THE IT FACTOR, PART II [T, 9-29-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—THE IT FACTOR, PART II [T, 9-29-26]

 

As you know from last column, old friend Quentin said that I have IT. He could not define IT, but he said I accomplished things in a town where I really did not fit because “…you have IT.” I was closing in on 90 when he said that. In all those years I had never considered that I have any IT. So, what could he mean?

First, most of who and what we are is not at conscious level. We get our personalities from nature and the early years of nurture, years we can’t remember. Many things happen then that we would take to the therapist if we could remember them. So, any IT I have is probably just an accident of those unremembered years.

Anyway, I have finally decided that by IT, Q meant that I was present.

Certain of my family members will get a huge laugh out of that, because at home I am often present only in my own mind. But, starting in fifth grade, I discovered that I could be a friend. It was then that I started being present. In the company of others, I paid attention. So much so that as years went by, sometimes people would accuse me of reading their minds. I wasn’t trying to. I just paid attention…and remembered everything they said and did. I thought that was what a friend should do. [1]

By “present,” I guess I mean depth. Since in the column before this one, I told you about two group situations where I did not show my IT, let me tell of a different one.

Gary Putnam was campus minister at Iowa State U when I had the same position at Illinois State U. We were in the same discussion group at a conference of campus ministers. After a day of working on some issues together, he said, “John, the thing with you… there are others who can see what’s behind a situation, but you see what’s behind what’s behind.”

It is dangerous to use a phrase that was used to describe the IT factor of Jesus to describe one’s self, but I need to use here that description of Jesus as “having authority within himself.” [Mark 1] I always assumed that everyone knew what was right and what was wrong, what was just and what was unjust. I acted on that assumption. I think that was my IT factor. It wasn’t arrogance—I alone am the one with the truth. No, I believed that we all have the truth, that we share in the same truth together. I was present for sharing that truth. [2]

As I have written before, I recently asked old friend Jim Kiefer about why anyone would think I have an IT quality. I’ve known Jim since he was an eighteen-year-old student in my campus ministry at IL State U. Later we were ministry colleagues for 20 years. Without hesitation, he said, “You have a deep voice, and you make people laugh.”

So much for having IT.

John Robert McFarland

1] My “presence” with others started with fifth grade school bus friends, not with pastoring, but it served me well as a preacher. People of all ages, even old people, accepted me as their pastor when I was just a teen, because I was present to them.

 

It was a dual-edge sword, though. Through the years, some people liked me because I really “got” them. Others disliked me for the same reason. They thought I could see through their mask and recognize the less pretty stuff underneath. I really couldn’t, but folks like that always reveal their real selves in one way or another without realizing it.

 

2] I have since learned that is so innocently ignorant, that we all share the same truth. I have not lived in the “all” at all. I lived in a very small niche of society, a very thin slice of humanity, called liberal Christianity. By liberal I simply mean open-minded. I thought the United Methodist slogan—Open Doors, Open Minds, Open Hearts—was perfect. Not many people want to live that way.

 

 

THE IT FACTOR [Su, 9-27-26]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—THE IT FACTOR [Su, 9-27-26]

 

[Remember that this column makes no claim to be anything but the personal reflections of an old man who is still trying to understand life.]

Q stopped by some while back, with his wife, Susan. We had not seen them for 15 years, and it was 45 years since we were both professionals in the same town. As they were leaving, he said something that has puzzled me greatly. I’m going to try to understand it by telling you…

Well, first, lest I seem too full of myself—which is undoubtedly true, anyway—I shall provide evidence to the contrary of what Q said.

When I was a seminary student, I was slightly older than most of the students, and a lot more experienced. Most of them had come to seminary right after graduating college. I’d had preaching appointments for five years. I had dropped out of high school to work in a factory. I’d been fired as director of a community center for letting black kids come in. I was married, with children. I was serving a full-time church while commuting four hours [round trip] to seminary each day.

Through all those experiences, I had learned that other people wanted to tell their stories, but they didn’t listen well to the stories of others. So I was used to letting everyone talk, while I kept silent, and then summarizing all the stories in an understandable form, so that we could move on. At least, that’s what I thought I was doing.

I did that one day in a Christian Education class. Can’t remember what we were talking about, but I remember the reaction of one of my classmates: “You do that all the time. You act like you have some prerogative to wrap up everything the way you want it. You wait while the rest of us stumble around and then swoop in with your deep voice and act like you’re the last word. You think you’re smarter than everybody else. Others of us are smart enough to…”

He went on at some length, rather indignantly. I waited for one of the others in the class to come to my defense. I waited for the professor. No one said anything. I was mortified. Mostly because I realized he was right. I apologized to him, and to the class.

I overlearned my lesson from that class. It was like the Catholic girl who was dating a Jewish boy. Her parents said she could not marry him unless he converted. So one night, she decided she would have it out with him. She came home crying. “Are you crying because he wouldn’t convert?” “No, because I overdid it, and now he wants to be a priest.”

I stopped acting like I was smarter than everybody else. I became humble Casper Milquetoast.

Ten years later, I was in a graduate school discussion group. At break time, I hurried to the restroom and was ensconced in a stall when I heard the others in the class coming in. [Yes, it was an all-male class.] They were talking about someone. “Where does he get off with this poor country boy bull?” “Yeah, he’s smarter than the rest of us put together.” “Yeah, he…” Whoever it was sounded like a real jerk. Oops. Once again, great chagrin; I realized they were talking about me.

I had switched from being smarter than everybody else to being just a poor, dumb country boy. Same thing, actually.

So don’t take what Q said too seriously…

Q was not a member of my church, or any church, but we knew each other pretty well, and respected each other greatly. He’d taught and coached my daughters in high school. We’d been involved in some of the same issues. As he was leaving our house on that recent visit, he said to me: “You were so important in that town, because they were so conservative, and you stood for so many unpopular causes, but you got away with it, because you have IT. Not the kind of IT my daughter has, but you’ve got IT. I can’t describe it, but you’ve got IT.”

[I’ve known his daughter since she was born, about 45 years ago. She is a sparkling blond TV personality whose smile lights up the room. I definitely do not have her kind of IT!]

Well, heck, we’re out of time. I guess we’ll never know why Q thinks I had IT, unless I take this up again in the next column…

John Robert McFarland

ENDING UP WHERE I STARTED [9-25-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—ENDING UP WHERE I STARTED [9-25-26]

 

Financially, it had not been smart to spend the summer as a social worker in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Pastoral appointments were made in June. Somebody else would be appointed to the Solsberry Circuit. There would be no preaching appointment for me when I returned to IU that fall. That meant no money to go to school.

I hadn’t thought about money when I decided to go to Chicago. I just knew that I wanted to be an inner-city pastor. In the 1950s, that was where the action was, because of The East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York. Those young pastors and seminary students were self-sacrificing and ecumenical, the great idealistic buzz words of the time. They were the cutting edge. The cutting edge was where I wanted to be.

I had lived until age ten in the all-white, working poor, inner city of Indianapolis, but that wasn’t exciting. It was just where I lived. And from age ten on, I was a total farm boy. I needed to experience what the “slums” were like to see if I could pastor there effectively.

I assumed it would be no problem. After all, I had grown up just as poor as anyone in Pilsen. But rural poverty is very different from urban poverty. That summer taught me that I did not belong in the city. So it was a really important summer. Still, though, when I returned to IU, I had no job, and no money.

Except for F.T. Johnson, my District Superintendent, and Loyd Bates, Director of The Wesley Foundation, who did indeed find some money to pay me to be a campus ministry “intern” that year. I found out that there was where I really belonged. I ended up preaching where I had started preaching, in the university. Not in the mean and gritty streets of the inner city, but in the gentle groves of academe, the hallowed halls of ivy. Leather elbows on the sleeves of my Harris Tweed sport coat. Puffing Borkum Riff in a bent-stem pipe. Not as a professor, to be sure, but as a preacher, a pastor, one who loves God with the brain first and parses the Word to other brain-first seekers.

I’ve always felt a bit bad about that, a bit guilty. More than a bit. The inner city is so hard, and the needs there are so great. The campus is a cushy place. I couldn’t cut the hard place. I was just a semi-elitist feeble intellectual who went to graduate school and got a doctorate and spent his days with thinkers instead of doers.

If you don’t believe that “thinkers instead of doers” line is accurate, just attend a committee meeting with a bunch of PhDs. It will always end with “Let’s study this some more.”

So, despite my guilt at taking the easy road, I still remember fondly all the times I pushed those tweed jacket types out in front of a bus and yelled “You’d better make a decision now!”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

AN INNER-CITY PREACHER [W, 9-23-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—AN INNER-CITY PREACHER [W, 9-23-26]

 

I have long looked online for photos of Wycliffe and Halstead Street Methodist Churches in the Pilsen Neighborhood of Chicago. I’m still looking for Wycliffe, but I found one of Halstead Street. The photo above is current. It is apartments now. But it looks just like it did in the summer of 1958, when I was its last preacher. Of all my churches, it had the most impressive building. On the outside, though, it didn’t resemble what I thought a church should look like. I was a country boy; I did not understand the space needs of the city, where you build up and instead of out.

I wanted to understand the city, though, because I thought I should be a preacher there. After all, I had grown up in poverty. Didn’t that mean I’d be a good preacher for others who lived in poverty?

That’s why I was in Pilsen that summer, a social worker at the Presbyterian Howell Neighborhood House. Settlement houses, like Jane Addams’ Hull House, had been around since 1889. But settlement house churches, called institutional churches, were newer. The model and standard was the East Harlem Protestant Parish, in NYC, started in 1942. Chicago Methodists had started a church like that, The Halstead Street Institutional Church. But despite a marvelous big building, complete with everything from a large Gothic sanctuary to a swimming pool, it was on its last legs.

The problem was Eisenhower. Meaning interstates. The average highway takes 24 acres per mile. Interstates require 40. That’s a lot of displaced people when you take 40 acres per mile to build an interstate through a city like Chicago. You’re not going to displace folks on The Gold Coast or tony neighborhoods, of course. No, you’re going to take the slums. By the summer of 1958, the neighborhood served by the Halstead St. Institutional Church had been replaced by interstate highways. There is no point to a church that has no neighborhood.

There were a few folks, though, for whom that church was home. Each Sunday they drove tortuous routes to get there to worship. They didn’t have a preacher, though. Not enough worshippers to justify the bishop appointing somebody. Somehow they heard about the kid at Howell House who was preaching a nine o’clock service at Wycliffe Methodist and figured I could add Halstead Street to my Sunday morning.

Wycliffe was situated in the heart of what was left of Pilsen’s Bohemian neighborhood. I was their first preacher who used English instead of the Bohemian language, now called Czech. [I’ve always felt it was appropriate that the first translation of my book, Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole, was Czech.]

Each Sunday morning, I got up early to fix breakfast for the other college kid summer staff, who lived on the third floor of Howell House, hoping that bacon and eggs would be good evangelism, that somebody might get dressed after breakfast and go with me to church. That happened only once, and I think my roommate, Randy, regretted it. He hadn’t known that he would have to go to church twice.

That summer was, for me, one of those dead ends that turns out to be a blessing, because I was going down the wrong road. I needed to turn around and go back to start and take a different road. I didn’t belong in the inner city. Rural poverty is very different from urban poverty.

But I cherish the memory of the summer of ’58, that short time when I could say that I was an inner-city preacher.

 John Robert McFarland

 

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT FAITH IN 70 YEARS OF PREACHING [M, 9-21-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT FAITH IN 70 YEARS OF PREACHING [M, 9-21-26]

 

Our friend, Suzanne, told this story in a public setting with about a hundred people present, so I’m not revealing anything private. When she was a young woman, early twenties, she was raped. Suzanne is a small woman, maybe five-three, and the man who raped her was huge, 6 foot 7, 300 lbs. He raped her over and over, and he kept telling her that when he was done with her, he would kill her. She believed him. She knew he would kill her. And he surely would have, but someone intervened before he could do it. She said throughout the ordeal that she prayed, and she kept saying to God, “Just don’t leave me alone. I can take the pain. I can take the humiliation. I can take the aloneness, as long as you don’t leave me alone. I can take death, as long as you don’t leave me.”

Here’s the bottom line: the one necessary thing for life is God’s presence. Crucifixion, resurrection, salvation, eternal life… those are all fine. But without the everlasting arms, without the Presence of God as the foundation, they are nothing.

[Okay, I just realized I have already used this in the column a couple of days ago. Sometimes my cutting and pasting gets out of hand. Well, it’s too late for me to learn something else, so either you can read it again or just relax into the everlasting arms.]

I’ve been a Christian for almost 90 years. By Christian theology, I became a Christian when I was baptized right at 90 years ago. I have a cradle roll certificate to prove it. And I have been thinking about God for almost all those 90 years. I have a doctorate in theology of Christian belief. And I’m confused about Christianity most of the time.

I mean, Jesus died for my sins. Or was that Christ? Anyway, if I’m saved from my sins, how come I keep sinning? Why do I pray every week for forgiveness? How does the death of one peasant two thousand years ago make things different for me now? And resurrection? Heaven hereafter? Hell? And where does the Holy Spirit come in? And if the Bible is the Word of God, how comes it says so many contradictory things? There is no end to the doubts about faith.

When I get overwhelmed by too much theology, I just turn it over to God. I remember that phrase from Deuteronomy: Underneath are the everlasting arms. I stop trying to understand, and I relax into those everlasting arms of God. 

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT PREACHING IN 70 YEARS [Sa, 9-19-26, which is Talk Like a Pirate Day, Matey.]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The 70-Year Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT PREACHING IN 70 YEARS [Sa, 9-19-26, which is Talk Like a Pirate Day, Matey.]

 

PEOPLE LIKE STORIES.

It’s not just that we like them, we live in them.

“Any sorrow can be borne if a story can be told about it.” Izak Denisen

“There is no story that is not true.” Chinua Achebe

PEOPLE WANT TO LAUGH.

Even in hard times. Perhaps especially then. I was helpful and appreciated at funerals because I wasn’t afraid to make people laugh, because I knew they wanted to and needed to.

Please understand, I did the laughter thing only in funerals, not in private pastoral moments with grieving people. Well, sometimes even then, if I could tell it was acceptable and helpful.

“You have a deep voice and you make people laugh.” That’s what former student and 60-year friend, and sometime ministry colleague, Jim Kiefer said, when saying why folks thought I was a good preacher.

CHURCH PEOPLE DON’T ALWAYS ACT LIKE CHRISTIANS, EVEN TO ONE ANOTHER.

Remember, I was only 19 when I started preaching at Chrisney. I had experienced only two churches until then. I assumed that Christians were interchangeable parts of The Body of Christ. {Yes, I had not read I Corinthians 12.}

I attended East Park in Indianapolis, from ages 4 to 10. But I went only to Sunday School. The only folks you encounter in Sunday School are people who like children.

Then Forsythe, the little country church in our country neighborhood, after we moved to the farm near Oakland City. Another place that prized children.

In neither of those churches was I involved in decisions about church life, and I never heard adults talk about how stupid other adults in church were, because my parents didn’t go to church. [Well, my father thought anybody who went to church was stupid, but that’s different.]

As a preacher, I was involved in the decisions of the church, and I learned that otherwise good Christians can clash quite ferociously over the color of a carpet.

“We never let those two women work together.” Catherine Adams of the Chrisney Church told me.

A PREACHER’S MAIN WORK IS EVANGELISM

Evangelism is not haranguing, but inviting, inviting someone to be part of the community of faith.

“Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.” D.T. Niles

WE GET BY ON FAITH, NOT KNOWLEDGE

As another former student and 60-year friend, Dennis Heller, says: “I have no choice but to believe in free will.” That sums up theology, all of it, rather nicely.

I wasn’t sure I was called, but I did have the necessary “gifts and graces” to be a preacher, so I got by.

YOU GO WHERE YOU HAVE TO GO, DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO

If you have accepted the job, even if you are not sure of the call, when the bell rings, you have to answer. I learned that in my second month of preaching, when I was 19, when Bob Adams said I had to go comfort the family of Billy Quick.

That sums up 70 years of preaching.

John Robert McFarland

SAYING YES [R, 9-17-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—SAYING YES [R, 9-17-26]

 

[This is the third part of a single story. I’m trying to understand my career in the ministry, which started 70 years ago this month. It’s probably best to read the parts in order, but they are about twice as long as usual, so if you have anything better to do…]

Why did I say yes when the District Superintendent [DS] said, “You can start preaching next Sunday?” I had not gone to him to start a ministry career. I was just trying to figure out the difference between a deal with God and a call by God.

I said yes because I always said yes. In improv theater, you never say no to your improv partners. You always say yes. My life was an improvisation. Still is.

I always said yes because I was afraid of being left out. I said yes to anything that would get me a place inside the circle, inside the circle of fellowship, of community. I wanted to belong. I wanted a seat at the table.

 As time went by, I came to understand that I had always belonged, within the everlasting arms, within the circle of God, at the communion table.

It is the Presence of God that makes life real. We don’t need to “feel” the Presence, or even be aware of it. The Presence is just there.

I’ve been a Christian for almost 90 years. By Christian theology, I became a Christian when I was baptized right at 90 years ago. I have a cradle roll certificate to prove it. And I have been thinking about God for almost all those 90 years. I have a doctorate in the theology of Christian belief. And I’m confused about Christian faith most of the time.

I mean, Jesus died for my sins. Or was that Christ? Anyway, if I’m saved from my sins, how come I keep sinning? Why do I pray every week for forgiveness? How does the death of one peasant two thousand years ago make things different for me now? And resurrection? Heaven hereafter? Hell? And where does the Holy Spirit come in? And if the Bible is the Word of God, how comes it says so many contradictory things? There is no end to the doubts about faith.

When I get overwhelmed by too much theology, I just turn it over to God. I remember that phrase from Deuteronomy: Underneath are the everlasting arms. I stop trying to understand, and I relax into those everlasting arms of God.

Here’s the bottom line: the one necessary thing for life is God’s presence. Crucifixion, resurrection, salvation, eternal life… those are all fine. But without the everlasting arms, without the Presence of God as the foundation, they are nothing.

In these 70 years since I started preaching, four of my members were murdered. Over a dozen committed suicide. Two dozen died in tragic accidents. Many died much too young, some still children.

In all these events, many people, including me, prayed for God to intervene, for God to act. In the process of pleading with God to act, I learned that God’s action was not nearly as important as God’s presence.

Also, though, in those 70 years, 23 young people from my churches went into the ministry. I like to think it is because they learned from me that the best thing you can do for anyone, in the midst of tragedy or joy, is to remind them that they are in the Presence, that God loves them.

About forty years after that dreadful night when I “comforted” the family of sixteen-year-old Billy Quick, by telling them that God wanted the best roses for “His” own garden, for the first and only time ever, I was back in Chrisney. I looked up Bob and Catherine Adams. I wanted to tell them about all my degrees and awards, to show that I had really been called to be a preacher. After all, it’s hard to justify a 70-year career in the ministry if you really just did it for the money.

I wanted to show them I had a call, despite that humiliating night at Billy’s house, but they seemed to take it for granted. They also took it for granted that I had married well. “You don’t need to show us her picture,” Catherine said. “We know she’s pretty.”

Finally, I said, “Do you remember when Billy Quick was killed?” Suddenly, they brightened. “Oh, yes, his father was a good friend of ours. Up to the day he died, he always talked about how you came to their house to comfort them... about how you knew just the right thing to say… something about a rose…”

John Robert McFarland