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Presiding Bishop, Willie Williams***

  District Eleven

  Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico

  Presiding Bishop, Alexander G. Anderson**

  District Twelve

  Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho

  Presiding Bishop, Conrad Brown***

  District Thirteen

  Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic

  Presiding Bishop, Buddy Marshall**

  District Fourteen

  West Indies, Virgin Islands, Bahamas

  Presiding Bishop, Thomas Lyle Jefferson**

  District Fifteen

  Nigeria

  Presiding Bishop, Ottah Babatunde***

  District Sixteen

  Ghana

  Presiding Bishop, Bobo Abeeku**

  District Seventeen

  Mozambique

  Presiding Bishop, Rucker Lee Hemphill***

  District Eighteen

  Swaziland

  Presiding Bishop, Otis Ray Caruthers, Jr.***

  Bishop assigned to the Office of Urban Affairs, Mann Phillips*

  Bishop assigned to the Office of Community Concerns for Districts with Small Black Populations, Yadkin Peters**

  “When the godly are in authority, the people rejoice. But when the wicked are in power, they groan.”

  Proverbs 29:2

  ONE

  The Reverend Theophilus Henry Simmons, Sr., was sent to serve as the Senior Pastor of Freedom Temple Gospel United Church in St. Louis, Missouri, at the conclusion of one of the denomination’s most corrupt and volatile Triennial General Conferences. Only one other conference had made it to the “Crazy Triennial Conference Hall of Fame,” and most of the folk responsible for that meeting had gone on to their just rewards. But back in 1963, good, stalwart, saved, and sanctified church folk feared that the Devil had managed to get such a firm foothold in the church, God was going to strike each and every one of them dead just for being listed on the church roll.

  At that conference folks were shocked and dismayed to discover that some of their top leaders had the unmitigated gall to run a brothel right in the midst of the conference, as if it were the first in a chain of franchised ho’ houses—and in a funeral home of all places. Whoever heard of a bunch of black people—no, back then, Negroes—wanting to party at a place where dead people were in “escrow” en route to their final destination? Black people didn’t make a habit of hanging out in funeral homes. And anybody foolish enough to differ from this norm was clearly either crazy or corrupt and without a lick of sense.

  There were a lot of mad church folk who were ready to throw down on those preachers with “memberships” at the ho’ house. When that “blue book” hit the conference floor, with the names of the members, folks bombarded the conference floor platform in Virginia Union’s gymnasium and found out who was wrong and who was right. That information led to some much-needed changes in the Gospel United Church—changes that led to Rev. Murcheson James’s being elected to an Episcopal seat and to Theophilus’s appointment to Freedom Temple.

  Twenty-two years later Freedom Temple had grown from a respectable congregation of five hundred members to one of the major players in St. Louis’s black church community, boasting three thousand dedicated and tithing members under the leadership of their senior pastor, Rev. Theophilus Simmons, Sr. Shortly after Theophilus took over the helm, the church bought up all the property within a ten-block radius. It rebuilt the church building into an impressive structure with a beautiful state-of-the-art sanctuary and a suite for the pastor that included a full bath, library, kitchenette, and conference room. There was a small bookstore and two more libraries—one for the youth and another one for the adults.

  The First Lady’s mother, Lee Allie Lane Hawkins, had worked alongside her husband, Pompey, to design the new church kitchen and cafeteria, which was large enough to host the Annual Conference and most wedding receptions. There were also a nursery, teen room with video games, gymnasium, first-aid room, and several good-sized education rooms. In addition, there was a large conference room where big meetings and workshops could be held.

  The actual grounds of the church had been landscaped by Dannilynn Meeting, a well-respected architect out of Evangeline T. Marshall University in Durham, North Carolina. Dannilynn was the granddaughter of the premier black architect in the country, Daniel Meeting, who had been responsible for designing many buildings on Eva T. Marshall University’s campus.

  There were flower gardens to walk through, sitting areas, a playground that was so enjoyable that many of the teens and adults loved to share in the fun with the younger children, and the best basketball court in the area. And that was a good thing, because Freedom Temple Gospel United Church had the best teen basketball teams for boys and girls in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

  Freedom Temple was a happening place. And if you listened to any of the members talk, you found out that it was a great church to attend, with a wonderful pastor and First Lady. The women admired Essie Simmons’s style, they shopped at her boutique, and they all came to her whenever they needed a one-of-a-kind designer outfit—be it a handcrafted wedding gown, debutante gown, or honeymoon wardrobe for a bride’s trousseau. Essie received so many requests for her designs that she had to hire a second designer, two seamstresses, and a tailor to keep up with the volume of requests.

  As far as Theophilus and Essie were concerned, it was an even better church to pastor than it was to attend. They loved Freedom Temple and felt blessed that the good Lord had seen fit to let them serve in the capacity of Senior Pastor and First Lady. Their members were warm and loving people. They were also people who loved the Lord, were hungry for His Word, and were determined that they would not stay baby Christians once they turned their lives over to Christ. The folks at Freedom Temple kept their pastor on his toes. Since taking over the pastorship at Freedom Temple, Theophilus had found himself needing to study Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic just so he would be able to continue to inspire and educate his members about the Word and the goodness of the Lord.

  Today was the third Sunday, and Theophilus had been at church since six a.m. Every third Sunday he met with his ministerial staff so they could pray together, cover each other in prayer, and encourage one another in their walks with the Lord. Preaching was hard work. Pastoring was harder. Folks just didn’t know—they didn’t even have a clue of what it took to be a good pastor and a great preacher.

  Rev. Simmons was both—and that was saying something. Some ministers could preach Lazarus out of the grave. And some could pastor a whole city to the pearly gates of Heaven. But to be able to do both? Man, oh man! Now that took some doing.

  Theophilus knew that he was both, just as the young brother sitting next to him—Rev. Obadiah Quincey, from Durham, North Carolina—was well on his way to becoming. Obadiah was a graduate of the School of Divinity at Evangeline T. Marshall University, and he had been selected by Theophilus to do his requisite two-year apprenticeship under him at Freedom Temple. Obadiah was sharp and well-read, and had a great sense of humor. He had done well here. About the only problem Theophilus could discern was that the young man, his wife Lena, and their family were all homesick for Durham.

  Theophilus was so sleepy this morning he could barely keep his eyes open while the announcements were being read by Mrs. Tommie Ann Jenkins, who at eighty-three was one of the meanest members of the church. He couldn’t stand the way that old woman abused the status of her age. Mrs. Tommie Ann was definitely blessed to have lived this long, and to be as healthy and robust as she was. But she was (and according to some of the other older members had always been) the worst announcement person in the history of announcement people at Freedom Temple.

  Once, when he felt guilty about wanting to throw Mrs. Tommie Ann up a tree and leave her there, one of his ninetysomethings told him, “Pastor, don’t feel bad about that old heifer. She has always been like that—ain’t nothing changed about Tommie Ann in all of the years that I have
known her. She was mean and stupid at twenty-five, she was a dumb cow at forty, she made folks want to slap her at sixty-six, and now she’s lived to be old enough to make somebody in this church give her a personal invite to go and visit the Lord and never come back.

  “I am just amazed that Tommie Ann has lived this long and not been cut or shot by some woman who was mad at her for sleeping with her husband. So don’t you feel bad about that, Pastor. ’Cause that thang is a piece of work. And now she’s just old enough to get away with being crazy.”

  A bunch of folk, mainly his senior members, had begged the pastor to retire Mrs. Tommie Ann from this position. But God had not given him the go-ahead. When Theophilus first took the matter to the Lord in prayer, God touched his heart with these words: “Wait. Just wait and let her fire herself.”

  Theophilus couldn’t even begin to imagine how someone who was so prideful and thought so highly of this particular church job would find a way to fire herself. He would have thought that a person like Mrs. Tommie Ann would be very good at finding a way to keep such a position. But the Word said that God’s ways were not our ways, and His thoughts not our thoughts. So, given that biblical truth, Theophilus was obedient and trusted that if God said wait, and he waited, one day Mrs. Tommie Ann would up and fire herself. He just hoped that day would be sooner rather than later.

  The only other thing that stopped the church from rebelling against Mrs. Tommie Ann’s reading the announcements every third Sunday was that she’d been at Freedom Temple so long, she knew way too much about just about everybody at the church. As one of the members of the Senior Usher Board said, “Don’t nam-nobody wanna mess with that evil-tailed heifer and make her mad enough to start giving the morning announcements on who been creepin’, who been stealin’, who been drinkin’, and who sittin’ at home from church ’cause they been fired and don’t have no money to put gas in they car.”

  The young people in the congregation—including the three Simmons offspring—secretly hoped Mrs. Tommie Ann would continue to do the third Sunday announcements because she was some of the best entertainment they could expect to have during the morning service. It was wonderful to attend a church that was so on point, and did so much right. But it could be kind of boring if nothing crazy, outlandish, or just blatantly ridiculous happened at your church. You needed these incidents to happen so you could go to school on Monday morning and compare notes with teens attending other churches in the city.

  Freedom Temple teens frequently bemoaned that they didn’t have enough crazy church folk in their congregation to talk about with their friends at school. But this morning things were getting ready to take a turn for the worse. And as far as the young people in the church were concerned, it wouldn’t get any better than this.

  Mrs. Tommie Ann had steered her walker up to the smaller podium in the pulpit to the left of where the pastor sat. She started off the announcements with the week’s list of birthdays and anniversaries. Then she went into a lengthy discussion about the members using up too much toilet tissue in the restrooms.

  That woman held out her hand and waited for the rumored newest old man in her life to place a roll of toilet paper in it. She held it up and said, “Freedom Temple, this is how we can stop using so much tissue in those bathrooms downstairs. As head of the Tissue, Paper Towel, Napkin, and Toilet Paper Ministry in this church, it is my duty to instruct you properly about the use of such in the church.”

  “By whose authority?” Rev. Quincey leaned over and whispered to his boss very carefully. He did not want to have to deal with Mrs. Tommie Ann if she happened to overhear what he said and threw a hissy fit on him.

  Theophilus whispered, “I don’t know because this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the Tissue, Paper Towel, Napkin, and Toilet Paper Ministry.”

  “Rev.,” Obadiah whispered, “she’s about to do the demonstration.”

  Mrs. Tommie Ann rolled off three sheets of toilet paper, folded them, and patted the side of her hip as if it were her bottom, to show how this was supposed to be done by the members of the church.

  Essie was sitting in the designated First Lady spot, right down from the pulpit. She willed herself away from making eye contact with her husband. She was having a hard enough time keeping it together sitting next to her mother and stepdad. They were passing notes, poking at each other, and trying not to laugh under their breaths.

  By now the teens were riveted to their seats. They could not believe that old woman had a roll of toilet paper and was showing them how to save on it by using her hip as her pretend butt.

  Mrs. Tommie Ann patted her hip again before giving the usher the toilet paper roll, along with the sheets of tissue she’d used for the demonstration.

  “That mean old lady knows good and well that she needs more than a few sheets of toilet paper for her big butt,” Linda Simmons, the middle Simmons child, whispered, praying that her mama and grandmother weren’t looking up at the balcony, watching her every move with those old Charleston, Mississippi, hawk eyes. They could get on your nerves—saw everything. And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, they always had a comment—always.

  “Mama’s staring at us,” Linda’s older sister Sharon whispered.

  By now folks were assuming that Mrs. Tommie Ann Jenkins had gotten enough attention with that toilet paper lecture to go somewhere and sit down. But as Essie always told her husband, “When did the Devil ever become satisfied enough to just go somewhere and sit down?”

  Mrs. Tommie Ann was not happy with the way her own church members were sitting there looking bored and passing notes, obviously too spoiled and selfish to take note of what she’d tried to tell them. That is what she hated about spoiled and selfish people—they were always so caught up in themselves and what they wanted to say and do. Never mind the other person. It was always all about them.

  Her eyes scanned the balcony, where most of the teens and young adults liked to sit. She knew why they were up there instead of on the main floor. They loved that perch—it gave them a perfect view of everything going on in church on a Sunday morning. And on top of that, it afforded them the opportunity to whisper, snicker, and pass notes about what was going on during service.

  She stared at them for a second, eyes narrowing into slits when they landed on that little red hussy Linda Simmons. Mrs. Tommie Ann couldn’t stand that little girl. It wasn’t that Linda had ever done anything to the lady. Mrs. Tommie Ann didn’t like Linda because she knew Linda saw straight through her and never tried to act as if she didn’t.

  “She is staring at you, Linda,” T. J., or Theophilus, Jr., said to his sister.

  “I see her,” Linda retorted, and stared back at that mean woman without flinching.

  That Linda is just like her mama, Mrs. Tommie Ann thought, as she picked up the announcement bulletin.

  “I don’t know why Theophilus has so much trouble with his announcement people,” Essie’s mother leaned over and whispered to her husband, Pompey Hawkins, who nodded, remembering some past announcement people at Theophilus’s old church, Greater Hope in Memphis. As good a pastor as Theophilus was, he always managed to have one fool on his team of folk giving the Sunday-morning announcements.

  Mrs. Tommie Ann fumbled with the bulletin for a moment. She looked as if something else was bothering her. She put the bulletin on the podium and pushed the false teeth at the top of her mouth up and down for a few seconds with her bottom lip. She looked as if she were trying to scratch her top gums with the bottom of her mouth. When that didn’t work, Mrs. Tommie Ann sucked the teeth up loudly and wiggled her mouth around in a feeble attempt to make the proper adjustments to her teeth. And when that attempt failed, she reached down to the pocketbook anchored on her walker and got something out.

  Mrs. Tommie Ann hung the pocketbook back on the walker, took her top teeth out of her mouth, put some extra Poligrip on them, put them back in, sucked them into place, slipped the tube of Poligrip in her pocketbook, and said, “Christian friends, before
I finish with the announcements, you all need to get your registration straight for the upcoming Triennial General Conference in Durham, North Carolina, before they run out of hotel rooms and the prices go up. I keep telling the pastor that he needs to do something about this since he is such a big shot in the Gospel United Church. But the pastor is so hardheaded and thinks he knows everything.”

  Theophilus couldn’t even get upset with the old lady for talking that junk because he was still trying to keep it together from the Toilet Paper Ministry’s demonstration and her teeth. Mrs. Tommie Ann had done some crazy stuff while giving the announcements during his tenure as pastor, but she had never fixed her teeth in front of the entire congregation. It reminded him of the time an old man’s teeth shot out of his mouth at an Annual Conference in Memphis, Tennessee, back in the early 1960s. That old man had been talking crazy, too—just like Mrs. Tommie Ann. And his teeth had landed right on the altar, looking as if they were trying to grin at somebody from outside his mouth. That teeth mess had been funny then, and it was still funny now.

  The kids, and especially Theophilus and Essie’s three children—Sharon, Linda, and T. J.—were sitting up in the balcony about to lose it, trying not to laugh at that crazy old lady. Their dad knew they had worked hard to keep it together when Mrs. Tommie Ann did the toilet paper thing. But the teeth sent them right over the edge.

  The entire balcony row of young people was now ducking down under the pews, trying hard not to laugh too loud. Linda, who was the spitting image of her mother, got up and tried to sneak out of the sanctuary without her dad seeing her. But she didn’t escape the pastor’s scrutiny, especially since she was standing in the vestibule laughing loud enough to be heard back in church.