for me and my family if I follow the voice of God?” began to become an insurmountable obstacle to my confidence in God.  Will God care for me and my family in ministry or not?  Most of the people I had close relationships with in the West End Methodist Church were telling me no.  You better keep your good job and take care of your family and not take this God stuff too seriously.

The question of God’s provision for those who love and follow God cane down on me as a crushing weight of fear when Nancy and my middle child Kevin came home from school and announced that he wanted to play in the band and wanted to play the trumpet.  I checked out the cost of a trumpet at the music stores and it was clear that even with my current income I could not afford a trumpet, new or used.  The trumpet became an idol that was screaming at me, see I told you so, ministry is not an option for you!  Words cannot express the magnitude of the fear I was feeling and the power of the bondage to my status quo it represented.

During these days the question of God’s care for me and my family in ministry occupied the front of my consciousness with a growing hopelessness.  One Saturday morning I needed to have the oil changed in our car and get a haircut.  I took care of the maintenance needs of the car at a service station on Bessemer Road in Central Park located where the Goo Goo Car Wash is located today and a hair cut across and down the street a block. I left the car at the service station and walked across the street and down the block to the barber shop. Then to my surprise I noticed a trumpet in an open case in a storefront window with a for sale sign leaning against the case. The hand written sign that indicated the asking price had fallen over and I was unable to read the amount.  I started to go back to the door of the store to check on the trumpet and its price but quickly dismissed the idea and continued to the barber shop.  The whole time the barber was working on my hair I considered the idea of investigating the trumpet.  I was fearful of another disappointment and had decided that it would cost more than I could pay and did not plan to check it out.  But on passing the window I changed my mind.  Went in and got up my courage to ask, “How much is the trumpet?” The answer was $25!  I had $25 in my pocket.  I asked the storekeeper if I could see the trumpet.  He brought it over to the counter and when I began to open the case I noticed something carved in the plastic handle. There in bold black letters was the name, KEVIN!  I purchased the trumpet.  It was well used but all it needed was valve oil and valve cushions.  Kevin was playing the trumpet in the band.  The question of God’s care for me and my family was answered.  “God will take care of you!” was carved in my heart by the Holy Spirit.  The road to ordained ministry was the way I was now firmly prepared to continue to travel, trusting in the Lord!

The two years of patient endurance was a great classroom.  I learned that God in Christ cares for the poor, abused, marginalized sinner.  I met Maybell Lee one Sunday night driving home from church.  She was drunk sitting in the middle of the road not far from the West End Church; having stumbled and fallen on her way home.  I was appalled when I saw her face.  She looked like a cauliflower with eyes and ears. I learned later that this was from years of physical abuse from a deceased husband.  Her home was a small cluttered apartment attached to a house just across the sidewalk from where she fell.  I stopped and assisted her inside her door and made a quick acquaintance and hurried back to the car where Nancy and the children were waiting.  After that faithful night, I began to visit Mrs. Lee.  She was living on almost nothing, minimum Social Security.  She had never worked outside the home.  Maybell was a bright, good humored woman despite her difficult past and present conditions.  She had lived most of her life outside the church.  I began to assist and encourage her in ways that I could.

On Christmas Eve 1973, the West End Methodist Church was having its traditional live Nativity Scene at the Church on Cotton Avenue.  The youth group and children’s department were staffing the live Nativity Scene dressed in the traditional blue for Mary, a doll for the baby Jesus and wise men with the PA playing Christmas Carols.  Nancy and I were youth counselors and Sunday School Teachers so we were there with all our children.  About midway through the scheduled time for the live Nativity that night, I had an amazing consciousness that insisted that I leave the Nativity scene and go check on Mrs. Lee.  God doesn’t just suggest or argue, God speaks.  I told Nancy that I was sorry to leave her in a bind but it was clear to me, I had to go check on Maybell Lee.  When I arrived at her apartment an ambulance pulled up.  Maybell had just been dismissed from the hospital.  She had been the victim of an accident and was in a body cast from above the waist to the end of her toes on both feet.  The ambulance driver was planning to leave her alone, in that condition, unable to move or meet any of her needs.  She would have died a horrible death alone.  God’s concern for Maybell Lee on that Christmas Eve night spoke a lasting truth to me.  Jesus was born for that poor sinner and for all poor sinners.  I was able to make the connections to get Mrs. Lee the care required for her to survive.  Thanks be to God!

The two years I continued to work for the Alabama Power Company were exciting and productive years for me.  Everyone knew that I was planning to leave the company and enter ordained ministry.  I had several exciting engineering assignments during that time.  I headed up a work group to design an underground residential distribution crew truck and a work group to design the construction specifications for upgrading the power distribution voltage from 12.2 KV to 44 KV.  This was very exciting work for me.  I was a good engineer and enjoyed my work with Alabama Power Company.  I continued, however, to have a growing sense of call to the work of the distribution of the power of God instead of the distribution of electrical power.  One aspect of my experience with the Alabama Power Company that has continued to amaze me was the way so many of my co-workers reacted to me as an engineer and as a preacher to be.  Some enjoyed their off color jokes, both racial and sexual, and their common swearing.  When it dawned on them that I was a preacher to be, they were often embarrassed and would apologize.  As time went on they would acknowledge me and say, “excuse me Lawton, I know that you are planning to be a preacher,” and then go ahead with their disrespect of people and God.  I responded by saying, “It is not me you need to be concerned about offending, it’s the Creator of all who is in all that you need to consider.”  They acted if God was only an idea or a reality that lived only in a church building or that was completely absent from their everyday experiences.
 

There was one other work I had to accomplish before I left my employment with Alabama Power Company.  I had known people to be so punitive and unmerciful that it was important to me for the church to know me as a sinner, forgiven and accepted.  So I made an appointment with the then bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, Carl Sanders.  In the meeting I confessed my sins to him.  He did a beautiful thing!  He took a pencil out of his desk drawer and gave it to me.  He said, “Lawton you see this pencil?  I gave it to you, don’t give it back to me, you keep it, it is yours.  These sins,” he said, “you have given them to God, God will keep them and never give them back,  you are forgiven in Christ Name!  Go in peace and serve God in joy.  Bishop Sanders later ordained me as a deacon and elder in the United Methodist Church.

The two years passed.  Nancy graduated from UAB with a degree in elementary education in may of 1974.  I accepted a student appointment in the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church to the Shannon United Methodist Church.  Nancy and I, Lawton Jr., Kevin and Beth Ann moved to Shannon Georgia, a mill village north of Rome, Georgia.  Nancy obtained a job in the Calhoun County School System and she began teaching and I started seminary in the fall of 1974.

I served the Shannon United Methodist Church as the sheep for whom Christ died and they loved me and my family.  A mill village church in North Georgia is a radically different culture than a big city Methodist church in Birmingham, Alabama, and God loves us all, wants and cares for all.

Midsummer, before I entered seminary in the fall of 1974, a few of us remained in front of the Shannon United Methodist Church after Wednesday night Bible Study and Choir Practice discussing the things on top of our consciousness about Shannon Georgia.  A young man roared into the gravel parking lot in front of the church, stopped his car abruptly, acted as if he was going to get out of the car, then changed his mind and sped off in the old model car, throwing gravel around our feet and the front of the church.  As we were beginning to break up our conversations and leave for home, the young man drove up again.  He did get out of the car this time.  He came up to me with obvious signs of distress and fear on his face.  He blurted out, “If I don’t preach, I will go to Hell!”  “If I don’t preach I will go to Hell!”  I responded calmly, “We don’t preach to save our souls, we preach because God has already saved us in Christ Jesus.”  I entered into a dialogue with him to minister Christ to him.  To help him by faith to enter into the merits of Christ so he could respond to the call of God out of the power of peace and not from servile fear.  I never saw the young man again personally, but I did see him again in the faces and hearts of many I started to seminary with in the fall of 1974.  Some called the seminary a cemetery that they had to defend themselves against to keeping from dying spiritually.  Others were firmly set with closed minds, they already knew all the opinions they had to irrationally hold to be saved and were not going to change.  Their minds were a closed box.  They had God in their box.  There was nothing new for them. 

I was so grateful for the Standard Sermons of John Wesley.  I had learned that grace was the source of my salvation and faith was the means to that great end.  I learned that I was not saved by my opinions about the Bible or God. I had my Bible idolatry healed.  I no longer worshipped a book.  I worshipped the living God who created heaven and earth who was revealed in Jesus Christ as witnessed to through the Scriptures.  I approached seminary with awe and wonder and discovered how much I did not know. 

I was fortunate to have a common sojourner, the Rev. Dennis White in the process.  Dennis is from the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church and was appointed as a student pastor to the Andrews Chapel United Methodist Church.  Andrews Chapel was located just outside of Shannon , Georgia.  Dennis was educated as an aeronautical engineer so we had a lot of common educational and work experience prior to seminary.  We arranged to commute back and forth from just north of Rome, Georgia to Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia four days a week.  Either one of us had not had any biblical studies, church history, or theology courses in college.  We were really green and lost in the woods so to speak in our required Introduction to the Bible and History of Christian Thought classes.  We did not even know the vocabulary.  We purchased a theological dictionary and a tape recorder. 

We would tape our lectures, listen to them again on the way home and back to school.  We would pause the playback when we discovered a word or words we did not understand.  The one not driving would look up the words. We struggled to comprehend an entirely different structure and vocabulary to express truth and reality. It was exciting. The expression of theological truth and scientific truth were in radically different forms.  The answers to the theological questions were not in the back of the book.  It was painful, joyful, upsetting, stabilizing, deep journey as we grew and dealt with all the red marks on the papers and faced the professors comments like, “very immature!” 

Then came the assignment to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from the Birmingham City Jail.

“I guess it is easy for those who have never suffered the stinging darts of segregation to say, “wait.”  But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim;  when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity;  when you see the vast majority of your twenty million negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;  when you find your toung twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos; “Daddy why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you;  when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading, “White” and “Colored”; when your first name becomes “Nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ”Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments;  when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.  There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of injustice when they experience the blackness of corroding despair.  I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” (The Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr.; p292-293.) 

As I read these words, a required reading in a seminary course, I came face to face with the answer to King’s questions.

“ I have traveled the length and breath of Alabama and Mississippi and all the other southern states.  On sweltering summer days and crisp autum mornings.  I have looked at her beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward.  I have beheld the impressive outlay of her massive religious education buildings.  Over and over again I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here?  Who is their God?  Where were their voices when the lips of Govenor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Govenor Wallace gave the clarion call for defiance and hatred?  Where were their voices of support when tired, brused and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complancy to the bright hills of creative protest?”  (The Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr.; p299.) 

I knew where the voices of those churches were, I am one of those voices!  We were standing with George Wallace and George Wallace’s white washed Jesus.  A false Jesus we had created so our bishops could own slaves and so we could get rich and stay rich off of the backs of Blacks in bondage under Jim Crow.  We had killed John Wesley, who fought slavery until his dying breath, and buried his works in the ground and kept the historical Jesus in the tomb so that we could worship our white washed Jesus enthroned on a white lie we taught in Sunday School, celebrated between Sunday School and worship and used as an excuse to deny any Black participation in our worship services.  All this is evidence of our white righteousness, a building on the sand, a fabrication of our own creation in opposition to God.  I saw the lie!   I wept and wept and wept!  Bitter tears of one who discovered I was living a lie, not just any lie, but a lie opposed to God with “defiance and hatred.”

I discovered the power of the lie of white supremacy and the system it supported in 1976 when I went home to visit my mother and dad in Huntsville, Alabama for a holiday.  I casually made the comment that, “black children can learn as well as white children.” In response to some information we heard on a TV show.  My dad flew into a rage like I had never experienced before.  He passionately contradicted my statement of equality in louder and louder tones.  I defended my statement, “Black children can learn as well as white children.” The next thing I knew we were in the back yard.  My dad was beginning to show signs of possible physical aggression towards me.  I thought he was going to hit me.  He held back, but screamed, “Get your wife and kids, and you get out of my house!”  So we left in a big hurry.  Through months of correspondence and years of communication, I was welcomed back home.  My dad mellowed in his racial attitudes into a place of acceptance of blacks but not to a place of equality.  My dad and I continued to struggle with a framework of perception that determined that only whites held the status of full worthfulness.  We had been born into in this religion of white racism in central Arkansas. This framework of perception was imbedded in us at church and in our families of origin.  We swam in a culture of a false reality that there are second class human beings and skin color was the measure of basic created worthfulness. It is deep, soul deep.  There will be many who read this who will find themselves standing with my daddy in the back yard defending a lie.  I hope and pray my work will cause some to see the equality and justice of God in everyone born of a woman and make this truth an incarnate reality in all the earth.

Sexual Orientation and the Marks of the New Birth

I signed up for a course entitled, “Human Sexuality” in the last semester of my seminary work in 1977, at Candler School of Theology.  Toward the middle of the semester our professor announced that the pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church would be our guest lecturer for the next week and that he had invited him to preach at our chapel service.  He informed us that the pastor was openly gay and was in a committed same sex marriage; and that the Metropolitan Community Church was a church whose membership was predominately composed of openly gay, lesbian and transgendered people.

It was a major step for this white southern churchman to study human sexuality in its most culturally accepted forms.  I had never had a sex education class from anybody in family, church or school and now this openly gay man was going to talk to us about homosexuality.  Totally out of bounds!  My first reaction was to drop the course and run.  Homosexuality was an evil act and an abomination to God in my view and my tradition.  All hell and hate broke loose at Candler when the word got out about this perceived invasion.  Attempts were made to prevent this gay pastor from coming to our class and to prevent him from preaching in chapel.  Pressure came from the seminary administration, Emory University, and the United Methodist Connectional leadership.  Thank God that academic and religious freedom partiality won the day.  The openly gay pastor was allowed to come to speak to our class and to lecture in chapel.  He could not preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ; he could only lecture in chapel.  This was the compromise that was reached for him to participate at this United Methodist seminary.  This encounter with an openly gay pastor was the hot topic in the Candler campus for the week preceding the arrival of the Metropolitan Community Church pastor.

Homosexuality and Christianity was a raging contradiction in my consciousness for sure.  Homosexuality was nothing but an ugly act of multiple sex partners that took place in public restrooms.  How could any homosexual be Christian?

Wesley’s teaching, confirmed by my experience, that the grace of Jesus Christ is the source of our salvation kept me connected to the class.  Thoroughly convinced that there was no way this homosexual pastor could have any relation to Christ I began to think about how I could prove my conviction about homosexuality and Christianity to myself and others.  Still deeply influenced by Wesley’s Standard Sermons, his sermon “The Witness of the Spirit” came to mind.  (Sermon #10, Romans 8:16). In that sermon Wesley makes the point that our spirit bears witness that we are children of God in the following way; the Bible gives clear marks or characteristic of the children of God and that we as conscious creatures can identify those marks in our lives and in the lives of others.  Therefore when we see the biblical marks of a Christian in our lives and in the lives of others we can be certain that we are children of God. 

Based on this insight, I decided that I would confirm my convictions that this gay pastor was not a child of God by showing that he did not demonstrate the biblical marks of a child of God.  Wesley identifies two primary sets of the biblical marks of the children of God, the beatitudes and the fruits of the Spirit.  I thought that the fruits of the Spirit would be simpler to identify in the short time frame that we would have while the gay pastor was at Candler.  I made a chart that had the fruits of the Spirit across the top; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control (I knew I would get him on self-control) and the name of our professor, the gay pastor, the chapel leader, and other prominent seminary faculty and administrators on the left side of the paper.  So all prepared with my assumptions and my chart, I was anxious for the day to arrive when I could expose the gay pastor’s hypocrisy.

The class on human sexuality began.  There was no peace in the room or peace demonstrated by our professor.  He introduced the gay pastor, detailing the distress, conflict and compromises around the gay pastors presence on campus.  No fruits of the Spirit for him at that time.  The gay pastor however was at peace with himself and the context in which he found himself, expressed gratitude for the opportunity and began to patiently teach and respond to our questions.

The first thing he taught was that homosexuality was an identity not a behavior.  That was amazing to me that homosexuality or sexual orientation could be about being not about activity.  He went on to teach us that there were homosexual people in committed heterosexual relationships, celibate, committed same sex marriages and in abusive, destructive multiple partner same sex relationships.  He pointed out that the same variety of human sexual activity was true for heterosexual people.  What a diferent view this was from the unexamined one that I held that every human being was heterosexual and that homosexuality was an evil undisciplined multiple partner sexual activity that was carried out by perverts in public restrooms. He also pointed out that as a pastor in the Metropolitan Community Church of Atlanta he was opposed to abusive, multiple partner sexual relations whether it was by homosexual or heterosexual persons.

This gay pastor shared with us that the church he served had a strong street ministry in Atlanta.  In that ministry it was their experience that when men and women on the street were converted to live in and be transformed by the grace of God in Christ they made significant discoveries about their sexual identity.  These new or renewed Christians were mentored to become disciplined in their sexuality.  Some who were involved in abusive multiple partner homosexual relations discovered that they were heterosexual ; others confirmed their homosexual identity and all were disciple to be in disciplined relationships that reflected their sexual orientation and to refrain from sexual intercourse outside of a lifetime committed relationship.

My chart was beginning to reveal conclusions radically different from the preconceived notions that I was planning to confirm.  I did not rush out of class that day.  It took me a few minutes to absorb what I had seen and heard in that class.

Chapel began not long after the human sexuality class that day.  The professor who presided at the chapel service introduced our speaker and made it crystal clear that self-avowed practicing homosexuals were not allowed to preach in the United Methodist Church.  To ritually demonstrate that position with absolute clarity our chapel leader walked up to the pulpit where a huge pulpit Bible lay open.  He then with expansive gesture slammed it shut.  A loud “Wham” resounded through the chapel.  He then turned to our speaker for the day.  The gay pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church then stood up and began speaking about God’s love for all.

The chart that I had devised for the condemnation of another human being showed that it was the one I had prejudged who had become the only one that had the only marks that I could clearly identify as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control. My eyes were opened to see the unexpected and free Spirit of God.

I graduated from Candler School of Theology in the spring of 1977 with a master of Divinity degree.  I was ordained an Elder in the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church that June.  I was appointed to serve the Coaling and Woodstock United Methodist churches.  They were located between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.  Preaching, Bible study, choir practice and pastoral care was nowhere close to a fulltime work load there. I was very much into church growth there. It was the current trend in ministry. It was mostly assimilating folks who looked and thought like you into church membership.  That was a limited field to harvest and there was not much success.  Both congregations were family congregations with a long history in their communities.  Even with two churches it was not much of a work load.  I missed the stimulating engagement with the seminary professors and other students.

One of the leaders in the Woodstock UMC was the principal of the Brookwood Elementary School.  He was looking for teachers and was impressed with Nancy and encouraged her to apply for a teaching position there.  Her application was successful and she began teaching there in the fall of 1977. She continued to teach there in the Tuscaloosa County School System until she retired in May of 2000. 

Nancy had been active in the United Methodist Women since we married.  She had served as the president of the unit at Forrest Lake United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa while I was in the Engineering School there. We were now back in the Tuscaloosa District and Nancy became connected with the District and Conference United Methodist Women again.  One of the United Methodist Women leaders at the Woodstock United Methodist Church served on the District Mission Team.  She asked Nancy if she would take the district office of Christian Personhood as the result of a mid-year resignation.  Nancy agreed to serve in that position.  Nancy’s sister Harriett Ann Williams was serving on the Conference Mission Team of the United Methodist Women at the time. She also served on the North Alabama Conference Cooperative School of Mission Planning Team. The North Alabama Conference Cooperative School of Mission had never taught the “How to Teach Mission to Children.”  Harriett Ann being aware of Nancy’s skill as an educator and her passion for the needs of children recruited her to begin teaching the children’s studies in North Alabama. Nancy began teaching them in 1978 and continued for many years.  Nancy’s excitement about this mission education opportunity and our conversations about the powerful experiences she was having at Regional Schools of Mission began to trigger a great deal of interest in me.  Aware that I could meet my need for continuing education credits by participating in the Conference Cooperative School of Christian Mission, I began to develop a strong interest in participating.  I attended the Cooperative School of Christian Mission as the teacher’s husband in 1979. I was deeply enriched by the quality of the courses and highly inspired for the global mission of the church through the experience.

After one of the plenary session that year the Rev. Austin Boggan challenged me to lead a Volunteer Mission Team to Iquique, Chili to rebuild a Methodist Church building that had deteriorated to the point that it had been condemned by the local authorities and could no longer be used by the church for worship, study and fellowship.  Austin shared the need of the church in Iquique and the responsibilities of a Volunteer In Mission Team Leader with me.  The building project was exciting to me and resonated with my engineering experience.  I knew I could handle the construction work and team leadership.  When I worked for the Alabama Power Company I had served as the team leader for two Alabama Power Company line crews that were deployed to the Mississippi coast following hurricane Camille and understood how to manage and direct that work for several weeks.  I was very successful in the effort.  However Alabama Power Company supplied the personal and resources for the task.  For this Volunteer In Mission Work I would have to recruit the personnel for the team and financial resources for travel and construction materials.  The magnitude of those tasks seemed absolutely impossible to me.  I told Austin that I would pray about it; which was more of a response to delay saying no, than any commitment to see if it was the will of God for me.

I was moved to find a quiet place to pray about this challenge to lead a mission team to Chili.  I went to the Elna Sanderson Deck behind the Eva Walker Lodge there at Camp  Sumatanga where our Schools O Christian Mission were held.  I sat on the built in benches on the deck under the short leaf pine trees growing out of the large rocks behind the deck.  Prayer for me is more about listening than pleading, interpreting rather than manipulating.  In the quiet there I looked up into the limbs of the short leaf pine trees and saw an amazing sight.  There were some small spiders in the limbs of the trees.  They were jumping off of the limbs of the short leaf pine tree on my left and spinning a thin single strand of web behind them and the light breeze that was blowing was carrying them to the short leaf pine trees on my right.  One after another they would jump and sail to the limbs of the adjacent tree.  I was lost in awe at their willingness to risk such a thing.  Then impressed on my consciousness was this word from God, “Lawton if those spiders can trust me to ump and sail from one tree to another, you can trust me to carry you to Chili and back.”  Empowered by that word from God, I got up to go find Austin and tell him I would accept the challenge to lead the Volunteer In Mission Team to Iquique Chili; but before I got off of the Elna Sanderson Deck, God said something else to me, “Lawton you see that freshly poured and set concrete side walk around the side of the Eva Walker Lodge?”  I said, “Yes.”  God said, “Lawton can you trust that sidewalk and walk on that sidewalk?” I said, “Sure, what a silly question, of course I can.” Then God said, “Lawton you can trust my Word, you can walk on it.”

Immediately after that School of Christian Mission I returned home and began to make the needs of the Church in Iquique, Chile known in every channel of relationships I had in the connectional church of the Tuscaloosa District of the United Methodist Church and beyond.  I communicated the cost of the mission trip for travel and other related expenses for each individual team member and the total amount of construction money we needed to raise for the project. It was a joyful experience to participate in the response God gave in accordance with the promises received on the Elna Sanderson deck behind the Eva Walker Lodge at Camp Sumatanga.  The team was filled with the number of missioners with the needed skills and the full amount of construction money was raised.  At the appointed time we landed on the air strip in Iquique Chile, where we were met by Kay and Ed Bowers, the United Methodist Missionaries serving the Iquique English College, a secondary school established by the United Methodist Church.  Most importantly we were received in love by the church community there.  In a foreign country, a foreign culture, with a foreign language we were at home in Jesus there.  We worshipped together, we sang together, we ate together, we worked together; an awesome spiritual experience.

The construction task we had been assigned was to pour the foundation for the new church building.  The members of the Iquique church were to have taken down the old building and cleared the site for the foundation work.  When we arrived the demolition work had not been started much less completed.  Their old church building was a too significant part of their past for them to have the capacity to take it down.  Our presence gave the gift to move beyond the past into the possibility of a new future and together we took the building down. 

Iquique Chile is located in the Atacama Desert where it never rains.  It was a completely new and challenging experience to be in a barren mountainous desert where it never rains. In Iquique it never rains.  This is so radically different from Alabama where all the mountains are covered with trees.  Because there are no trees all the wood for building had to be shipped in by boat.  The lumber for the old church building came to Iquique as ballast for the ships that would carry copper and other raw materials back to the West Coast of the United States.  That lumber was a precious thing.  We took it down one piece at a time, removed the nails and stacked it for use in the new building.

Iquique is located on the beautiful Pacific Ocean surrounded by the desert mountains.  One evening after a hard days work we climbed one of the mountains with no trees south of the city. Most of the trip was made by car.  At the end of the road we made another 200 yards or so and found a place to worship together.  It was an evening whose beauty was beyond words. It was the time of the full moon.  As we celebrated the Lord’s Supper together we experienced a Holy Communion with one another, the Lord and all of His creation. The huge full golden moon was rising in the east over the Andes Mountains and the flaming red sun was setting in the Pacific Ocean.  Below us to the north was the jewel of the city of Iquique with its lights beginning to sparkle as it sat above the sand dragon at the foot of the mountain.  We knew ourselves to be one in the Lord.

At home again we told the story of the love and joy experienced by risking ourselves to be sent on a mission of the Christ.

A year or so later Bob and Rosa Caufield, General Board of Global Ministries missionaries to Bolivia were itinerating in their home conference, the North Alabama Conference. At the time they were serving in the Alto Beni region of Bolivia.  At one of their mission interpretation programs at a church in the Tuscaloosa District, Bob shared that they were in need of electricity at the dormitory for the mission school located about a mile and a half from their mission home.  The children there had to study by candle light in the evening; a considerable barrier to their success in school.  At the end of the program I shared my business card with Bob and my history as an electrical power distribution engineer and my willingness to put together a United Methodist Volunteer In Mission Team to help with the work of installing a power system to meet his needs.

It was not many months later that I heard from Bob.  He had purchased two used diesel powered 120/240 volt electric generators from a US contractor who was building roads in Bolivia.  Bob wanted me to organize a Volunteer In Mission Team to come to Bolivia to install the generators and build the power line and install transformers to get electricity to the children’s dormitory. I agreed to come.

Following the pattern of team development and fund raising for the Iquique project, I went to work.  The team came together including a diesel mechanic and a good number of hard working men and women.  The required funds were raised.

When we arrived in Bolivia we discovered that the US contractor had sold Bob a pile of junk.  The diesel engine and generators were slap worn out. We finally got one of the two grnerators to run using parts from the other.  We build the mile and a half of the overhead single phase power line with a ladder truck we build ourselves on an old flatbed truck with an engine with a head that Bob had glued together with super glue so that it would run using untreated poles. The children had lights at night for a while, how long I don’t know.

We met some wonderful Bolivian people; a pastor and his wife who worked night and day serving the needs of the sheep for whom Christ had died.  They lived in a small one room house with a dirt floor.  They taught me what being a servant of Christ means. Their faithfulness reoriented my ministry to serving the needs of the poor and marganilized and not seeking a career among the affluent.  The Letter from the Birmingham City Jail began to make a great deal more sense to me in this context.

I had a deeply held stereotype that South American people were lazy people.  That stereotype was shattered on this trip as I observed strong dedicated people working from dusk to dark raising pineapples on the sides of steep mountains.  I understood how blessed we are in Alabama to raise crops on flat rich river bottom land.  Their productivity was not limited by their lack of intelligence and hard work; it was limited by the natural resources at their disposal and the left over junk they had to work with.  I had washed in the pool called sent and could see new realities (John 9).

During this time I was grateful to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for the privilege to serve as the Chairperson of the North Alabama Conference Task Force for United Methodist Volunteers in Mission.  I worked with the Rev. Tom Curtis who led the Southeastern Jurisdiction United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (SEJUMVIM).  We received guidance from them to ensure the effectiveness of our North Alabama UMVIM Teams and to make connection with Christian communities in third world countries that were interested in receiving volunteer work teams to strengthen their ministries of love and justice.  The SEJUMVIM was an invaluable resource. The annual gathering at Lake Junaluska was a great spiritual joy and technical resource for all of us involved in this lay mission of the church.

The Spirit of Christ places a yearning in all our congregations to be in mission.  How could it be otherwise given the Great Commandment and the Great Commission?  Ms. Mary Jack McNeal, a member of the McCoy United Methodist Church in Birmingham had parents that were missionaries and in their memory regularly gave money to a mission fund at the McCoy Church.  The money accumulated across the years and was never used. Rev. Tom Curtis with SEJUMVIM made us aware of a need in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.  The church there needed help building a school for children in one of the more seriously economically depressed areas of that city.  Mary Jack and the McCoy Church were willing to use the mission fund to provide seed money for the project.  Dr. Neal Berte President of Birmingham Southern College was also interested in the project and wanted Dr. Stewart Jackson, Birmingham Southern College Chaplain to participate to gain invaluable experience as the college was preparing to develop their international service learning program.  The team was successful in all of its goals. 

Members of the team stayed in the homes of the members of the church in Santo Domingo.  I had the privilege of staying in the home of a professional accountant.  Every evening after dinner he would share with me the pain of the economic oppression of the people of the Dominican Republic by the multinational sugar corporations based in the United States.  He showed me from every angle why the people of the Dominican Republic could not work their own land to raise sugar cane, but had to work for the multinational corporations at starvation wages.  He demonstrated to me over and over why the harder they would work on their own land the more money they would lose and would eventually lose their land if they worked it.  The price for seed, fertilizer, equipment, the interest rates on loans, the monetary exchange rates, the tariffs, and market prices were controlled in such a way to guarantee that they would lose money on every pound of sugar, no matter how many pounds they produced.  I think about the lessons I learned in the Dominican Republic about economic justice every time I buy cheap sugar at the grocery store.  I also renew my commitment to the mission of the church as justice not charity. 

Reverend Curtis with the SEJUMVIM made me aware of need in Juarez Mexico. They needed construction teams to help build a school for children in their city.  We were beginning to take more seriously the need to build relationships and understanding with the church community that was requesting Volunteer In Mission assistance before we began recruiting teams.  This reconnaissance work would help in our ability to share love for one another across cultural barriers and to enable more efficient and effective work to complete the projects. Harold Wilson, a member of the Forrest Lake United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa was active in our conference VIM Task Force.  When he heard about the possibility of a project in Juarez Mexico he suggested that we do a road trip, driving to Juarez, to check out the work and begin building a strong relationship.  I agreed.  Beth Ann, Nancy’s and my daughter wanted to make the trip with us. So we arranged for her to get out of school for several days, an excused absence because of the educational value of the trip to Juarez Mexico.  So we got up early and left.  Harold’s religious orientation bordered on what Jon Wesley termed enthusiasm. He had the three of us listening to the whole New Testament on tape as we traveled in his car across Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.  Harold had family in Dallas Texas and we spent the night with them and were off again.  We made the border crossing without any difficulty and arrived in Juarez.  There was great need there.  United Methodist Volunteer In Mission work purified my conscience to see and feel the call to support the worlds peoples struggling to be all they could be.  The project there was a very large one.  It was beyond the resources that we could provide at the time.

We made a discovery there that broke our hearts.  This heartbreak also contributed to our decision not to accept the project for the North Alabama Conference UMVUM.  A US corporation had donated steel beams to be used for the ceiling joists in the construction of the building.  The community in Juarez had discovered that the steel was radioactive.  It could not be used.  If it were used all the children would have ben exposed to harmful levels of radiation while they were in school.

We were warmly received by the church there and shown loving hospitality.  They treated us to a wonderful lunch.  We ate at a small local restaurant.  We were served the most delicious chicken soup.  The finely chopped vegetables, green onions, celery, tomatoes yellow and green squash were brought to us in heavy round well-worn ceramic bowls.  Then they served the boiling rich well-seasoned chopped boned chicken and broth that was ladled into the bowl over the vegetables, creating the most awesome chicken soup one could ever desire. After lunch we spent some time in local shops purchasing some souvenirs. Then we were off for the long ride home.

After Juarez came the Jones Chapel United Methodist Church in Jackson Gap Alabama.  Jones Chapel is a historically and totally Black United Methodist Church in the North Alabama Conference.  The condition of that church facility, the fruit of the 1901 Alabama Constitution and the Jim Crow it made legal, was worse than anything we saw in Chili, Bolivia, The Dominican Republic and Mexico.  The roof leaked rivers of water when it rained.  There was a potbellied stove in the center of the sanctuary for heat.  The building was unpainted, bleached gray by the weathering of the years.  The building was sitting on square brick foundation columns that gave the appearance that one shove and it would fall into a heap of rubble. The wooden steps were warped and broken, the hand rail wobbly.  This facility was holy ground for a vital worshipping people, where they expressed their love to God and were strengthened by the Spirit in their struggle for life.  They requested a new modern building for their community.  We said yes!

Jackson Gap Alabama is located east of Lake Martin, north of Dadeville, just east of Highway 280.  In developing the structure to organize the volunteer in mission teams needed to construct a new church building for the Jones Chapel United Methodist Church we made an appointment with the pastor and lay leadership of the Dadeville United Methodist Church to make arrangements for work teams from around the North Alabama Conference to stay in their fellowship hall as they contributed skill and labor for the construction of the new facility at Jones Chapel. They declined to host the work teams.  The fundamental reason for the decline was their fear that there might be some black people on some of the teams.  They did not want blacks in their church.  This response is typical of many if not most white United Methodist Churches in the North Alabama Conference.  When it comes to racial inclusiveness, our conference and its lay and clergy leadership is more faithful to defending the values of the 1901 Alabama Constitution than defending the values and teachings of Jesus and the apostles. Based on the response of the Dadeville United Methodist Church we decided to recruit teams that were in driving distance for a one day work time or to teams that could use campers that could be parked on site.

In many ways the Jones Chapel project in Jackson Gap was the most challenging project that I had the privilege to organize.  In a sense the North Alabama Conference United Methodist Volunteer In Mission Task Force (NACUMVIM Task Force) was the organizer of the work teams and the fund raiser, as well as the host organization for the work teams.  Local projects always carry this double burden and require extra time and effort. The church or agency receiving the teams has to be organized and trained to receive teams and the work teams have to be recruited and trained to do the work and the money has to be raised for construction materials and travel.  The capacity of a volunteer organization to effectively accomplish all this detailed and important work is never adequate and causes difficulty and creates serious problems that have to be overcome.

Prior to the NACUMVIM Task Force’s involvement in the project, other groups had prepared the ground and constructed the forms for a concrete slab to be poured for the new building.  A careful visual investigation of the forms and site preparation for the slab indicated that it was in good shape.  We then began raising money and recruiting the teams needed to complete the concrete slab.  We were successful.  The required materials were purchased and we arrived as early as possible to put down the reinforcing wire and be prepared for the cement trucks that were scheduled to arrive by 12N.  We met our schedule and were ready to pour.  1PM arrived and no cement trucks.  We called and they informed us that they were behind schedule but would be on site before 2:30PM.  Thirty minutes after we called a huge thunderstorm blew in.  It poured rain, a real gully washer.  The team that was to pour and finish the slab left.  “They are certain to not bring the concrete in the rain,” they said and headed home.  It did not rain in Alexander City at the cement plant.  We called to try to cancel, but the trucks were on the way.  30 minutes after the pouring and finishing team left the two cement trucks came rolling up the gravel road to the construction site.  They would not take the cement back.  We had to pay for it whether we used it or not.  They would dump it on the ground there at the site if we did not put it in the forms. 

The two of us that were left looked at one another and said, “Well let’s try to pout it.” The hard rain had made the construction site a muddy, slippery place.  The cement trucks could only get to the front right corner of the forms.  We had to use wheelbarrows to move the cement to the back and other side of the forms.  That was the hardest day of work I have ever done in my life.  I expected to fall dead and be buried in the wet heavy cement at any moment.  Moving wet cement with wheelbarrows and hand shovels and finishing it with long handled wooden finishers is exhausting work.  We finished and were finished about dark.  We collapsed and had to rest an hour before the drive home.

A month or so after we finished the slab the team showed up to put up the walls and trusses for the building.  Mid-morning the day they arrived I received a call from the team leader.  He said, “Lawton did you know the back right hand corner of the slab you poured is 8 inches lower than the front left hand corner?”  “We can’t put the walls up on that slab.”  I was devastated and heart sick.  They said they were headed back home.  I was depressed for days.  The good appearance of the forms and preparation for the slab had caused us to accept without checking the level of the forms with a transit.

With the help of the Lord and the support of the NACUMVIM Task Force leadership strength was regained, money raised, teams recruited to form up and re-pour the slab to make it level.  The form was well checked this time and an adequate crew was present to pour the level slab.  It was poured on top of the unlevel one making sure the thickness on the high corner was adequate to keep it from flaking off.

The team we recruited to put up the walls and trusses had suggested to me that they could build the trusses for the building for much less expense than purchasing prefab ones.  After much consultation we agreed for them to proceed with the plan for them to build the trusses.  They assured us they had built a lot of trusses like the ones needed for the Jones Chapel facility.  They completed their work and it looked good.

Two or three months later the team arrived to put on the siding and roof decking for the building.  I got a call that morning from the team leader.  “Lawton did you know the trusses have sagged and the walls on both sides of the building are out a foot and a half. It looks like the whole building is ready to fall in.”  They said they would stack and cover the materials on the slab and asked me to call them when I figured out what I was going to do.  I was not ready for another such call.  I was ready to give up on the whole project.  But after a few days I gathered my strength and drove down to Jackson Gap to check out the situation.  It was like they reported it to be.  I called a dear friend and longtime builder and UMVIM team leader, Mr. Ed Cowden from the Palmerdale United Methodist Church for help. Ed had led many UMVIM mission teams to Haiti for many years.  Ed figured out a way to use cables to pull the walls plum and to reinforce the trusses so that the framing would have the necessary strength to hold up the building.  The team returned and put on the siding and roof decking.  The windows were installed and the electrical wiring completed.  The building was finished and dedicated.  It provided a dry warm and safe building for the Jones Chapel United Methodist Church in Jackson Gap Alabama to worship God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and to fellowship in the Holy Spirit. 

I am sure that many projects all over the world suffered the deficiencies and challenges faced at Jackson Gap Alabama.  But all of them, like us were grateful for the gifts and services offered.  And by the support of the Holy Spirit and the Grace of God in Christ Jesus working through it all needs were met for the world house of the family of God.