Part 3 (2/2)

I knew he wasn't a Jehovah's Witness; they always travel in twos and compliment you on your house.

He couldn't be a tax a.s.sessor because he wasn't carrying a clipboard with the plot plan on it.

He wasn't a salesman because he carried no samples.

But like all three, he hadn't called first. He just showed up. I wanted to kill whoever told him where I lived.

”You're the new pastor?” I asked. I wasn't curious. I was amazed.

”Guilty as charged, brother!” He was so jubilant, so on top of it, so young.

I let him in because it was the right thing to do and invited him to have a seat wherever he could find one. He stepped around the model airplane I was working on, dug a man-sized s.p.a.ce in the magazines and newspapers that covered the couch, and had a seat.

”Nice place you have here.”

I'd left the pastorate a month before and had not returned to Antioch Mission since. Call me picky, call me a grouch, but I expected Kyle Sherman to know there had to be a reason. The moment he opened his mouth I knew he didn't have a clue.

When I ate dinner at Judy's, n.o.body I met there talked about church. We talked about fis.h.i.+ng, baseball, country music, cars and trucks, and the condition of the roads. We argued about politics and local issues. We even talked about religion and spiritual matters, which I didn't mind, not at all.

But we did not talk about Sunday school attendance, the church van, the outreach program, or the Blessing Barrel. We didn't haggle over the Sunday morning song list or whose job it was to change the sheets in the nursery. We didn't talk about the budget and the offerings or the need for an ongoing children's ministry, or whether we should allow Dee Baylor to fall on the floor every time we prayed for her. Potlucks and men's fellows.h.i.+ps and ladies' Bible studies and the struggling youth program never came up.

But Kyle started right in talking about all that stuff as if I'd asked him for an update. I wouldn't go near the church, so he brought it to me. ”The youth group's going to have a lock-in this weekend/Dave White and Brother Norheim showed up for men's prayer breakfast. Is it always just those two?/I'm thinking about painting the van/Bruce Hiddle still smokes. I wonder if he should be on the deacon board?/Emily Kelmer wants us to sing *Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,' but I don't think that's a wors.h.i.+p song/Did you know Jeff Lundgren doesn't want to do the Young Explorers anymore?/How often did you preach on giving?/We need to develop the children's ministry-”

He was out to cover everything. He talked fast, he talked loud, he got more and more excited, and I just sat there trying to gauge if my nerves could last longer than this seeming catharsis. I could feel a lingual tonsil starting to swell up. I began to feel a gnawing pain in my stomach.

Then it came: the one sentence predestined from all eternity for this moment, this place-exactly what it would take to set me off: ”Travis, we're going to take this city for Christ!”

”We?!?” My voice came so loud and sudden it made him jump. It also made him stop talking. I leaned forward in my chair, so far I almost stood up. ”Now you listen to me.” I said it slowly, and I know I sounded downright vicious. ”Have you even asked this town if it wants to be taken for Christ? Have you even met the folks down at Judy's or working at Kiley's Hardware or Anderson's Furniture and Appliance and gotten their input? I guarantee you, Kyle, I know some people around here who do not wish to be taken for Christ.” He looked like he was about to interrupt, but I didn't give him a chance. ”No one . . . has ever . . . taken a city for Christ. Not Paul, not Peter, n.o.body. Not even Christ took a city for Christ.”

Now I did stand up, too upset to hold still. ”You come cruising into this town throwing that big, glorious claim around as if it were some kind of mandate from the throne of G.o.d, but who's going to do all the work in the real world? I suppose you think everyone in town has his own transportation, so you won't have to organize a car and bus route and deal with people who don't want to come that Sunday but didn't call, or people who aren't ready on time so you have to sit there waiting for them while all the other people on the route are wondering where you are, and everybody ends up getting there late.

”And once you take this town for Christ, what are you going to do with all the kids? Is Judy Milton still breast-feeding Baxter right out in the open during the service?”

”I was going to ask you about that.”

”Ah! Aha! That boy's old enough to unb.u.t.ton her blouse himself. Want some more? Of course, babies don't just nurse. They scream too, and there are plenty of mothers out there who are going to sit there with that kid and let him drown out your sermon- during the most important part, I might add. You might ask them to take the kid out, and some might, but they'll be back with the same kid the next week. Either that, or they'll get huffy and not come back at all.

”Which brings me to the nursery sign-up sheet. Keep that puppy circulating or somebody's going to get stuck in there doing the job alone and forever while all the parents dump their kids on them. Same goes for children's ministry. Be careful you don't find anyone too good at it, because they'll get stuck with the job until they burn out. And then the parents will start to mutter about who's going to take charge of the kids, and maybe some of them will step forward to do something about it, and some of them will just go elsewhere.

”Youth ministry? It's the greatest, but don't you dare make a mistake. Because after you've done anything and everything to disciple those kids, it's your mistakes the parents will tell you about.

”How's your car running? Once you take this town for Christ you're going to have to visit every person, every family, until you run yourself ragged and your wife starts to complain that you're never home. You'll be so busy visiting that folks will start complaining that you never come to visit.

”In the meantime, you'll always have a contingent in the church that wants to dance in the aisles and fall on the floor and have battles of the prophets and insist that leg lengthening services are the answer to everything, and if you try to bring some balance to all that stuff they'll start their own faction and accuse you of *quenching the Spirit.'

”When you take this town for Christ you're going to get all this stuff with it. It's all going to be right in your lap.”

By now I was thinking I'd better stop before I outtalked the young man I thought talked too much. I took a breath. ”Pastor Kyle Sherman, dreams and goals in ministry are fine and good, but spare me this *take the town for Christ' stuff. I've been taking as much of this town as wants to go for the past fifteen years. I've been there, done that, got the tee s.h.i.+rt, and the town and I are sick of it.”

He looked up at me from the couch. His face seemed so different, so tranquil, when his mouth wasn't moving. ”You seem bitter.”

Well, I could let this young buck start counseling me or I could get back to my journaling. ”Thank you for coming to visit. I'm pretty tired.” I moved toward the door, and to his credit, he followed my cue.

THUS ENDED MY FIRST MEETING with Kyle Sherman. I did not go out of my way to encounter him again, but it happened on several occasions anyway, either by G.o.d's hand or by Kyle's. As I've mentioned before, Kyle has no fear of thin ice.

That's one reason-among the others-that I accepted his invitation to go with him to the next morning's ministerial meeting. It was the first time I'd taken him up on any invitation to do anything, but I knew those ministers. If Kyle stepped out on thin ice this time, he was sure to break through, and there were sharks waiting below to eat him alive.

3.

KYLE PICKED ME UP a little before ten the next morning and we rode together. In a town the size of Antioch there isn't much time to discuss anything while on the way somewhere, so I found myself talking fast.

”Morgan Elliott's the only female minister. She used to copastor the Methodist church with her husband, Gabe, but he was killed in a car wreck three years ago. Nice gal. I wouldn't call her a liberal, but she's definitely not a fundamentalist, either.

”Paul Daley's a kidder, and he likes being Episcopalian as much as you like being Pentecostal. He'd genuflect at a light pole if it had a cross piece on it.

”Al Vendetti is as Catholic as the Pope himself. His father was Catholic, his father's father was Catholic, his oldest sister is a nun in Philadelphia. I got into a religious argument with him once and he finished it in Latin. But listen, you respect him and he'll respect you. You get yourself into a sc.r.a.pe he'll be the first one there, and besides that, he plays a mean first base on the softball team.

”Bob Fisher's Southern Baptist, so he's sound and solid. Just don't get into a doctrinal dispute with him. He doesn't like being disagreed with.”

There was no more time. We had arrived at Our Lady of the Fields.

Thanks to the underground spring that had undermined the old church, Our Lady of the Fields now had one of the newest buildings in town. It was sand-colored brick, traditional with its tall spire and arched, stained-gla.s.s windows. It sat on a solid foundation ideally located on the main thoroughfare through town. Father Al always posted the t.i.tle of his sermon on the illuminated, covered sign that sat in the front yard.

As Kyle pulled into the parking lot, I recognized some of the cars already sitting there. ”That's Morgan Elliott's Jeep Cherokee. And I think that Ford belongs to Sid Maher, the Lutheran pastor.” There were plenty of other cars, including Nancy Barrons's Volvo and Brett Henchle's squad car. This meeting of the Antioch Ministerial was going to be unlike all the others: well attended. I kept telling myself I was only a visitor now, but that didn't take away the tremors deep inside me.

We walked along the sidewalk toward the front door.

”I haven't been in too many Catholic churches,” Kyle said quietly.

”I've only been here once, for a funeral,” I admitted. ”I don't know that the ministerial's ever met here. But Kyle . . .” I stopped, he stopped. I had to get this said before we went in. ”I'm never going to tell you to compromise your convictions. But remember what the Bible says about being sly as a serpent and harmless as a dove.”

He wasn't quite getting my message, I could tell. He gave me a suspicious look. ”What do you mean?”

”I mean . . .” Suddenly I found it hard to form an answer with him looking at me like that. ”I mean, there's a time to speak out and there's a time to just listen and, you know, stay cool.”

”Stay cool?”

Something else came to mind. ”With this bunch, it's easy to get into a discussion that just goes around in circles, and take it from me, if you really want to go around in circles, it's best to find a merry-go-round somewhere, you follow me?”

”A merry-go-round.” Now the look in his eyes had to be something he normally reserved for Mormons at his front door.

”Think of it as two gravel trucks going opposite directions on a one-way street. Sure, one of them is wrong, but both of them are going to get smashed when they hit, right?”

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