HE MECHANICSVILLE MALADY [R, 6-29-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—THE MECHANICSVILLE MALADY [R, 6-29-24]

 

In the 1970s, I was the teaching/administration assistant for James Spalding, the Director of The Iowa School of Religion, while I was doing doctoral work at The University of Iowa. He was also the Presbyterian bishop for east Iowa.

Presbyterians don’t have bishops, of course, but there were a lot of small Presby churches in eastern Iowa, and they depended on Jim to help them find a preacher. He was their de facto bishop. In that role, he explained to me “The Mechanicsville Malady.” [MM[

Mechanicsville is a small town about midway between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. “It’s full of vice-presidents,” he said. “They have moved there from Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, and even Dubuque. They have aged out of presidential hopes. They know they aren’t ever going to be president. They’re stuck at vice-president. They’re desperate to run something, so they move to Mechanicsville, to be a big fish in a little puddle. But they run into all the other big fish have moved there to be in that puddle. And they’re all Presbyterians, and they all want to run the Mechanicsville Presbyterian church, so the longtime members are always calling me out there to straighten things out…”

I was working on an academic doctorate with Jim, not a professional degree, but he taught me one of the most important lessons for my subsequent pastorates: Beware of the vice-presidents…and their equivalencies. In the MM, people want to run the organization, but they don’t want to do its work.

Now, my friend and colleague, Roger Rominger, probably had a good answer for this. “Put all the malcontents on the same committee,” he said, “and let them drive one another out of the church.”

Most MM malcontents assume they are supposed to be in charge, just by virtue of heritage or money or desire or “manifest destiny.” They can’t understand why everyone else can‘t think so.

The VP looks like a perfect step to the top, but it is often where dreams of power go to die. It’s beyond doing meaningful work, but not up to real authority.

Alben Barkley famously said that the vice-presidency of the USA “…isn’t worth a bucket of spit,” or something close to that. He was the 35^th VP of the US when he said it.

So, be sympathetic to VPs. But put them on the same committee…

John Robert McFarland