WOULD YOU CHOOSE MARRIAGE OR SINGING? [R, 4-10-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—WOULD YOU CHOOSE MARRIAGE OR SINGING? [R, 4-10-25]

 [This is follow-up column to the one of 4-8 on revivals]

 

Oh, yes, those early revivals. Old Harley Woolridge, pastor at Worthington, IN, was conducting a revival at Garrison Chapel, a few miles outside of Bloomington, in the fall of 1957. Norma Sullivan thought it would be good if town kids in the I.U. Wesley Foundation could go to an old-fashioned revival to see what it was like. I had a car, and was sort of interested in Norma, so I agreed to drive a load out to take in the show.

I had the impression that Karen Rosenthal was going, too, along, maybe with Judy Thornburg, and maybe Joan Auble, as well as Norma and her roommate, Helen Karr. When I got to Memorial Hall women’s dorm, the agreed pickup point, the only one who came to get in the car was Helen. She was embarrassed. She said Norma claimed she could not go after all and that none of the others could, either.

It was awkward for both of us. Helen was beginning to get the idea that Norma was setting her up with me [true], probably to be able to get rid of me herself [true?].

We were slightly late, and slipped in and sat in the back row. District Superintendent FT Johnson was a huge fan of mine—he often referred to me as the son he never had—and liked to show me off the young preacher he had “discovered” and appointed to the Solsberry circuit, like having me do devotions for the monthly district minister’s meetings, so Harley knew who I was. In the free-floating style of revivals in those days, when he saw Helen and me, he called out, “Let’s have this young preacher and his wife come up and sing a duet.”

Wife? We’d never even had a date! Was this a date? Sing? We weren’t singers! I have no idea what I said to reject old Harley at that moment, but I do know we did not then, or at any other time, sing a duet at a revival. [1]

That should have been a warning, to Helen about marrying a preacher, and to me about having revivals, but neither of us was very smart back then. She married me, and I had revivals in my early churches, with other pastors coming over from some nearby town, with about the same results, or lack of same, that old Harley got.

Strangely, despite that awkward start, I was once an “Approved Conference Evangelist,” for the simple reason I was on sabbatical and wanted to extend it for another year, so that I could write for the Prairie Home Companion radio show, and Approved Conference Evangelist was the only appointment Bishop Woodie White was willing to let me have.

I was amazed at how much business I got. I thought I’d have a free year because nobody did revivals anymore, and those that did certainly did not want an evangelist who just told stories instead of whipping people up emotionally to get them saved.

Everybody knew that socially I was so liberal that I was radical, and that personally, I was as conservative as you can get. [“I don’t smoke, drink, or chew, or go with girls who do.”] So, despite my social justice rabble rousing, it was the conservative preachers of the conference who thought my Conference Evangelist appointment was great. They were always under pressure from their congregations to have revivals, but were afraid of professional evangelists. As one said, “We know you. We know you won’t run off with the offering or the organist, you won’t get people jumping up and down, and you won’t tell people what to believe; you’ll just tell jokes and inspirational stories and let folks figure things out for themselves.”

I was very proud of that analysis, but I was getting invited to do so many “spiritual renewal” weeks that I had no time to write, so figured I might as well go back to regular preaching.

As a preacher, I wasn’t a revivalist, but I was always an evangelist, meaning I asked anybody and everybody to join the church. I figured the best thing I could do for a person was to invite them into a community of renewing love, to help them get saved, get whole, not just once, but every day.

John Robert McFarland

1] Helen is not as bad a singer as she claims, but she does say that if she’d had to choose right then between “wife” and “sing a duet,” she would have married me on the spot.