Our arrival in Kansas City presented us with a few challenges. The first was getting settled in the preacher’s house. Ask anyone who has ever lived in this arrangement, and they will tell you that it presents some unique challenges.
We arrived in Kansas City two or three days before our furniture did. We slept on the floor and in lounge chairs, and we prepared sandwiches from groceries we had in the ice chest. When our furniture did arrive, some of it was damaged. It made us long for the good old days when we moved in a cattle trailer and didn’t damage any of our belongings.
When Ann entered the house, she was disappointed to say the least. She actually sat down on the floor and cried. She immediately saw problems that I had missed when I did a walk through at the house during my interview.
Throughout much of our lives we’ve lived in parsonages. Until recent years that’s what preachers generally did. Churches often owned houses that had long since been paid off, and they figured they could deduct housing costs from the salary offer. I’ve sometimes been reminded that I had the privilege of living in a free house, which was true, although we never accumulated any equity. If the preacher dies his family has to move out of the “free house.”
Besides that it’s sometime a hassle to get the church to take care of repairs, and improvements are out of the question. The guy who came before you fought the same battle, so you inherited a lot of unresolved home maintenance issues. You wanted to own your own home but it was hard to make the shift to home ownership because the salary was usually too low to allow saving up for a down payment. Besides that the church would be required to raise your salary significantly if you were going to be required to make house payments. It was like riding a merry –go-round that never stopped.
You really didn’t complain about it much. You didn’t want to appear to be ungrateful, and you just accepted the fact that churches dealt with housing that way.. We called them parsonages, although I’ve never heard of our preachers called parsons unless somebody wanted to make fun of them. In high church circles, they’re called a manse, which sounds a little more sophisticated. The Episcopalians house their clergy in a rectory. Regardless of what they were called it was usually not a satisfactory arrangement.
The attitude seemed to be that if you choose the life of a minister, then you choose a life of sacrifice. We don’t like the clergy/laity distinction, but there seemed to be one economic standard for preachers and a different one for the rank and file. A friend of mine used to say “I don’t mind short rations of the church members are on short rations, but if they are on full rations, I want full rations too.” I think most of us feel the same way. Over the last quarter of a century the compensation package has changed, and that’s a good thing.
Our new home didn’t have a kitchen range. Because the church operated on a different financial calendar from our previous church, we missed a week’s pay period. We found a nice stove, but after we paid for it, we couldn’t afford groceries. I’m not sure how we made it, but we did.
We moved to Kansas City in August and Gary was born in March. When Ann came home from the hospital, after giving birth to Gary, she went into our bedroom to rest. I went to the office. I had barely sat down at my desk when I received a telephone call that was so intense I couldn’t really make out what she was saying. had just gotten to the office. She called me as was hysterical on the phone. I rushed home, and found out thousands of insects had invaded our bedroom. They covered everything. I don’t think there was a square inch of flat surface they didn’t occupy. I concluded that it was not a time to make tell Ann they might be a good source of protein. We found some buy spray, fumigated, the room and stayed out of it several days. We eventually went back and never saw them again, but I had reached the conclusion that our housing arrangements were no longer tolerable.
I had only been at Argentine for a few months, but I met with the elders and told them that if they didn’t do something to improve the housing situation I would. Of course I had no idea what I might do but they got the message. I won’t go into details, but within a few months we moved into a new house. There would be new challenges as we went along
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