The Passing of Keith Drury

We received word yesterday that Keith Drury had passed on Sunday. Apparently, he began feeling and perhaps acting a little strangely at church Sunday morning. It appears he had a stroke that led to a brain bleed. 

It would be hard to quantify the impact of this man. In some ways, he was like a second father to me. But to say that is not to say anything different from what countless others might say of him. He invested in so many people over the years. The memories that are flooding on Facebook have a predictable cadence. There are countless pictures of him hiking with students and countless comments about how he said just the right thing at the right time for someone.  

He was eminently quotable. As I started to write this post, I thought, "There are people who can write faster than me, and there are people who can write better than me, but there aren't many who write as well as me and as fast as me." Or something like that. I often mess up the details.

One Facebook story yesterday that stood out to me was a pastor's kid who came to IWU as a psychology major. But he was wondering if God was calling him to ministry. One of Keith's syllabus antics was that you could have someone attend class for you. This PK subbed in for his roommate, I think. The class tugged him more in the ministry direction.

So Keith had a quote -- "Often a pastor's kid needs to take a vacation from ministry when they come to college, but eventually they find their way back." Or something like that.

2. If I were to sum up Keith in one word, it would be phronesis. This is the Greek word for practical wisdom. I have never known anyone who had more wisdom than Keith Drury. If he had lived in ancient Israel, God might have used him to write a book of Proverbs. 

I wasn't of the age to know his course in Strategetics, but I am so happy that he invested in Eric Romer to preserve it. I felt like he planted his legacy in countless people. I doubt that anything of his wisdom is lost. It's all out there somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if in forty years the Wesleyan Archives release a time capsule of memoirs that he has planted there on a fifty-year release schedule.

I know that some people think I have some book smarts, but I think of how stupid I must have presented myself at anything practical over the years. As no doubt with all of us, he patiently listened (most of the time) and then Socratically led us to the right path. How many good decisions or ideas I had over the years actually came from his subtle redirection? I bet this is true of countless ones of us.

3. I am prone to share too much, so I ask forgiveness if I do. I like to preserve the memories I can, and I have a forum here to preserve them that others may not have. Others will be able to perfect and fill in details. Keith came from Pennsylvania, as I recall. The Pilgrim Church in Pennsylvania was very conservative. The Alleghany district, for example, didn't go with the merger of the Wesleyan Church because they thought it was a move toward liberalism (maybe even a one world religion -- some of the ideas back then were crazy, as are some of ours today... we just can't see it yet).

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Interlude

So let me give a Drury interruption again (there may be many). He used to talk about how worship comes in cycles. The children go back to choruses and think they're doing something new when their grandparents were singing choruses in the 40s. The parents thought their parents were unsophisticated and so sang hymns. Then their children think they know more and shift to choruses again. The children always think they know more and that they are coming up with something new, but often history is just bouncing back and forth. The children swing one way; their children swing back to what their parents did.

He didn't believe we were getting better and better. It was more like we were bouncing back and forth. The children make fun of their parents for being legalistic and narrow-minded on x. Then their children grow up and do the same thing on different issues. In this most recent flare-up over race, one of Keith Drury's students (Andy Merritt, as I recall) came up with a very Drurian quote: "If you want to know what you would have done during the Civil Rights movement, you're doing it now."

With regard to the holiness movement, he used to say that the impact of ultraconservatism of that sort usually left evidence on a person even after they have long abandoned its specifics. With Jim Barnes, he thought it was in a certain way of dressing and presenting himself. With Larry Mitchell, he thought it was a kind of "anti-rule" approach to life. He wasn't sure how it had impacted me but my parents weren't narrowminded in their approach to life even though they lived what to most would be a strict life. If anything its impact on me has been more a deep sense of perpetual failure, but perhaps that is my personality.

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4. I think Keith didn't have as smooth a relationship with his mother, but as far as I remember he was a dutiful son. I knew his older brother Elmer briefly at SWU. He was the advancement officer (Elmer's son Scott would later become advancement officer for SWU too). In the late 80s, I was in a mixed quartet that traveled to Florida for the college, and Elmer took us there. But he died suddenly of a heart attack not long after, as I recall. Keith helped his family get their affairs in order. Again, forgive me if I am sharing too much.

The memory I remember hearing of Keith's dad was very interesting to me. He was district superintendent in Pennsylvania in the days when going to movies was an absolute no-no. His father knew it was an unnecessary rule and at least on one occasion drove some distance to take Keith to see a movie. In other words, his father may have followed strict rules most of the time, but he wasn't legalistic about them.

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Interlude

Keith used to say that if you put the unimportant rules in the same place in the Discipline as the important rules, then you undermine the importance of the truly important ones. So if you put "don't have sex outside of marriage" in the same place as "don't dance and don't go to movies," you trivialize the rules about sex by the rules about dancing.

It is truly dumbfounding how much rearrangement and strategizing in the Discipline has taken place in order to maneuver around rules like "don't dance." They actually created a special section of the Discipline called "Special Directions" to try to insulate the truly important from the culturally passing.

It is [insert stronger word than puzzling] to me that the Wesleyan Church might actually disintegrate over the issue of drinking. The Methodists devolved over homosexuality, but it would be perfectly Wesleyan for us to split because of drinking, something that is obviously not prohibited in Scripture. I don't drink. But really. As Drury said, we are just playing out the struggles of our parents and grandparents with a different issue. "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity."

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 5. You can see that Keith was a pragmatist. I would define Keith's kind of pragmatist (as mine) as someone who has a set of essentials but understands that a lot of the rules are more or less made up by our cultures and subcultures. Far more than the idealists think, the end often does justify the means, just not on the essentials. Keith understood people. And Keith understood what was important. Within those parameters, there was a lot of lee-way to get things where they need to go.

I would say that most leaders -- at least the successful ones -- fall into this philosophy. The church doesn't like it when they find out how much politics there often is on a general level, but this seems to be the way things are. The idealists (I don't want to say the godly) end up either breaking everything or failing miserably. Frankly, I'm not sure how well I am equipped to play these games, and that's probably why I'm not a leader.

Man, the memories are flooding in and my typing can't keep up. Keith used to say that he wasn't sure you could stay holy and become a senior leader even in the church. He mused once that the holiest people are probably the quiet people in the pew who don't do much. [By the way, his comments never had a permanent quality. They were always just musings he felt free to change his opinion on. In fact, he might change positions just to keep you on your toes.]

He famously turned down being general superintendent in 1988. The reason was to be a father to his sons, and I have no reason to doubt him. But he was also aware of the corrupting impact that being in senior leadership could have.

He used to say that he could rarely go up against someone like Earle Wilson and win. Earle was just too savvy at maneuvering. I'm not saying, by the way, that all general superintendents or college presidents have been warped. I'm just saying that the world of power, even in the church, has an impact on you that isn't always positive. It's because of fallen human nature and the difficulty of doing even good in the world without breaking some eggs.

When I became the Dean of the School of Ministry, David Drury made a positive comment to me about the possibility of getting good things done in organizations without political maneuvering and sneakiness. I felt like it was a comment on his father's generation. However, I view my efforts to get good things done during that time as a failure. Perhaps I wasn't sneaky enough. My initiatives were given to another... where they have died to a degree I could have never imagined.

I need to work now. To be continued...