THE KANSAS CITY SCHOOL OF PREACHING

While in Kansas City we got acquainted with Will and Dee Weathersby.  Will and Dee have been our friends ever since.  They celebrated our fiftieth anniversary with us in Abilene in 2009.  Shortly after we moved to Kansas City, Will began preaching for a church on the Missouri side.  We “clicked” as the saying goes, and we had many long and deep discussions about many things.   

After he had been in Kansas City awhile, Will began to dream of starting a School of Preaching.  Schools of Preaching were springing up all over the country as an alternative approach to preacher training.  There were those who wanted to preach, but the traditional degree program from a college didn’t work for them.

Preacher training schools are much like Bible Colleges in other faith communities.   Will wanted to start a school, and he wanted me to be on the faculty.  I agreed provided that our academic standards would be on a par with college instruction.  I had no interest in teaching glorified Sunday School classes for people who thought they wanted to be preachers.  We conceived of a school that would be staffed by part time faculty – ministers of local congregations.  We expected our students to work at jobs and attend school part time.  It would take four years to go through our program.

Early on I began to realize that we had a problem.  Many of these students did not have the intellectual ability to do the academic work.  Others simply lacked discipline or were so stressed by work responsibilities and family responsibilities that the study load overwhelmed them.  Within the first year, about half of the first class dropped out.  On the other hand we had some students, who were so disciplined and so motivated, that we struggled to keep challenging them.

After a couple of years Will decided to move to Texas, and I was asked to assume the role of school administrator.  I would have to say that I’m a good teacher and a lousy administrator but I gave it a shot.  

I had some conflict with the leadership of the sponsoring church.  They thought I was making the academic load too hard.  They said I was teaching at a graduate school level, when I should be offering the courses at a Freshman and Sophomore level.  I didn’t agree with that analogy and refused to give in.   A short time after that we left Kansas City the decision was made to “dumb down” the academics, but the school didn’t last long after that.  Before we began the school, we asked educators what they thought about our plans.  We were warned about compromising academics.  Even those who had successfully started other preacher training schools told us the same thing. As I look back on it, I think that warning was good advice. Sometimes I argue for things that I have second thoughts about later, but this was not one of them.

The Kansas City School of Preaching assignment was not good for my family life. I insisted that my work at the school not interfere with my work at the local church.  So I decided that I would work on my lesson preparation between the hours of 10 at night and 1 in the morning.  That wasn’t good for me physically.  It was terrible for Ann, and it really reduced the amount of attention I gave the children.  It would only be a matter of time before something had to give.

Reflecting on the Kansas City Experience (2)

I’ve already admitted that my reasons for making the move to Kansas City were not totally noble.    Throughout my life I’ve wanted to be affirmed, looked up to and admired.  There’s nothing wrong with that unless it becomes the driving force in your life.  I’m afraid I got dangerously close to that in Kansas City.

While Ann was quite unpopular with many of the women, my experience was the exact opposite.  At that time Argentine was not the largest congregation in Kansas City, but there were probably not more than three or four Churches of Christ whose attendance exceeded ours.  I was being affirmed at every turn, and I’m ashamed to say that much of that went to my head.”   My church bulletin articles were well received and reprinted throughout the country.  A few secular newspapers even picked up my stuff.   I was asked to speak at several different locations, and flew to various places around the country to fulfill speaking engagements.  At each stop there was praise and affirmation.   The one place where I was getting less and less of it was in my home, and for good reasons.

On top of that I came to Kansas City with a pretty negative preaching agenda.   I thought my New York critics were liberal, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that.   The mentality of many in the Argentine church was supportive  of what I now consider to be a harsh, negative message, and I gave them what they wanted.

Toward the end of my time in Kansas City, I began to have serious questions about my approach to ministry, my failures as a father, and a husband, and my misuse to scripture texts in the pulpit and the classroom.  Gradually that began to change, especially as I saw people being put down because of their failure to measure up to the standards that some wanted to impose upon them.  I began to change, and the leadership began to change, but it became increasingly difficult to minister in the environment that I had helped create, so we made the decision to leave Argentine.  But that’s another story, and it will have to wait for another blog. 

On the other hand, we developed some lifelong friendships with people we first met at Argentine.  They were and are some of the most Godly people we’ve ever known.  It’s amazing how God used this difficult time to enrich our lives by putting people in our path who truly loved God and wanted to follow him with pure hearts.

Reflecting on the Kansas City Experience (1)

I’m not going into a lot of detail about our Kansas City experience.  It was somewhat like Charles Dickens description at the beginning of the Tale of Two Cities.  It was the best of times and the worst of times.  I’ll say a little about each, but there are a lot of specifics that are best left in the past.

It was a very difficult time for Ann.  She was the victim of harsh judgmentalism and congregational gossip.  

On top of that she was facing something of a personal crisis. She had three children under school age during our early years.   Gary was born within our first year at Kansas City, so she had her hands full.  The salary wasn’t the greatest in the world, and she was working to help make ends meet.   On top of all that she tried to involve herself the children’s school experiences, and was named the unit president of the PTA.   When we left Kansas, she was given a lifetime membership in the Kansas PTA.  Ann never does anything half way.  She had also major surgery during that time, so there were a lot of things on her plate.

To make matters worse I wasn’t engaged in family life in the way I should have been.  Ann tied to be a good trooper but she was going to church more and enjoying it less.  She tried very hard to live the life of a supportive preacher’s wife, but she found it difficult to live up to the expectations of others.  

Looking back on it, I think I was pretty full of me, and I think Ann saw right through me.  The more I got involved in church life, the more I seemed to be moving farther away from God.  My prayers were cold, ritualistic, formal, and lacking in fervency.   My thoughts were superficial, and often nothing more than a rehash of something I heard someone else say or something somebody else had written. 

Besides that  my practical skills left a lot to be desired.  I wasn’t much of a handy man around the house.   I hated trying to do anything electrical.  Once I ran a drill bit into an electrical cord inside the wall, and knocked out half of the electricity in the house.  It was only by the grace of God that I avoided electrocution.  I hated plumbing, and would sometimes let a leaky faucet go for months before trying to fix it.   I didn’t hate plumbing as much as I hated electrical work, but only because it was harder to kill yourself that way. 

A lot of preacher’s wives are frustrated because they are married to a husband who is a klutz when it comes to doing anything practical. Nevertheless preachers sometimes end up being admire by woman who are frustrated because their husbands don’t exercise spiritual leadership.

So when Hattie Housewife starts telling Peggy Preacher’s Wife how wonderful her husband is, Peggy wants to throw up.  She knows that dude’s weaknesses better than he does, and she doesn’t share Hattie’s opinions about him.   If he ever appeared to be angelic at all, she knows full well that he’s lost his halo.

Gary Len Bales Becomes a Part of the Family

Not long after our arrival in Kansas City, we realized we would soon have our fourth child.  Of course that was long before you knew the sex of the child prior to delivery.  She had a difficult time with her pregnancy, but there was a silver lining.  Ann contacted our gynecologist in Jamestown.  He knew a highly competent obstetrician who happened to be working on an additional residency at the KU Medical Center.  He agreed to see Ann and take care of her prior to giving birth. He was tremendous.  He even called Ann pretty regularly to see how she was doing and gave the tenderest care we could have ever asked for.

Gary’s birth occurred on a Sunday night.  We had a guest speaker at church that night, but Ann didn’t feel like showing up for church.  The song service had barely concluded when she called to tell me that it was time.

Of course there’s no one more useless than an expectant father when delivery is about to take place.  Your main job is trying to stay out of the way of the medical staff and the one who is doing the real work – the mother.   We met the doctor at the hospital.  He told us that he was going home because he thought it would be several hours before the baby was born.  He suggested I go home too.  I wasn’t so sure, so I stayed put.  He barely got home when a resident called him and told him he needed to return to the hospital..

KUMC is a teaching hospital, so Gary had to face an audience of onlookers when he made this entrance into the world.  Most of the students had not seen a breech birth, so they all wanted to observe.  Gary came into the world without a hitch, but I don’t think he bowed to the audience, and thanked them for their applause.  He didn’t tip his hat because he wasn’t wearing one.

It was rare for fathers to be allowed in the delivery room at that time.  When I saw Gary for the first time he was in the nursery.  The doctor stood by me as I looked in the window.  He said, “Oh, I wish I had thought about it.  I would have arranged for you to be in the delivery room.”   I didn’t say what I was thinking. In my mind I was saying, “Oh, great Doc.  This is the end of the line, finis, caboose in our effort to be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth.  Then you think of it after the fact.  You’re timing isn’t all that great.”

We had a little bit of family controversy about name selection.  If it was a boy, Ann wanted to name him Adam Clyde.   The rest of us weren’t excited about that choice of names, but we all finally agreed on Gary.   Then there came the problem of selecting a middle name.  The Kansas City Chiefs had just won the Super Bown.  Len Dawson had been the most valuable player, so we selected Len as has middle name.

To this day Gary is an avid Kansas City Chiefs fan (I am too, except I’m not as avid as he is).   When people ask him why he likes the Chiefs he says, “I was born a Kansas City Chiefs fan.”  When people ask him where he was born, he says, “Kansassouri.’  The KU Med Center is in Kansas, but it is actually about three blocks from the Missouri state line, so Gary is pretty close to correct on that score.  Nevertheless his birth certificate is filed in Topeka, not Columbia.

THE CHALLENGE OF LIVING IN A CHURCH OWNED HOUSE

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

Winding Up Our Ministry in Jamestown

There were several things to take care of prior to leaving Jamestown.  We had planned a second campaign for the summer of 1969.  Jim and Charles came back, and we had a great reunion. Ward and Hope Glentzer replaced us.  Ward and I had attended graduate school together at a summer session in Abilene.  They arrived early in the summer of 1969, and we helped them get settled.  I took care of a lot of the logistics involved in getting the pre campaign plans.

We needed to sell our house, and it didn’t move that quickly after it was put on the market.   We changed realtors and they wanted us to make some changes.  We were busy with a lot of that as the campaign was rushing in one us.

The campaign was really our last “hurrah” in Jamestown.  Joe Barnett came from Amarillo, Texas to be our featured speaker.  Charles, Jim, and I had all known Joe in school.   He was an eloquent speaker, and his ministry was a blessing to us.  Two rather mundane memories stand out from that experience.

Ann had not known him previously, and she was not impressed with him at first.  Joe was the consummate dresser.  He looked as if he had just been featured on the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly.  Ann’s first impression of people are usually, but not always accurate.  She thought Joe was a stuffed shirt when he first showed up in Jamestown, but she changed her mind in a few days.  Joe nicknamed her “Miz Preach.”

At the time our only television set was a black and white table top model that was in our bedroom.  Ann and I liked to watch television before we went to sleep at night, so we kept the television set there.   It also enabled us to monitor the children’s viewing since they had to come into our bedroom to watch television.   I remember Joe being at our house when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.  We all gathered in the bedroom and watched the moon landing.  A room full of people in our bedroom heard Neil’s famous words “a small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”   We were stunned to watch history in the making.

We also fed Joe at lunch every day.  The kids were really into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so Ann would often feed them their sandwiches while we ate more substantial food.  The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was a favorite of our kids., so  Ann would always buy the largest available container of peanut butter.  Joe said, “I didn’t know it came in barrels.”  He even asked Ann if she would make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  That became something of an inside joke for a  number of years.  We would see him at the lectureship in Abilene, and the first words out of us mouth would be, “Where’s my peanut butter?”

After a wonderful closing week, we said “good bye” to our friends in Jamestown.  We loaded the kids, our luggage, and Ann’s plants into our 1968 Green Mercury Montego, and headed out for Kansas.  An important chapter in our lives came to a close.

A Visit to Kansas City

I had already agreed to interview in Kansas City when I went to Pittsburgh, and had purchased an airline ticket.  The church didn’t pay for both Ann and me to come so I agreed to travel to Kansas City alone.  Big mistake!  You have to be able to see a place through your wife’s eyes if you expect her to be content.

When I got to Kansas City, I was treated royally.  I was introduced to Kansas City Steaks, given a tour of city.  I learned about the American Royal, the history of Kansas city jazz, and the stockyards.  I was shown many courtesies. 

I met with the elders and deacons and their wives in an informal setting, and they seemed like wonderful people.  I stayed in the home of Ray Strome, who was one of the two elders.  Ray and Ruth couldn’t have been nicer.   On Sunday afternoon, I went to the home of Earl and Carrie Bond, and that was the beginning of a friendship that continues to this very day.  Ray and Ruth were there, and I had a most unusual interview.  It was not an interview in the formal sense.  It was nothing more than a social conversation.  In the process we learned a great deal about each other.  

There were negatives about the Argentine church, but I didn’t see them at the time.  We had lived in our own house in New York, and Ann really liked it.  The outgoing minister lived in a parsonage.  They invited me to take a brief tour of the house.  I didn’t think it was as nice as our home in Jamestown, but my thought was “It will do.”  Another big reason, why I needed Ann’s take on things!

I didn’t have an offer on the table when I left, but Ray told me that I needed to be prepared to accept or reject and offer.  I made a modest request for a little more money, and that didn’t prove to be an obstacle.  On the way back home I agonized over which offer to accept. 

Within the Churches of Christ, we aren’t comfortable with the term “call.”   We’re quite willing to accept God’s leading, guidance, direction, and we talk about trying to discern his will.   Unfortunately, there’s it’s a great temptation to rationalize, what you want to do, and convince yourself that it’s God’s will.  Certainly, it’s within the scope of God’s permissive will because he allows it to happen, but our decisions may or may not be based on God’s direction.

In this instance I remember praying about it while I was waiting for a connecting flight at O’Hare in Chicago.  By the time I boarded my flight for Buffalo, I had decided to accept the Kansas City offer if one was made. I would ask Ann for het judgment, but I didn’t figure it would be any different from mine. On Friday night I got a call from Kansas City, accepted the offer, and then made a very difficult call to Pittsburgh.