THE WITNESS OF RAYDEAN [M, 6-16-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—THE WITNESS OF RAYDEAN [M, 6-16-25]

 

Annual Conferences are just wrapping up in the UMC, and it brings to mind a very important AC, when Raydean Davis engineered something everyone else gave up on…

Raydean Davis was a St. Louis Browns fan, even long after the Browns ceased their futile attempts at playing baseball. That may be all you need to know to understand Raydean. He was an off-the-wall, over-the-line kind of guy.

Raydean followed me--once-removed, after thirteen years by Tom and Sharon Neufer-Emswiler [1] --as the Director of The Wesley Foundation at Illinois State University. Anne Paxton, the long-time secretary at the WF, said to me after Raydean’s death, “Working with you was a joy. Working with Tom and Sharon was a pleasure. Working with Raydean was a challenge.” [2]

She didn’t mean that Raydean was not creative and beloved as a campus minister. He may have been the best ever. He was so open, so inclusive. Even in his sixties, he understood and loved college students, and they understood and loved him. He provided them so many opportunities to grow in grace and self. But being off-the-wall and over-the-line means you don’t sweat the small stuff. There is, though, always small stuff that somebody has to sweat, and that meant the gracious but long-suffering Anne. Fortunately, her abilities at small stuff were just as great as Raydean’s liabilities.

Raydean and I met first as table tennis majors at Garrett Theological Seminary, often partnering to suffer ignominious defeat at the backhand of James Cone, who became the famous theologian of Black Power, and his partner, Australian Malcolm MacArthur, of the power forehand. Raydean was younger, in his first year at Garrett when I was in my last, but we continued our table tennis inclinations for the rest of his life, whenever we were together in the presence of a Ping-Pong table.

I usually write a little narrative obit when a friend dies, and I fear I have neglected Raydean. It has been eleven years now since he died, fittingly—if that does not sound too bizarre—from a bicycle accident head injury, at the age of 72. It is time to acknowledge and appreciate his friendship and life.

After Garrett, we did not see each other much. He was in the South IL Conference. I started in the Northwest Indiana Conference, and then was in the Central IL Conference. The latter was when we began to make contact again, because the Central and South IL Conferences were part of the same Area, presided over by the same bishop.

The Central IL Conference was about twice the size of South. As the UMC suffered declines from the 1960s on, the South IL Conference became too small to be viable, and our bishop tried to get the two conferences to merge into one. Central was doing pretty well, though. A lot of Central folks thought merging with South would be a drag on the pension and hospitalization plans. South IL voted to merge, but Central did not.

I joined Central in voting against merger, not because of pensions and health plans, but because The South IL Conference had a history of rejecting ministry candidates, and folks in general, if they were not white enough and masculine enough. A lot of southern IL would have fit nicely in Mississippi.

In fact, Raydean had spoken to that at the South IL Conference a few years earlier, when yet another group of outcasts knocked at the door of the church. He said, “When we had a black preacher who wanted to join the conference, we said no. Eventually we had to let him in, and we are a better conference because of it. Then Mike and Roy Katayama wanted to be pastors here, and we said no, because they were of Japanese descent. But eventually we were forced to let them in, and we are a better conference because of it. Then women wanted to be preachers, and we said no, but we were finally forced to let them in, and we are a better conference because of it. Now…]

By the time of the merger vote, Raydean had left the South IL Conference to be Director of The WF at ILSU. He knew both conferences well. He worked for a second vote, trying to get us to merge.

At Annual Conference that year, he sat down with Helen and me one morning as we had breakfast. He asked me to vote in favor of merger. I told him I would.

When he left, Helen said, “Why did you tell him that? I thought you were against merger.”

“Raydean,” I said. “There is a time when you need to trust your friends. He’s the only guy I know who can see past the small stuff to the result. If he thinks it will work, it will.”

There are still folks who think Raydean earned a place in hell for managing that merger, but everyone knows that he was the only one who was over the line far enough to see its possibilities.

John Robert McFarland

1] I used to say that it took Tom and Sharon 13 years together to accomplish all I did at ILSU in six years, until Sharon began to say that it took the two of them together 13 years to undo all that I did in six.

2] Often, the best things I did in ministry were the hires I made. That includes Anne as secretary [Head Honcho, really] of The ILSU Wesley Foundation.