1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism

Earlier this week I started a journey through the history of Wesleyan ideology. Today the journey looks to where Wesley was situated in relation to the Protestant Reformation before him. [The image to the side is that of Thomas Cranmer, perhaps the most formative thinker in the formation of the Church of England (or Anglican Church).]

Previous posts:
Preface

1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism

1. Wesley wasn't a heretic, but you might get that impression sometimes. I heard a story once about someone President Barnes of Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) brought in to evaluate where IWU was ideologically. Apparently, the person's greatest suspicions ended up being about Bud Bence, who is often considered a Wesleyan's Wesleyan. I am sometimes considered a heretic for believing in women in ministry. 

The Wesleyan tradition often looks a little "off" when viewed from what I might call "high Protestantism." Here I chiefly mean the heirs of Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1500s. Of course, they would no doubt have a similar perspective on any number of other groups like Pentecostals and charismatics as well. Today, America's theology is Baptist more than anything else -- historical Wesleyans can look pretty fishy to them too. 

I would say that Wesley looks a little askew among high Protestants for two chief reasons. First, he was an Anglican, and Anglicanism was a "middle way" between Protestantism and Catholicism. In other words, Wesley can seem a little too Catholic. Second, he was an Arminian, In simple terms, he believed that God gives us some degree of free will. A good deal of Christianity considers that a heresy called "Pelagianism" or "semi-Pelagianism."

2. First, Wesley was an Anglican. The Church of England did not start the way Lutheranism did. In the beginning, Luther opposed the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) because they were taking people's money and promising them years off of purgatory. This flashpoint cascaded into Luther's other positions. So, he rejected the "Apocrypha" as part of the Bible because 2 Maccabees was thought to give support to the idea of purgatory. Similarly, salvation must purely be on the basis of faith not works because good works (like paying money to the church) couldn't help save your soul. 

As is often the case, Luther's ideology directly followed a concrete, practical situation rather than being some purely biblical or theological discovery. Life led him to focus on certain passages and he almost certainly took them beyond what they actually said.

The Church of England started differently. King Henry VIII disagreed with Luther's theology. In fact, he wrote a treatise against Luther and his "Protestants." BUT Henry wanted a divorce, and the RCC wouldn't grant one because Spain was breathing down the Pope's neck -- and the wife Henry wanted to divorce was the daughter of the king of Spain. 

So after England's separation from the RCC, the Anglican church still had more of a Catholic flavor than the Lutheran or Reformed churches did. Its original theologians would ironically burn at the stake at the hands of "bloody Mary" for being too Protestant (even though they still had a lot in common with Catholicism). Meanwhile, those who resisted the withdrawal would burn at the stake for being too Catholic (even though they were very sympathetic to some of the reforms it made to the RCC).

In the end, the Anglican church came to see itself as a kind of "via media" or "middle way" between Catholicism and high Protestantism. It adopted justification by faith, but in its sacraments and church structure it often still looked a bit Catholic. It continued to use the Apocrypha in worship, and it was more open to works in the life of a believer than Luther by far.

The fact that Wesley was a child of Anglicanism rather than of high Protestantism has probably contributed to some of the "otherness" of Methodism and Wesleyanism within Protestantism. 

3. If you know your history, high Protestantism had four or five "solas" (the Latin word for "only"). 

• Luther's biggest one was 1) sola fide or "by faith alone." Luther taught that "works" play no role in being "justified" before God. We attain a right standing with God based on faith alone. 
• Similarly, our salvation is purely a matter of 2) grace alone (sola gratia). No one can earn or merit salvation.
• Salvation is based on 3) "Christ alone" (solus Christus). There is no other path to God. 
• Everything we must believe is a matter of 4) "Scripture alone" (sola scriptura), and Scripture is clear enough in itself for anyone to see the way (the "perspicuity" of Scripture). You don't need the church to explain it to you or a priest to intercede for you. 
• Finally, a latecomer was the idea that everything is for 5) "God's glory alone" (soli dei gloria).

Of course, it is not enough to say that Wesley affirmed sola fide as Luther and Calvin did. We have to ask how Wesley used those words. For Luther and Calvin, "by faith alone" meant that any effort on our part ("works") plays no role in our salvation whatsoever. For them, this extended to the act of faith itself. For them, we have no part at all in the exercise of faith. God does it for us in us. We are his sock puppets, and he says through our mouths, "I believe" for us.

Works played a much larger role in the equation for Wesley and the Anglicans (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:10). Technically, Wesley believed that works are a result of our justification by grace through faith. They are not the cause of our justification or salvation. But, unlike Luther and Calvin, Wesley believed your works could disqualify you from the prize (1 Cor. 9:27; Wesley, "A Call to Backsliders"). Such a concept played no role in the high Protestantism of Luther or Calvin.  

4. Wesley was thus a "synergist" rather than a "monergist." He believed that our wills worked together with God's will toward salvation. Luther and Calvin were monergists, believing that God alone did all the work. In short, Wesley was an "Arminian."

Arminius was a Dutch theologian who died in 1609. Before he died, he suggested a few tweaks to Calvin's theology. 

• For example, he suggested that God's choosing of us -- our election -- was conditional upon our response. By contrast, "election" was unconditional for Calvin. 
• Arminius believed that Christ died for everyone, while some Calvinists had concluded that Christ only died for the elect ("limited atonement"). 
• While Arminius believed in the "total depravity" of humanity (as did Wesley)...
• ... he taught that the grace of God went before us ("prevenient grace") to make it possible for us to open ourselves to his saving grace and thus cooperate with God's grace. For Calvin, God's grace was "irresistible."
• And for Arminius, it was similarly possible to "fall" from God's grace (Jude 24). Calvinists saw God's grace as irresistible, and if God had chosen you, you would definitely make it to the end.

After Arminius died, the Synod of Dort codified orthodox Calvinism in the TULIP that we have alluded to above, which Arminius (and Wesley) mostly rejected:

• Total depravity -- We can do no good in our own power.
• Unconditional election -- God alone decides who will be saved. We play no real role.
• Limited atonement -- Christ only died for the elect.
• Irresistible grace -- If God has chosen you, you will receive his grace.
• Perseverance of the saints -- If you are chosen, you will make it to the kingdom no matter what.

It is no surprise that Wesley modified the 39 Articles of the Church of England in keeping with his "Arminianism." For example, Wesley removed Article 17 on predestination. Most of his other edits had to do with church structure and toning down the "let's burn them at the stake" feel of others. He passed on 25 of the 39 Articles to the Methodists.

5. In the twenty-five doctrines that Wesley retained, several were in direct continuity with the high Reformation. For example, Article 5 retained Luther's sense of sola scriptura, "Scripture only." Nothing was to be required of a believer that could not be demonstrated in Scripture. Wesley famously aspired to be a "man of one book" (homo unius libri).

Again, if we look to his actual practice, however, Wesley regularly brought into conversation tradition, reason, and experience with Scripture. Scripture was primary, but it was clarified by these other sources of truth, an approach sometimes called prima scriptura. Although the Wesleyan quadrilateral is not a term that Wesley himself coined (it comes from Albert Outler in the twentieth century), it is a fair reflection of his actual practice. The four sides of the quadrilateral are Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

I am not aware of a place where Wesley directly engaged Luther on the concept of the "perspicuity" of Scripture. The idea of perspicuity is the sense that Scripture is clear and plainly understandable on matters pertaining to salvation. Wesley may have. Here's how Luther put it in his Bondage of the Will in 1525: "The perspicuity of Scripture means that everything necessary for salvation and regarding faith and life is taught in clear language in Scripture." 

The Westminster Confession of 1647 put it this way: "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them."

Wesley did not pass these sorts of statements into Methodism, and there is no statement of this sort in the Wesleyan Discipline today. However, I think Wesley agreed with them (Arminius did), and I welcome input from those who might know "chapter and verse" in Wesley's works. 

Notice the focus of perspicuity. It does not consider every passage in Scripture to be clear to us. Rather, the path of salvation is clear. The driving force for Luther was again his reaction to Roman Catholicism. His doctrine of Scripture's clarity was meant to indicate that we do not need a priest or the church in order to be saved. Scripture alone is a sufficient enough guide to lead us to salvation.

6. In the Preface, I suggested that Luther's understanding of Scripture was two-dimensional -- primarily literary without historical depth. Unreflectively, he thought the words could be separated from the historical contexts that gave them their first meaning. Like Melanchthon after him, he largely treated meaning as inherent and fixed in words rather than as functions of how they are used at a particular time and place.

He also underestimated the fact that I as a reader ultimately construct the meaning I see in a text. A text can come to have almost as many meanings as the minds that read it. "Meaning is in the eye of the beholder." Paul Tillich in the twentieth century would speak of the Protestant Principle -- the fact that each individual reader is free to interpret the biblical texts suggests that the interpretations of the Bible will multiply endlessly as reader after reader interprets them.

Martin Marty once suggested that there were 20-30,000 different Protestant denominations, almost of all of which think they get their beliefs from the Bible alone. A little reflection suggests that sola scriptura has not resulted in anything like a common understanding of the meaning of most of the Bible. There are three reasons for this multiplicity of interpretations:

• There is the "polyvalence" of individual words and sentences -- words are capable of taking on more than one meaning.
• There is the need to integrate the thought of multiple books together. The Bible does not tell us how to connect James and Paul or Mark and John. Hebrews may tell us what to do with Leviticus, but we may end up overriding Leviticus in the process of listening to Hebrews. The process of integrating the books of the Bible together of necessity takes place outside the biblical texts themselves. In other words, it requires a scaffolding that is outside the Bible alone.
• There is the need to appropriate the ancient meanings of these texts to today. The books do not tell us how to do this. 1 Peter doesn't say, "Here's how to apply these instructions to persecuted believers in the first century to twentieth century America." We have to connect the dots outside the biblical texts. In other words, appropriation requires work that is beyond Scripture alone, work that we have to do ourselves.

The fact that most interpreters of the Bible are unreflective about the role that they (and their traditions) play in integrating and appropriating Scripture sneaks in the chaos that is the myriad conflicting interpretations and applications of the Bible.

And, living before Descartes' epistemological turn in the 1600s, Luther was largely unaware of the fact that when I read a text, it is inevitably my mind that constructs the meaning of that text for me. He saw the meaning as "out there" with little appreciation for the chaos that is our minds inferring meaning.

We can thus see some important clarifications that need to be made to Luther's sense of sola scriptura and the perspicuity of Scripture. For one, the fact that there are tens of thousands of denominations with varying beliefs and interpretations of the Bible suggests that, for us (in contrast to the original audiences), Scripture is far more unclear than we probably realize or acknowledge. Given the lay of the denominational land, this conclusion hardly seems debatable, although many groups insist they are right and everyone else is wrong. Even scholars regularly disagree on the meaning of passage after passage.

7. Here's where we should recognize the essential role of the Holy Spirit. There is a tendency to detach our interpretation of the Bible from the illuminating and inspiring work of the Holy Spirit. This is a serious mistake. After all, it is the prevenient grace of the Spirit that leads us to salvation. The biblical text without the Spirit will not lead me to salvation. It is not "Scripture alone" that leads me to salvation. It is the Spirit working with my spirit.

In the hands of the Spirit, the original meaning of the Bible does not need to be clear to lead me to salvation because the journey to salvation is not primarily an intellectual or cognitive journey. My mind is certainly involved, but the essential features have to do with my "heart" and will. The Spirit can use a stop sign to bring me to salvation assuming that I have the barest knowledge of God and Christ!

I might add that this is a frequent blind spot of apologetics as well. Coming to Christ is not a matter of intellectual argument. We can help remove intellectual obstacles. We can lay the groundwork for the path. But it is the Spirit that always leads the way. It is the Spirit that empowers the will. It is the heart that believes unto salvation (Rom. 10:10).

These refinements of our understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture and these clarifications to the limits of sola scriptura go beyond the hermeneutical understandings of Wesley and the Reformers. They are contemporary insights, as undeniable as they seem to be once they are pointed out and understood. 

The original purpose of sola scriptura was to say that the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was not needed for salvation, which of course is true. Luther asserted that the RCC and its priesthood were not needed to interpret the Bible for any believer. The doctrine was an instrument of separation from the Roman Catholic Church. 

Recent years have suggested that the community of faith is more important in the appropriation of Scripture than the Reformers recognized. For one thing, it was through Old Testament priests, Jewish rabbis, and the Church that God collected these writings into a canon and brought to recognition which books were authoritative as a collection. Without communities of faith searching these texts and worshiping with these texts, we would only have had individual believers with whatever individual scrolls they might have had access to. 

Still, Luther and Zwingli got together in 1529 to see if they could agree on what "Scripture alone" taught about communion. They couldn't agree, not even the first two Protestant interpreters of the Bible. Twelve years after Luther's 95 Theses, sola scriptura in a sense fell apart.

And thus the infinite proliferation of Christian groups all pretending they are just reading "the Bible alone" began. Zwingli would later watch his people drown Anabaptists in the river because the Anabaptists did not think the Bible alone supported infant baptism. "You want to be rebaptized as an adult? I'll rebaptize you!" Apparently, Zwingli could interpret the Bible alone, but no one else could. The statements of faith that are ubiquitous in Christendom are basically churches and Christian organizations trying to nail down what we should take away from the Bible (and to compel their communities to agree). 

I always smile when I think of the various churches of Christ and churches of God that were founded on the idea that they are not denominations. They were founded on the idea that they simply follow the Bible alone. Yet it is clear that they have made decisions about what their group thinks the Bible means. They have made decisions on what structures they think the Bible implies. And, sometimes, their people go full on heretical because that's just their interpretation of the Bible.

Your non-denominational church on the corner isn't fooling anyone. A few questions and we will quickly be able to identify which traditions of American Christianity their leaders and people draw from. They are mostly Baptist without the name, and some of them throw some charismatic movement on top. They are hermeneutically unreflective, more examples of the Protestant Principle at work.

To put a more positive perspective on it, our communities of faith are spaces where we "work out our salvation with fear and trembling" together (Phil. 2:12). Given the multiplicity of such workings, we should probably be pretty humble about our group being right. And we should quite probably be more generous toward the groups and individuals whose interpretations are different from ours. 

In the end, God will sort us all out.  

1. Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History

1. While it is obvious to those who are actual experts in the areas on which I write, I consider it an advantage to the rest of the church that I often write on topics I only know enough about to be dangerous. This has served my undergraduate students greatly over the years, for I have well gotten them in the door of knowledge by being intelligible. Then they remember much better the corrections of the real experts when they go on to more detailed study.

And so, like the fool I am, for some time, I have wanted to write an ideological history of The Wesleyan Church. After my first wee faith crisis in seminary, I determined that God was a God of truth. This may seem obvious, but what it meant to me was that if the truth seemed to come into conflict with the traditions I grew up with, then choosing truth was making a choice for what God thinks -- even if it went against my traditional understandings. My crisis ensued when I came to grips with the fact that Hosea 11:1 was not originally a prophecy about the Messiah going down to Egypt. Could Matthew have been wrong, because it was obvious Hosea 11:1 wasn't even a prophecy about the future, let alone about Jesus in its original context?

I've since concluded that Matthew was not wrong but, rather, that the lovely chart in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference KJV was misleading. Matthew was reading the Old Testament in a spiritual sense, not a literal one. It was perfectly acceptable for a Jewish interpreter of his day and, indeed, was not unlike some of the spiritual interpretations I grew up with in the holiness tradition.

I concluded that God was not a trickster. God was not a Loki. God was not putting me to the test as if to say, "I've made it look like Matthew is wrong here to test your willingness to ignore all reason and blindly believe things that appear to be stupid." Nope. That would be the Devil's approach to things. "All truth is God's truth," the saying goes.

I do believe there's a time to say, "The evidence and reason seem to point in this direction but by faith I'm going to go in another direction." That's honest. More often, I have found Christian thinkers go through the motion of reason and weighing evidence when it is clear that they are making the evidence fit what they want it to fit. I'd rather them just be honest and say, "Because of my presuppositions, I'm going to go in this direction despite the evidence and reason."

2. All of that is to say that I think I might be a little more "honest" about Wesleyan history than some others. It is a human tendency to idolize our heroes. I remember in college feeling a little naughty to suggest that Wesley might not have been someone to get marital advice from. Can a Wesleyan critique Wesley?

But then again, the holiness tradition I grew up in didn't really pay much attention to Wesley. We believed our preaching came straight from the Bible. At least in my experience, we had almost no idea of the historical influences leading us to interpret the Bible the way we did. I never heard about Phoebe Palmer, yet hers was the principal voice in any sermon on entire sanctification growing up. I had never heard of John Nelson Darby, and yet his voice was the source of all the teaching I heard on the Tribulation and Antichrist.

We were what I sometimes call "unreflective" interpreters of the Bible. We stood 100% on the Bible... and had no idea that we overwhelmingly interpreted the Bible through glasses we had inherited from our tradition and environment.

Wesley lived in the early days of what I might call historical consciousness. It would be hard for me to find much contextual interpretation before the 1600s and 1700s that wasn't two-dimensional, and it really wasn't until the late 1800s that historical consciousness came into its own, in my estimation. By two-dimensional, I mean that interpretation was largely literary without a strong sense of how culture and history impact the meaning of words.

Melanchthon, the systematizer of Luther, famously said that theology was simply the application of grammar to the words of Scripture. I was impressed when I first encountered this quote in college. It is also significantly mistaken. Melanchthon didn't understand that the meaning of words is a function of how they are being used at the time they are used. Accordingly, you can't fully understand a word of the Bible for what it really meant without knowing something about the world that used those words at the time.

Melanchthon was thus a "pre-reflective" interpreter, as to a great extent were Luther and Calvin. They were brilliant at the world "within" the text. But they were significantly blind to how the world "behind" the text affected its meaning. Luther's idea that "Scripture interprets Scripture" is a tell because it reveals that Luther didn't fully understand that the context of each book of the Bible is different and thus that the words of one book may not mean the same thing as the words of another. They saw the meaning of the Bible as static without much awareness of the movement of revelation.

Wesley was also pre-reflective. Yes, he knew Bengel, and Bengel was one of the first to begin to read the Bible in three dimensions. But many of Wesley's interpretations seemed obviously out of context to me even when I had just learned inductive Bible study at Asbury (e.g., his interpretation of Matthew 5:48, which was based on how he understood perfection rather than how the context seems to understand it).

3. My dear friend Keith Drury and I had some interesting exchanges about how some idealize Wesley. I think some Methodists especially do this. Growing up in the American holiness movement, we did not feel as tied to him. I once told Keith that Wesley was like our grandfather. Most of us do not treat our grandfather -- or even our father's thought as inerrant. Drury remarked, "He's more like our great-grandfather."

Of course, The Wesleyan Church's beliefs are dictated by the current Discipline, not the sermons or practices of Wesley, not the beliefs of the Wesleyan Methodist or Pilgrim Holiness Church, not even the 1968 Discipline. At the same time, at least on a popular level, we have drunk deeply from the "baptistification of America," as Martin Marty put it. There are probably ways in which our detachment from Wesley has made us more susceptible to the ebbs and flow of American religious culture.

With all this in mind, I start this journey through the story of Wesleyan ideology. It would be helpful if we knew the winds that have blown us to where we are. Then we will less likely mistake them for the Bible or the Spirit. On the other hand, some of those winds may actually have come from the Spirit. It will be easier for us to decide if we are aware of them.

Thus starts the journey...

The Weeks in Review

1. It's been three weeks now since my mother passed. She lived a long, good life and her passing was peaceful. It's more just weird. This morning at 11 is a show she used to listen to called Tinyberg Tales. I won't be calling to ask how it went.

The readership of my reflections on her life was surprising. It helped to have some notes from her early years. I may combine them with the notes from my dad's life. Together their lives covered a century, 1924-2024. I don't expect a large audience of buyers. :-)

2. I've had a lot of success on YouTube with Hebrew, so I wrote a book that took the approach I had used at Wesley Seminary and presented it in book form. It goes with a Udemy course I created in parallel. I have only promoted it on YouTube because the women in ministry/leadership book has been doing well (for me) with Facebook advertising so I didn't want to taint that well. First real "success" I've had with Facebook advertising, although I'm only making a few dollars a day when all is said and done.

3. In early July I made my yearly trip to Silver Lake Camp to be the Bible teacher (alongside none other than A.J. Thomas). We went through the book of Acts this year. I'm convinced that my sense of Acts (and in fact many parts of the Bible) would be interesting to a lot of people if I could find the right way to present it. I've had this blog since 2004 and of course any number of people have engaged it, but it has not had a broad punch -- not when you think of the likes of Nijay Gupta or Michael Bird or James McGrath.

I did start a new project this morning (not another one!). I'm titling it, "As Told by the Women: The Story of the Bible." Most readers are women. I thought it might be interesting to write a novelized overview of the Bible using the voices of key women throughout as the narrators, so to speak. Fourteen chapters. On your mark, get set, go.

4. I do have a writing schedule, but most days I don't get much to it. Sundays, I've been working on a project relating to the book of Revelation. Mondays I'm writing some notes from my life. Tuesday is Science and Scripture, a course I teach for Houghton that starts in a week. Wednesday is how to study the Bible. Thursday is my philosophy. Friday is my family story. Saturday is math and science. Like I said, these projects languish on.

For reading, I got three books this week to read. Miranda Cruz's Faithful Politics is now out. Her book is going to do well. I also started Salman Khan's Brave New Words on how AI is going to impact education. Finally, I bought Brant Pitre's Jesus and Divine Christology. I expect I'll find it driven more by sentiment than objectivity like so many scholarly works seem to me these days.

5. I went to Oklahoma Baptist last week for a day trip. We may work on some new online courses with them. Working on finishing up the Church Leadership ordination course for Kingwood Learn. Kingswood Learn now has over 1000 learners on the platform. Five of the ordination core courses are there now (Intro to Theology, Inductive Bible Study, NT Survey, Wesleyan Church History, Theology of Holiness). You can watch and read them for free. You can pay $350 and get the credit toward ordination licensure. Or you can pay $900 and get 3 hours of academic credit.

Kingswood has been a superb partner with Campus. For example, my daughter is taking a college biology class through the partnership. I'm teaching an ethics class for a student at Cairn University through Kingswood. Their on-campus enrollment is currently small (hindered in no small part by the quotas the Canadian government abruptly imposed this year), but they train more Wesleyan ministers online than any of the Wesleyan schools.

6. Last weekend I blew through Brian Simmon's Passion Translation study notes on Luke. He's revising it because it was a little too much for Bible Gateway and they took it down, I think. He's trying to be a little more scrupulous in a revision. It is a fun paraphrase and I don't have any problem with them for several hermeneutical reasons. 

I have two main critiques as a scholar. First, he "word-fallacies" all over the place (etymology, overload...). Second, he follows the late Lamsa in thinking the Syriac is a direct line back to Jesus in Aramaic. Although he's a true believer, it's actually a great marketing device. You give readers the impression that you have a secret line to the real Jesus AND it lets you claim that all the verses and passages left out in modern translations are actually original. However, pretty much all scholars think that the Syriac is later.

Onward!

Memories of My Mother 7: The Final Years in Lakeland

Memories of my recently passed mother continue. The first six installments were:

1. The Early Years
2. The Depression Years
3. The Teen Years
4. Getting Married
5. Early Marriage
6. Fort Lauderdale

35. It was nice to have my parents visit me in England when I was working on my doctorate. Toward the end of my second year (spring 1995), I went to Germany for a couple months. In the lead up, my dad used the moment as an opportunity to revisit some of the places he had been during WW2. Mom of course came as well.

We visited Cheltenham in the south where my dad was stationed in England. I believe we drove to Paris, taking a ferry from Dover to Calais. In Paris, we have a picture of mom with the seat belt under her jacket by accident. It took a moment to figure out why she couldn't get out of the car. She had zipped up the coat over the seat belt. We took a train but didn't stop in Nancy where he had been stationed in France. We went to Mannheim where he had been stationed in Germany. 

From there we went to Munich where we visited Dachau. Then we took a train to Zurich and on to Basel and Bern, places Dad had gone on vacation while he was in Germany. For all my planning, the train from Munich to Zurich briefly ran across Austria, which was not on our travel pass. Dad had to cough up a little unexpected money for that ever so brief passage of the journey. It was a meaningful trip for dad and fun for mom.

They came over for my graduation from Durham in December 1996. Professor James Dunn and his wife Meta kindly had lunch with us after the ceremony.

For a while, Angie and I found some excuse to go back to Europe at least every other year. 2001 was the year of the big family trip with both Angie's parents and my parents along with the four kids. I was giving a paper at St. Andrews for a conference, so we all started up there. From there we traveled to Paris. It was quite an ordeal getting all those children and all that luggage on and off of trains. We got home just weeks before 9-11 would change travel forever.

Angie likes to tell a story of us at a restaurant near the Eiffel Tower. I was the only person who spoke any French at all, but I was pushing Tommy in the stroller (I don't think I sat down for five years). My parents kept saying in English, "We need to wait for Kenny to get back so we can order." The waiter spoke no English and was incredibly frustrated. Finally they all just pointed to who knows what.

The final trip to Europe with Mom came in 2004 when I was on a Fulbright in Tubingen. Angie's dad came too and we revisited some of the old haunts. We made a day trip to Munich and visited Dachau again. Angie took them to see the Grunewald altarpiece in France. I think it was the last time Mom was out of the country.

My mother was a little too proud of me. If I were to shoot someone and confess she would tell the police that I didn't really mean it. Soon after I finished my doctorate we were waiting to go into Outback to eat, and she began a conversation with the complete strangers next to her about how I was a minister and had just finished a doctorate in Bible in England. Very embarrassing!

In her later years when I would tell her what I had done on a particular week, she often assumed I had been involved in a grandiose activity substantially out of proportion to whatever it actually was. Now are you speaking there? Do they want you to be president there? No, mom, it was just a trip to Walmart.

36. Eventually they would transfer the lease on their cottage on the Frankfort Campgrounds. We had made that trip in early August every year. I think my mom had only missed one year in all her life up to that point.

That reminds me of my mother's ventures with miniature Schnauzers. My mother was not a pet person. She never had any desire to have a dog. But my sister Debbie wanted one early on in Florida, so they indulged her and got her a miniature Schnauzer named Misty. Then Debbie went off to Hobe Sound, leaving my mom to raise the dog. Suffice it to say, it became my mom's dog.

Then after Misty had died, Debbie wanted to get another dog to replace it. Not my mother's first choice, but they indulged her and got another miniature Schnauzer, Mindy. Then Debbie went off to Marion College and got married. Suffice it to say, it became my mom's dog again. Mindy died in my mom's arms at Frankfort Camp around 1988 and is buried next to our old cottage.

37. In the last years of my dad's work, GMAC flew him to Atlanta to work during the week. He would fly Delta up on Monday and fly home on Friday. In the early days, she would go up with him sometimes.

I was glad that my two stepdaughters Stefanie and Stacy were able to see the house in Fort Lauderdale before my parents moved to Lakeland. We visited in the summer of 1998. When I bought my first house on Harmon St. in Marion, we converted an attic into a room for the girls. Russ Gunsalus and I built some stairs into the attic.

My mother and father visited just after we had finished the stairs around 2000. As my dad started to go up, my mother with brutal honesty blurted out, "You're not going up there are you?" We laughed. Apparently, she wasn't sure whether my craftsmanship should be trusted or not. Wise woman.

38. As I began teaching at Indiana Wesleyan, my mother's voice was something like a little angel on my shoulder. If I said such and such, would it make her upset? Unlike Bud Bence, who wanted you to face your greatest doubts and rise to the challenge (the Houghton in him), I didn't want students to feel too uncomfortable. My far-too-subtle approach was to sow seeds that I thought would spring to life at some unexpected moment in the future as the implications dawned on them. Some of that was picturing my mother in the back of the room.  

39. In her later years, my mother was not great at facing her fears. She had some cataracts that could have easily been removed by laser, but she wasn't interested, even though her eyesight was getting worse and worse. The first day I arrived at the hospital last week, she said maybe she could handle that procedure since she was handling the hospital ok.

In 2003, her brother David died of cancer. During his second marriage, he had become quite charismatic. In fact, he had disturbingly told his brother Paul that, if he had enough faith, his heart issues would go away. Now, we believe in healing, but we also believe that God doesn't always heal. And we believe in doctors too.

I don't know if it would have made a difference, but David waited too long to see a doctor. Despite his faith, he died from the cancer. My mom and her sister Bernadine came up to help him in those last days. Unfortunately, he fell off his bed at some point and my mother and Bernadine tried to lift him back up on it. My mother crushed some vertebrae and never fully recovered. That was also one of the last times she drove, driving herself from Marion to Frankfort.

Then a few years later when her grandson Jeremy graduated from high school, she crushed some more vertebrae trying to lift a stack of plates into a cabinet. Much of her immobility in her later years was because of her back pain. For over a year, she gave herself daily shots in the stomach to improve her bone density. I was proud of her for being able to do that.

When David died a month or two later, she couldn't bring herself to come back up to the funeral. Some of it was of course her back pain.

40. My father died in March of 2012. He had a significant event about a month earlier, maybe a heart attack. Again, in the category of, "if you hide it doesn't exist," they should have gone to the hospital immediately. Instead, they went to bed.

When he had his final heart event, at first my mother did call 911. But she hung up on them. They did call back immediately of course, but he was gone. I suspect there was some fear of hospital expenses in there.

My sister Debbie being a nurse has been an invaluable help this last decade. Patricia has born the brunt of taking care of my mother, and her husband Dennis has also been incredibly faithful. Patricia even hurt her back some trying to help my mother.

I have repeatedly said that my mother was a tank, but a lot of it was just smart health care under Debbie's supervision. My mother got COVID in late 2020, but smart work got her Rendezevir and a platelet wash immediately. She had a seizure at one point in which it was discovered she had a tumor around part of her brain. It turned out to be a kind that grows slowly and is survivable. 

She has had countless UTIs and had pneumonia one other time. She broke her pelvis once. She has been in rehab twice. I think she overheard us talking rehab last week -- not something she would want to face at all. But she was a tank at 98!

Juanita and Debbie recently moved back to the Lakeland area. That has helped relieve some of Patricia's load. They also had some faithful helpers who would spend the night and help turn my mother when she needed it. Occasionally, Sharon and I would take a few days to help as well. My mother was incredibly fortunate to be able to spend her last days in her own home. Her mother and sister were not so fortunate.

I was able to be with her some in February, and was able to be with her for four nights last week. She was probably exposed to COVID Friday or Saturday, July 27-28. On Tuesday she was showing symptoms. On Wednesday they took her to the ER where they sat for four hours and were almost sent home without anything. They were basically sending her home to die.

Thursday they took her again by ambulance and the doctor didn't think she would make it. But she rallied and when I arrived on Saturday she seemed to be on a good path. I spent the nights with her. Monday the steriods had her saying crazy things. They had her on Lasix to drain fluids on her lungs, which meant she was constantly thirsty. I have to think those things were incredibly tiring to her body.

After I left on Wednesday she continued to decline. There were new infections in her lungs. On Friday she was telling my sisters to stop when they offered her water and food. She told me she loved me on the phone Friday night, and she died around 4:15am Saturday morning. It was pretty unexpected. The nurse called about 1am in the night to get permission to give Albumen, but she thought she would make it. But a little after 4am, her heart slowly stopped. She doesn't seem to have suffered. 

And so shall she ever be with the Lord.

41. I wrote a poem when my father died, so I thought I would write one for my mother as well.

'Tis So Sweet

We cannot choose our day to die.
We cannot always say goodbye.
But gratefully our time with Mom,
Allowed for us a gracious sum.

A century she walked with us.
She loved; she prayed without a fuss.
She taught us how to trust in God,
Whatever comes upon this sod.

She loved the Lord; she loved his Word.
She studied thus her soul to gird.
And when the trials upon her came,
Her God was with her through the same.

She looked for Jesus soon to come
And any day his kingdom done.
But now she'll beat us to the air,
And we will follow to her there.

We look to see you on that side
Where we forever will abide.
And until once again we meet,
Enjoy God's presence oh so sweet!

My Mother 6: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Memories of my recently passed mother continue. The first five installments were:

1. The Early Years
2. The Depression Years
3. The Teen Years
4. Getting Married
5. Early Marriage

27. I imagine moving to Florida was difficult for my mother because of being so far from her family, although I don't remember her saying so. My family prayed about the move, and several different Scriptures jumped out at different ones in the family. My favorite was my sister Juanita's verse: "Thou hast given me a south land" (Judg. 1:15). I can't remember my mother's verse. It may have been a psalm.

This would be the farthest she had ever been from family. Paul would not make this move. On the other hand, my mother loved to explore new things. She was curious. A longstanding story in my family was a road in Tennessee called "Stinking Creek Road" north of Knoxville. Every time we passed by my mother would say, "I wonder what's down that road." On such occasions, my dad's "J" personality had a schedule he wanted to keep. He even timed rest park stops for fun.

When my mother suggested diversions or visiting someone or something along the way, he would say, "Helen!" But most of the time, he would indulge her. In retirement, on one journey, they took the time to go down Stinking Creek Road. There's nothing there. It goes for a bit and then ends in a T with another north-south road.

I don't remember there ever being any rhetoric in my home about who the head was. In keeping with the culture and my dad's abilities, my mother was more than happy to let my dad function in traditional ways. (She did once say that they could never have money because he gave it all away.) Yet I don't think my dad ever made a significant decision without discussing it with her. Decisions were joint decisions. Even the children were often brought into them. 

My dad lived by the verse, "in honor preferring one another" (Rom. 12:10). This mutual deference often became frustrating to my brother-in-laws when it came to deciding where to eat out. "Where do you want to go?" "No, where do you want to go?" You couldn't trust someone when they said, "You have the last piece" because they might actually want it and be being polite.

On the other hand, my mother probably was often more prone to be straightforward about what she wanted. :-)

28. We made an exploratory trip to Fort Lauderdale before fully deciding. We stayed at a motel on Federal Highway. The beach and motel pool were relatively foreign experiences. I think my mother found a "bathing suit" that had a dress attached to it. She never did learn how to swim.

Having a house in Florida meant a steady stream of family and "friends" would come to visit us. We lived three miles from the beach and had a detached upstairs. Frankly, that was about the only time we went to the beach, when we had visitors from the north. Some visitors were more pleasant than others. Some were actually rather demanding and picky -- while getting a free room near a beach! But our peace-oriented family smiled and waved (and then of course talked about them around the dinner table later).

My Grandma Schenck came to visit once, maybe her one and only trip out of the state of Indiana during her life. This would have probably been around 1975, the year after my Grandpa Schenck died. She died in 1977.

29. My Grandma Shepherd and Great Aunt Nora (Harry Shepherd's sister) came to live with us for the better part of a year in the early 70s. These were precious days. Aunt Nora had been living in a trailer on my grandmother's land. For a long time, Grandma had lived off the rent from the original house in front and lived in a small shack at the back of the property. I remember it as small, and I was small.

Aunt Nora was in her early nineties, I believe, and had skin that reminded me of the crust of a pot pie. She loved vanilla wafers and gave them out fairly freely. She was very into politics (Republican, of course) and taught me to recite the presidents in order up to then-President Richard Nixon.

My mother's family had been Republican since the Civil War. Her grandfather had fought and been injured during the war, fighting for the Union. Abraham Lincoln was virtually a saint for my family, almost right up there with Peter and Paul. (I am still quite fond of him.) Aunt Nora had a frame with pictures in it of the three Republican presidents who had been assassinated (she got it before JFK).

In 1968 as Nixon was campaigning, he made a stop in Indianapolis, and my mother went to see him at the airport. Her picture was captured greeting him on the front page of the Indianapolis Star. If you were to visit my mother's book room today, you would find signed pictures of Reagan and Bush senior and junior. A Republican presidential candidate could hardly do any wrong, although I believe Trump sometimes made my mother uncomfortable the first time around.

I asked her once if she had ever voted for a Democrat. She indicated that she did once in a local election because she knew the person. But then she had second thoughts after he was in the position. Even with Nixon, the claims against him were scarcely to be believed. Even after he confessed and resigned, my mother had a sense that he had been mistreated.

My mother wasn't able to take care of her mother long-term. Eventually, her mother flew back to Indiana (I tried to build a plane to take her back but the aerodynamics weren't right). Grandma spent the rest of her days in the nursing home in Rossville where she passed in 1979.

30. My mother volunteered in the nurse's office at Wilton Manors Elementary School where I attended, about a half mile straight up the street from our house. She had to decide whether to enroll me as a four-year-old or to wait a year. She decided to enroll me. I was quite reluctant to go the first couple days, perhaps even hiding under the bed. But the second week I was into it.

While my father's family is loud and rather boisterous, my mother's family can be painfully shy, even neurotically fearful. This was me until my final days in college when the Schenck in me took over. My mother was understanding, probably remembering her own childhood.

We took a trip to the Philippines in 1976 (I believe) to visit my sister Juanita who was a missionary there. Those were the days when an overseas call cost an arm and a leg. We exchanged tape cassette recordings. We had stops in Guam and Seoul.

My mother loved these adventures. We had also made a trip to Brainerd in South Dakota when my sisters were there, maybe 1974. My parents would come to England twice during my education there. They would go with us to Europe again after I was married and to Germany when I was on my first Fulbright in 2004. It was a sign that my mother was moving slower when she wasn't interested in visiting us in Germany in 2011 while I was on a second Fulbright. I think Dad was game but she wasn't interested. He died right after we returned.

In the Philippines, I was quite neurotically terrified in the night at the sound of the "tikka" geckos up country in Rosales. Throughout the night, they made that repeated sound loudly, "TIK-KA, TIK-KA." My mother let me crawl into the way-too-small bed with them. My father was a trooper through such fears.

When our church watched the film, A Thief in the Night around the same time, I went through a long fearful period worrying about being left behind in the rapture. My mother gave me a little box of Scriptural promises to look at during school with verses like Joshua 1:6 and Jeremiah 29:11. One day in the sixth grade I was so fearful I was running a low grade temperature and they sent me home. In those days, she drove me to Sunrise Middle School and picked me up each day.

Perhaps she was overly indulgent, but my fears were irrational and real. When one woman at church told me that shyness was a matter of pride, I thought she was crazy. She was obviously an extrovert who had no idea what she was talking about.

31. My mom was an early version of a helicopter parent. In the sixth grade, I was not put in the track that students normally got on when they would eventually go to college. I was quite enjoying the run-of-the-mill math class. She made a hard decision and had me switched. I wasn't too excited about change at the time but was incredibly grateful for it afterward.

In high school, she was quite annoying at pushing me to get my homework done. (I tried to pass that along to my kids when they were in high school) I used to tell her to let me order my life. My first semester of college suggested her prodding had been helpful, in retrospect.

When in college I worried about whether I should date someone who didn't follow the standards of my background, my mom said not to worry about it. God would take care of it. Whereas I was wired at that time to be an idealist and absolutist, she argued for common sense and practicality. 

When my personality at that time felt like it had to say everything I was thinking or doubting to a girlfriend, my mother urged that "You don't have to say everything you know." She also had a sense of protecting the family, I would say. Not that we had any scandals, but I would say culturally she was of the mind to keep any family worries in house.

Mom was probably too indulgent. She came to my rescue many times. On my graduation weekend from Central, she was busy typing my honor's project in our hotel room for me while I read my notes to her. My Aunt Bernadine raised an eyebrow. Those were the days before computers were fully in play (1987). 

32. My mother was allergic to exercise. Even this last decade she has barely moved from her chair. Physical therapy was anathema. The by-weekly baths were of the Devil.

I have often run during my life. More than once she quoted that verse to me, "Bodily exercise profiteth little" (1 Tim. 4:8). Her father did play baseball at Wabash and she remembered seeing him play on a field day on the property of C. G. Taylor near Russiaville at some point.

She was not known for her great cooking. No doubt, her childhood left her with more of a sense of creativity than excellence in this area. We ate extensively out of cans. My dad discovered he had diabetes soon after we moved to Florida, so that was a regular factor in our collective diet. 

33. As the empty nest approached, my mother became more and more interested in current events. I think she would deny that it had anything to do with the empty nest, and she may be right. The 80s were the beginning of a new phase in the culture wars, as the Reagan years saw an increasing fusion of religion and politics. She rode that wave in her own way.

In Fort Lauderdale, we lived in the shadow of Dr. D. James Kennedy and Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. We had its radio station on all weekend. Coral Ridge was ground zero for the culture wars that were ramping up. Scientific creationism was now hitting its stride. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was becoming increasingly activist on the issue of abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade in the 70s.

My mother and church took great interest in these issues. I attended a couple creation-evolution debates there with my mom. She began to buy lots of books as the Christian Book Store movement was in full swing. The lead-off hitter was a book on Globalism by Marlin Maddox, who had a regular daily radio show. In my opinion, this set my mother on somewhat of a trajectory toward conspiracy theories.

Radio shows were a staple for her in the later decades of her life. She loved a show by a Messianic Jew named Zola Levitz. She was on multiple newsletters by individuals like Timothy LaHaye. Prophecy would remain a continual interest with Hal Lindsey still keeping track of world events. My mother strongly hoped that the Lord would return before she died, and she was known for keeping up with the signs of the times.

She would become the outreach director of the district women's organization in the 90s and would bring to the women in the district the latest findings she had from her network of information. I believe she also shared some of this information with the spouses of Central Wesleyan College board members. My dad was on the Board of Trustees of SWU in the 80s and 90s, and they enjoyed their travels to South Carolina twice a year. 

In this last decade, the radio shows were more along the lines of Tinyberg Tales and Al Smith's show that featured the origins of a hymn each week. However, she still to some extent kept up with current events with a steady stream of FOX News in the morning.

34. As my Dad was regularly working, my mother filled in some of the gaps in getting me to college before there was a car for me to take. One summer as I was about to drive back for summer school, I poked my eye on a candle sitting down to breakfast. She ended up driving me up. Interesting to think of now since she did almost no driving the last 20 years of her life.

My mother was not surprised when I felt a call to ministry. She never said anything, but she didn't really see me as a doctor. As I wrestled with issues of my study, she began to feed me resources. Given what was available, they tended to be fundamentalist, Coral-Ridge type resources.

For example, as I began to wrestle with whether the King James was the best Bible version, she gave me pro-KJV materials. I tried to go that way for a couple years but in seminary it just didn't seem correct. I believe she gave me a book that argued against Mark being the first Gospel. I'm sure she wasn't pleased that after due consideration I kept concluding for the other side. 

At one point I apologized for arguing with her. But entirely sanctified individuals weren't supposed to argue. "We're not arguing," she said. "We're discussing."

She thought me a bit rebellious but nothing could be farther from the truth. It was with great pain that I changed my mind on these issues. We had a fundamentally different approach to truth. Her approach was to use your intellect to show how the evidence could support the position of your group and tradition. But I had started out as a chemistry major. I wanted to gather evidence, form hypotheses, test them, then come to the most likely conclusion.

At some point around the end of seminary, I largely stopped discussing my learning with her. I didn't really want her to change her mind, and she never would change it anyway. It wasn't beneficial to argue about things that, in the end, didn't matter. So I lost my conversation partner. She would at least listen to anything I wanted to talk about.

35. Around the year 2000, my parents sensed it was a good time to move closer to family. The days were gone when Patricia's husband was pastoring the church in Fort Lauderdale. Sharon had moved to Hobe Sound after being our pastor for a while. My dad was retired. They sold the house and moved to Lakeland to be near Patricia.

To be continued...

Memories of My Mother 5 (Early Marriage)

Reminiscences of my mother's life continue. The first four posts were:

1. The Early Years
2. The Depression Years
3. The Teen Years
4. Getting Married

20. After they returned from their honeymoon, my parents first lived above my Grandpa Schenck's store. My mother had all the adjustments you would expect not only for someone newly married but for a new wife living on her husband's family's turf!

My dad not only had the work of his bread route with his brother (then Tasty Bread later that year), but he was expected to be on call to help in the store on a moment's notice. Sometimes, he was so tired that my mom could hardly wake him up. When my dad's brother Eugene once asked her how it was going, she unthinkingly and innocently remarked, "All he wants to do is go to bed." I'm sure this elicited a smirk from the mischievous Gene. Obviously, it embarrassed my mother enough to remember it.

My mom always said that Dad survived on short power naps. I've heard that these are actually very healthy. I take them quite often myself.

21. They lived there for four years. In April of the next year, they had their first daughter Patricia. Then Juanita in 1950. Then Sharon in 1951. My sisters would become the famous "Schenck trio" with my mother playing the piano. 

My mother could play virtually any song by ear. She could of course read music as well, but the style of Pilgrim worship favored a more extemporaneous ability. A song could arise at any time in a worship service, whether from the front or from the congregation. It could come in any key. 

The right hand would quickly find the melody, and the alto could fairly easily be filled in because the interval was fairly predictable. Then the left hand would play the chords. First the key chord-note one octave below. Then the left hand jumped up an octave to the appropriate three-finger chord just below C. Once you figured out the key, the two or three key chords that went with the melody were predictable.

In any case, my mom made it look easy.

22. A couple awkward funnies from this period. One unexpected feature of my mother these last few years is a slight sense of humor. Recently, if you asked her how she was feeling, she might say, "with my fingers and toes." But most of my life, she hasn't really been much of a joker. They used to tell her to raise her right hand when she was being funny because no one could tell.

This Spock-like matter-of-factness got her into a little hot water apparently with her new father-in-law. As I remember the story, at some point, the Schenck family were all singing the melody, and she suggested that some of them might want to sing harmony. I guess Grandpa Schenck didn't like any suggestion that they weren't already perfect singers. 

Of course, the Schenck family are all incredible singers. My dad's brother Maurice and family were in great demand. And, yes, they have all indeed sung in perfect harmony for as long as I've been conscious.

A second awkward moment was when my mother's father was the reader for some ministerial correspondence course that my dad's father was taking. My Grandpa Schenck didn't think that my Grandpa Shepherd had graded him fairly. I of course can't say except that Grandpa Shepherd was neurotically conscientious and prayed over every grade he gave. In any case, Grandpa Schenck asked my mom to have a talk with her father about it. :-)

23. As Sharon's birth approached, the space above the store was not going to be adequate. So they bought their first house on Evanston Avenue in Indianapolis. My mom's brother Paul was married by then and moved there as well, not far from the old Northside Pilgrim Church. This is the congregation that would eventually move to what is now Trinity Wesleyan on Allisonville Road. My family would attend Northside until we moved to Florida in 1971 (except for two very brief company moves to Anderson and Evansville).

It was below zero around the time Sharon was born in December. Mom went to the hospital early because they were afraid that the car wouldn't start when the critical moment came.

In the 50s, my mother struggled with the peer pressure of "standards" that existed in the church at that time. My mother and father were easygoing. I like to say that while they lived a strict lifestyle, they were not legalistic. My mother had a bun her whole life (in a distinctive style). She didn't cut her hair except in keeping with the common sense of split ends and such. She never wore slacks or pants, only skirts and dresses. In the last decade of her life, she had some pajama bottoms. She wore no jewelry. Maybe she had an un-showy pin/brooch or two on a rare occasion. She wore no visible makeup. Maybe a little base you didn't notice sometimes.

We did not buy or sell on Sunday, meaning that we didn't eat out on Sunday except when the "ox was in the ditch" because of traveling. We didn't have a TV for many years. My dad always suspected that his dad wouldn't visit them because he thought my dad was hiding a TV. (They did visit, however, when I was born in 1966.) 

Even when he got a small black and white TV, my dad didn't watch TV on Sunday because he felt like he would get sucked into sports and lose perspective on the Lord's Day. As another sidenote, my mother had to adjust to my dad listening to the radio/watching sports. He would tell her there were just five minutes left in a game, which she assumed meant five minutes. She didn't know it meant a half hour. 

At some point, my go-along-to-get-along mother had to make some choices. One decision she made had to do with knee socks for my sisters. Apparently, they were viewed as prideful and showy by some in the church of that time. However, when you consider the coldness of winter and the fact that my sisters wore only dresses and skirts, there was the question of practicality. My mom didn't want to make waves or appear prideful, but there was the practical concern of keeping her daughters warm.

She felt like the Lord brought Philippians 2:12 to her mind: "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." She believed the Lord was telling her not to worry about what others thought but to do what made sense to her own conscience before him. She let them wear knee socks.

She trimmed my sisters' bangs -- a big no-no in some circles. The famous Schenck trio of Patricia-Juanita-Sharon was actually not allowed to sing at one church they were supposed to because they had bangs. 1 Corinthians 11 -- a woman's hair is her glory.

A story I haven't mentioned is how my mother felt like the Lord told her as a young girl that she was spending too much time listening to programs like Little Orphan Annie on the radio (I think that was the show). She felt convicted and that she needed to spend more time in the real world rather than getting caught up in fiction. Thankfully, I've never felt convicted about living in a dream world, much to my wife's dismay.

24. On the whole, I feel like a sort of common sense conservatism typified my parents. They didn't eat out on Sunday, but they made exceptions. When the merger of the Wesleyan Church happened in 1968, my dad was a delegate and supported it. Some in his family thought it was of the Devil and told him they would pray for his soul. Despite how uncomfortable this sort of conflict was for my dad, he stuck to what he believed. And my parents never got bitter over things like this.

When I struggled with some of these questions in college, my mother told me not to worry too much about it. God would work these things out. It seems to me that she was unusually practical when it came to such things, no doubt because of some of the extremes they had navigated in their early marriage.

25. From Evanston Avenue they moved to Crestview, where Debbie was born (1958). In the mid-fifties, my dad started working for General Motors. More specifically, MIC, Motors Insurance Corporation, which is now GMAC. This would lead to some moving around. He was actually in Michigan at the GM Institute when Debbie was born, and Uncle Paul had to take my mother to the hospital. Debbie never let my dad forget.

In the 50s, I think raising my sisters was my mother's main job. She also babysat some for my cousins Carl and Jerry, Paul's sons. I think in the 60s, she did start giving piano lessons. She was officially certified as a piano teacher. I've mentioned that she played the piano and accordion, but I haven't mentioned that she played the violin. She had a valuable violin that someone who had played in John Philip Sousa's band had sold or given her.

That reminds me that I didn't mention the orchestras that used to be part of Frankfort Camp meeting. As a young girl, my mother would play the violin in the orchestra. Anyone who played an instrument could join, and it seems like most people did in those days. My dad played the trombone. My son Tom used my dad's trombone throughout high school for band. 

The final move in Indy was to Preston Drive, on the edge of what is now Carmel. What was countryside and a random artesian well is now a quite hip neighborhood. My wife and I ate at a nice Greek restaurant for our anniversary this year probably less than a mile from where my family lived when I was born.

Each time my parents moved, Uncle Paul and Aunt Betty would move nearby too. Paul would pass from this life in 1980 living in a house about a mile from Preston Dr. Again, extremely difficult for my mother given how close they had all been as a family. 

26. I don't think my mother ever had any serious difficulties with my sisters except perhaps a little conflict with Sharon in her early teens. Sharon would tell you that she was initially rebellious but then had a spiritual breakthrough when she gave everything to the Lord. Sharon went on to become a Wesleyan pastor. She would follow Juanita to Brainerd Indian School and then, after marrying her husband, to work at God's Bible School and Hobe Sound.

My two oldest sisters both graduated from Frankfort Bible College. Sharon started there but had to finish up at Hobe Sound Bible College because of Frankfort closing. They all also went to live with Grandma Shepherd to finish high school at Frankfort. That made it easier for my mother to have two young children at home in the late 60s rather than five.

When I was still four in 1971, General Motors moved my Dad to Florida, where I would grow up. My parents lived in Wilton Manors, within Fort Lauderdale, in a house that cost my dad $25,000. It's probably worth a half a million today. 

To be continued...

My Mother 4: Getting Married

This is the fourth post in a series of posts remembering the life of my mother, Helen Schenck. The first three posts were:

1. The Early Years
2. The Depression Years
3. The Teen Years

15. In the fall of 1943, my mother started college at Frankfort Pilgrim College. These were the days of World War II. I don't have any more personal notes from her for those years, so I'll now continue with memories I have of things she said and I'd be delighted for any readers to add memories in the comments.

She would graduate as valedictorian of her class. She was apparently good enough at Greek that the president of the college at that time thought she might become a Greek teacher for the college. He had her substitute for him at least once. Marriage of course would take her in a different direction. I have her Greek textbook. Years later, when I started to learn Greek, I remember her trying to go through the alphabet, but that was about all that was left in her memory.

Her final credits were in the history of education. Her assignment was to outline a book. Probably wouldn't pass muster today for three credits. :-) There was apparently a little dispute over who should be valedictorian. The other contender was student body president, I believe. She was much more outgoing, involved, and indeed went on to be a leader and missionary in the Pilgrim church. My mother was shy and bookish. 

I heard the (friendly) two sides to this controversy from the relevant participants even in the last decade. But, whatever the reason, my mother had the honor and gave the valedictory speech. As I recall, it was on the imminence of Christ's return and the need for Christians to step up to meet the times. This would be a theme of my mother's later life. She was built for the cultural moment that rose in the 80s.

16. My grandfather, of course, was a prophecy teacher. During this period he was not only pastoring but going to churches to deliver teaching on the end times with the long prophecy scroll on the right. The Pilgrim Church was thoroughly dispensationalist: pre-trib rapture, pre-millennial, and all.  

My mother helped my grandfather type up his teaching into a book in the last years of his life. In 1960, he paid $100 to have it published: Foundational and Fundamental Truth Concerning the Coming of the Lord. Last year I republished it (2023). For months thereafter, my mother always asked me whether there had been any more sales. She still felt like we needed to promote the book so that people would know that Christ is coming back soon.

He retired from FBC on somewhat of a sad note. Still a Quaker in spirit, young rabble-rousing students of the late 50s weren't always ones to pay attention in class (nothing's changed :-) ). I think the president's son even jumped out the window for fun. The president didn't think my grandfather could keep order and pushed him to retire. He did get the final boy's dorm at Frankfort named after him, "Shepherd's Hall." 

My grandfather often seemed to get the short end of the stick, and it was against his principles to do anything about it. During the history of FBC, he was the one whose salary could be passed over first in a pinch. My father also had some similar elements in his background (his mother came out of the Old German Baptist tradition). He had an aha moment when he saw Aunt Bernadine's husband Paul send an order back to the kitchen that wasn't how he had ordered it. The realization was, "What do you know? Sometimes you get what you want when you say something." :-)

My grandfather died of bone cancer in 1963. I know it was hard on my mother. He and my grandmother spent those last years as janitors at a bank to make ends meet.

17. My mother knew or knew of many of the Pilgrims and other holiness folk of the early twentieth century. I believe she once heard Henry Clay Morrison preach, the founder of Asbury Seminary. She knew Walter Surbrook, general superintendent of the Pilgrim Church in the 30s and 40s. 

A major moment during her time at Frankfort was when the Philippines was liberated. R. K. Storey's family had been missionaries there when the Japanese took over. He lost a daughter in the early days of occupation because she drank from polluted water. The Storey's were part of the Bataan Death March and were prisoners until 1945. 

When the Storeys returned to Frankfort, the entire college marched in celebration from the college to downtown Frankfort. It was a high moment.

18. My mother's piano skills in college didn't go to waste. She would go to churches with singing groups from the college on the weekends, just like I did in college. One such church was the house church my dad's father had planted in Indy. My mother was friends with my dad's sister Francis, and more than once she went to this church to play the piano. (My mother also played the accordion, by the way.)

One Sunday in late 1946 or early 47, she was at their church for "Rally Day." She saw my dad's picture in his army uniform and thought to herself, "I wonder if I would ever date him." She was kind of dating at the time. I say "kind of," because my mother had no interest in the guy and there was no physical involvement, not even holding hands. I'm not even sure what to call that.

As a side note, my father's brother Eugene did ask her out first, but she wasn't interested. When my dad finally went to ask her out, he cleared it with his brother. I'm not sure how I would evaluate my father's romantic skills. His pickup line was, "Most of the guys my age are getting married, and I wondered if you would go out with me." Classic.

19. Let's just say that my mother had never properly dated. I wonder if she had even been to a proper restaurant before. On their first date, my mother didn't know what a tip was. She actually picked up the money my dad left behind on the table and returned it to him.

Soon, my dad wanted to kiss her, but she didn't think it was proper. He asked something like, "What will it take for you to let me kiss you?" Her answer was that she didn't think she should kiss someone until you were engaged." 

"Is that all?" he said. "Well then will you marry me?" A hopeless romantic, my dad. She said yes, and they were engaged after two months of dating.

My dad was working an early morning bread route those days with his brother Vernon. On dates, he would sometimes fall asleep with his head on her shoulder. They would both just be sitting in his car somewhere out in the country near Frankfort. She didn't mind. She just liked being with him. As an engagement present, he gave her a "hope chest" since wedding rings and jewelry of any kind were strictly prohibited.

They would get married on July 9, 1947, after dating for about four months. They were married at First Pilgrim Church in Frankfort, Indiana, about a mile north of the college. It was a double wedding. They weren't close at all to the other couple. A friend of my mom's just suggested they might save on expenses if they got married together.

The day of the wedding, my Mom felt like they needed some more flowers. She had no car, so she walked around to some friends whom she thought had pretty flowers in their yards and asked if she could have some. By the time she got to the wedding, she was so tired it was an effort to walk down the aisle.

After the wedding, they drove all the way to Whiteland that night, getting there about midnight. Mom's brother Paul followed them down to Dad's house to make sure they had enough money for their honeymoon. They went on for about a week in Mississippi and Louisiana, visiting one of the places he had been during the war. They went on to a Pilgrim Holiness camp meeting in Pineville, Louisiana, where they were asked to sing and did.

As a wedding gift, my dad gave my mother the piano that still sits in her living room today.

To be continued...

Helen Schenck 3 (The Teen Years)

My mother passed away Saturday morning, August 3, 2024. This is the third in a series of posts remembering her life. The first two posts were:

1. The Early Years
2. The Depression Years

After seven years away from Frankfort, the odyssey of my mother's family came to an end, and they returned to their base camp.

11. Frankfort Bible College reopened in the fall of 1939, and my grandfather was called back to teach. The family moved back into the small cottage owned by someone else. The now significantly larger children slept in a bunk bed of single width, the two boys on the top and the two girls on the bottom. They had a laundry stove for heat but still no toilet or running water. It was the farthest cottage from the dorms.

My mother had her father for several high school classes: Latin, history, algebra, geometry, English, and health and safety. She remembers one lesson in health and safety that was about not leaving things like books on the stairs so you don’t trip. Helpful. :-) He taught Bible courses and prophecy in the college.

That freshman year of high school was one of sickness for my mother. Not only did she get the mumps, but she also had a very serious case of Pemphigus, which was nearly always fatal. Her father carried her up a flight of stairs on a Sunday morning to see a doctor. Her legs were weeping fluids and itched badly. The doctor prescribed a fluid to put in a bucket for her to soak. The redness and swelling were climbing up her legs.

She remembers one day when two of her close friends were visiting, Mary and May Zeits. They prayed to the top of their lungs for healing. My mom later testified that “the Lord heard our cries, and I started on the road to recovery.”

12. Once again, it was my grandmother who came to the rescue to save them from poor living conditions. There was a house across the railroad tracks, less than a half mile east of campus. It was being sold for taxes due, $200. Grandma Shepherd had four brothers (Harry, Billy, Lester, and Garland). She was going to ask them each for $25 toward the house. They were generous and gave the whole amount.

Around 1941, they moved into this new house, which still did not have an indoor toilet (951 S. Third St.). It was in poor condition, smelly, a shell of a house. An elderly couple had lived there, unable to take care of themselves properly. Grandpa Shepherd did the math as they slowly redid walls and added to the house, including finishing an upstairs space.

One memory my mother had was trying to put wallpaper over some tar paper my grandfather had used on the walls. It was my grandmother’s idea, and my mom and her brother Paul were charged with the task. But the wallpaper wouldn’t stick. In frustration, Paul said, “Throw it out the window.” But they did get enough up to make it livable.

Her dad enclosed a small porch to make a room for my mother and her sister Bernadine. A long shell of a room in the back was given cement to make a floor. Mom remembers that she and Paul were tasked to smooth the cement before it could dry. Apparently, they were only half successful. She remembers that the room became quite useful.

They were likely living in that new house when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The troubles of Europe were no longer those of a faraway land. My grandfather would register for the draft at the age of 58 like every other able-bodied man in 1942.

13. The week my mother was to graduate from high school (spring of 1943), there was a flood in Frankfort. Their house was in a floodplain. The water came up to the piano keys, ruining my mother’s piano. They scrambled to pack and move as much as they could upstairs. I believe some precious family history was ruined.

They exited the back door through waist-deep water and were picked up by a police boat. Grandpa Shepherd quoted Job 1:21 the next day in chapel at FBC: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” My mom remembers it as a precious time, despite the loss. They moved back into the Clem’s cottage on the campus for the summer.

It took a lot of work to get the house back into decent shape. The floors had buckled and were covered in mud. They had to be replaced. Somehow, they had the house at least livable by the time they needed to vacate the cottage for camp meeting.

14. My mother began her college days at Frankfort. Early in those four years, they were able to move into a larger house just a little bit down the street (951 S. Third St.). The sale of the first house was able to cover the cost. They finally had an indoor bathroom. Mom's mother rented gardening space in the field across the street, and they had fresh vegetables. They were living the life now!

I vaguely remember the cherry tree they had in the backyard. Apparently, my grandmother made cherry dumplings to die for. A sad moment for my grandfather was when their former house up the block burned down. They had put so much work into that house.

My mother’s family deeply enjoyed living in the new house. They had finally reached some stability in their lives. My mom tells a story about her and her sister Bernadine moving a chair or couch upstairs in the house. They could hear their father, who was praying at the time, pray for them. “Lord, please help Helen and Mary as they carry that chair up the stairs.” Bernadine mumbled under her breath, “Why don’t you get up yourself and help us?”

To be continued...

My Mother 2: The Depression Years

My mom passed away this morning, August 3, 2024. I started this series of reminiscences about her life here. Continuing...

6. In the summer of 1933, R. G. Flexon asked my grandfather to go to Virginia to pastor a Pilgrim church in a new sawmill town called Bacova, Virginia.

Bacova was a town built by a company around a sawmill. The houses were all the same with a wooden sidewalk connecting each house. For the first brief time, my mother had an indoor toilet. The lid would pop up to make it flush when you stood up. My mom wouldn’t have an indoor toilet again until high school.

The church in Bacova (named from the first letters of BAth COunty, VA) was a community church, not tied to any one denomination. However, during the week, my grandfather would preach at a Pilgrim church in the mountains, with kerosene lamps in the windows to light the service. My mother remembers one weeknight when they came upon a group marveling over a huge rattlesnake the mailman had killed. Her father in fact would preach the funeral of a boy who died from a rattlesnake bite that summer. Let’s just say she was rather afraid of snakes.

On a sidenote, a snake (non-poisonous) somehow got into her house in Lakeland last year. They had found one in the garage they thought had come in because of hard rains, but this one was in the back hallway near where she slept. At one point she said, "I see something in the hallway," but they thought she was seeing things. But, lo and behold, they found a snake in the back bedroom. It was removed without her knowing the operation was going on.

Back to Virginia. On the midweek evening trip to the Pilgrim church in the mountains, my mother remembered that they could see lights in the distance where prisoners were building a road, probably today’s US 220. This was a “chain gang,” probably consisting entirely of blacks arrested under Jim Crow laws.

7. Come fall 1933, the call came for my grandfather to teach at another Pilgrim school in Kingswood, Kentucky. At the time, Kingswood was one of the decentralized headquarters for the Pilgrim church. There was also an orphanage there. As usual, my grandfather also pastored a Pilgrim church, located upstairs above a store.

My mother had fond memories of the year there, from 1933-34. They had no electricity but a big, bright Aladdin lamp. Apparently, my grandfather gave considerable attention to cleaning the globe of the lamp. I’m guessing it was so he could read. My mother and her brother Paul played church in the tabernacle. Paul was the preacher. Mom pretended to play the piano, and their friend Velma (Snider, I think) was the shouter, a testament to the nature of Pilgrim worship at that time.

My grandmother was ever creative and resourceful. My grandfather could hardly have made it without her. As an example of her creativity, she used the ice from a nearby waterfall to make ice cream for the kids (although perhaps this was a common practice before refrigerators?).

Apparently, there was a cliff behind the cottage where they lived. Kids would crawl through a crack to get to the bottom of the cliff. Not my mother. The rattlesnakes she remembered from Tennessee and Virginia convinced her otherwise.

8. Finally, they returned to southern Indiana. In early 1935, they were living in Burns City, Indiana, pastoring. It was the first place where my mother attended a public school, which was right across a field behind the parsonage. They had hardly any furniture, maybe one chair. When people visited, they would ask if they were just moving in or just moving out. They slept on straw mattresses on the floors upstairs. 

Then from 1935-37, my mother’s father pastored a circuit in Elnore and Epsom. They lived in Elnore, the bigger town. My mom attended school across town from where they lived. It was apparently a rather harsh winter of 1935-36. One day when it was well below zero, my mother forgot to wear her gloves. Her dad set out to meet her on her way home from school but while he went through town, the shortest distance, she took the longer way around the edge of town.

By the time they met up, her hands were frozen. They quickly stopped at a family’s home that attended the church and ran cold water over her hands. It was apparently very painful, but her hands probably survived because of it.

She remembers another day when they ran out of gas as they were returning from the Epsom church, about an 8-mile drive. They waited a long time while her father walked to Elnore to find gas. Her ever-resourceful mother always kept a blanket in the car for such an occasion.

9. New Year’s Eve 1935 was the day my mother’s Grandpa Rich died (Oscar Rich). He was driving around collecting rent. He apparently had a heart attack and drove into a tree. They had been planning to go to Indianapolis to his house for Christmas, but the snow was so deep they had postponed it.

Finally, with a sense of urgency on my grandmother’s part, they went on New Year’s Eve. She got those sorts of impressions. When they arrived, her mother was in tears because Great-Grandpa Rich should have long been home before then. They retraced his steps until they found him in the morgue, and my grandmother had to identify him, an unfortunate task.

Meanwhile, my mother was sad that she had not been able to go with them. School was starting and she would have exams that week. They had left her behind in Elnore with a woman from the church.

She has fond memories of Elnore. She remembers her mom making her own soap. She remembers that there was a railroad track behind their house and that coal would sometimes fall off trains. They were allowed to pick it up and use it in the cook stove for heat or for cooking. (I can see my grandfather agonizing over the question of whether this was stealing.) Apparently, sometimes the coal arrived just in time for much-needed heat.

One memory she had of that time was of some people who visited to repent for doing my grandparents dirty. My mom was supposed to go upstairs but listened in from the top of the stairs. Apparently, there was some property of her grandfather Rich that these individuals had somehow taken over after he died. My grandparents being ever forgiving, this couple left with their consciences clear. But my grandparents didn't end up with the property, of course. 

Another awkward moment came when it was time for my mother’s family to move to the Greenwood church my grandfather had pastored before. The pastor there had not moved out, but a family coming in from Kansas had already arrived. My formerly Quaker grandfather was not one to push back or quarrel. The whole family crowded into one room of the parsonage and the other family, pushier, moved into the rest of the house. The two families occupied the same house for a week or two.

10. They would stay at Greenwood for two years until Frankfort Pilgrim Holiness College reopened in 1939. Mom was now 11 years old. My grandfather’s pay was whatever came in the offering plate, sometimes 50 cents. He tried to work at a local grain silo to make more, but back problems soon ended that. They survived off the tithe of a bedridden World War I veteran with tuberculosis. The man received a $ 100-a-month penchant.

It was at Greenwood that my mother really grew in her ability to play the piano. Her mother washed clothes for a Baptist piano teacher to pay for piano lessons, another sign that her family was low on the totem pole even during the Depression. My mother’s brothers accused Mom of practicing the piano to get out of doing the dishes. Believable.

During that time, my Grandma Shepherd became ill and needed a hysterectomy, which would keep her out of commission for several weeks. Apparently, she had a tumor the size of a grapefruit. My mother's mother had played the piano for church services. Grandma told my mother that she would have to take over for her. This was when my mother first started playing the piano for church, something she would do her whole life. She would even give piano lessons herself as a certified piano teacher after she was married.

My grandmother had some chickens during this time. She was quite creative. Necessity is the mother of invention. It was my mother’s job to collect the eggs. Apparently, she was afraid of the rooster because it would peck her. I believe it was at this time that grandma also gave my mother a little banty rooster. Unfortunately, it perished when it ran into a fire being used to warm a pot. When I called my mother these last couple years, she always asked about the chickens.

To be continued...