Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [7]
As anyone who studies congregations knows, history matters. The story of a church’s birth tends to shape that community’s identity for the rest of its life, with each new generation adding its own variations to the foundational themes. In my case, Clarkesville’s history as a summer resort town meant that newcomers like me were welcomed more warmly than we might have been elsewhere. The “been heres” were used to the “come heres” and had even learned how to make some money off them.
On our first visit to Clarkesville, Ed and I got used to answering the question “Where ya’ll from?” We heard it at the Yogurt Shoppe on the square, at Duncan Oil’s full-service filling station on highway 105, and at the Mark of the Potter on highway 197, where tourists from all over the Southeast came to buy hand-thrown coffee mugs and pitch fish food at the obese trout lolling in the Soque River out back. Even though we heard a rumor that no local auto mechanic would either tow or work on my old Saab, everyone we ran into was friendly enough.
At the church level, Grace-Calvary’s history meant that local families and summer residents had shared lay leadership for more than a century. While certain names showed up over and over again in the parish register, there was no local cabal intent on preserving its power in church affairs. The work, the power, and the food at the parish picnics were all pretty well distributed so that the line between newcomers and old-timers was often hard to find.
If anything, Grace-Calvary was distinguished by how little time most clergy stayed there. Between 1838 and 1990, the church had twenty-one rectors, only four of whom lasted more than ten years. Like most congregants, the people of Grace-Calvary were sorry to see some of these ministers go even as they helped others leave. Every now and then, they simply resolved to wait a minister out. After the Reverend William Walton arrived in 1895, he decided to replace the high pulpit with a dorsal curtain on a pole. Vestryman William Kollock carefully numbered each piece of the beloved pulpit as it came down, stored the parts in his barn, and happily put it back up again fourteen years later when Mr. Walton finally left.
After that, the average tenure for clergy was a little less than five years, with some of them leaving more dramatically than others. When I first visited, the congregation was under the care of Saint Julian Mustard Lachicotte, a legendary character whom I knew from clergy conferences as a bourbon connoisseur with a wicked sense of humor. Not only was “Saint” part of his legal, baptized name, but Julian was also the youngest of eight children from a prominent South Carolina family. A divorced chain-smoker with a bald head, dark arched eyebrows, and a house full of antiques, he was known affectionately by some around town as “Louie Quatorze.”
Under his nine years of leadership, Grace-Calvary grew and stabilized. The church paid off its debts, established an endowment fund, and organized a new mission in nearby Blairsville. Julian also worked with clergy from other denominations to start several local ministries, including Habitat for Humanity and Circle of Hope, a battered women’s shelter. When he did not show up for work on the Tuesday after All Saints’ Day in November 1990, two members of the church went to his