Becoming Christian
Most Scottish people are Presbyterian, especially the Scots-Irish. The Campbells and the Boyds became Methodist because, in Hesterville, Mississippi, you took what you could get after the Civil War. Most of life in Mississippi is a matter of eating what’s on your plate and being glad of it because there ain’t no more. More than anything, this is why our children don’t want to live here anymore.
My great grandfather only had one arm, but he helped build a church and a school because he thought people should have the option to know the Lord. He sent his children to far off Jackson to become educated because that was the best way to serve the lord. All but one went. He died in France trying to serve the lord by ferrying soldiers from the trenches to the hospital when he drove into a pocket of German mustard gas.
Much like what happened with the Methodists, the Presbyterians split and then split again. There are Presbyterian groups that are closely aligned with what I believe about the Lord, and there are Presbyterian groups that leave me scratching my head. When the Campbells returned to the now-independent Bethel Methodist Church for homecoming and food on the grounds, I often wondered what the man in the pulpit was on about. It was pretty alien to me.
In Jackson, I was baptized by Rev. Cunningham because Rev. Selah refused to take the pulpit in a church that wouldn’t integrate and resigned from his post two weeks after I was born. Cunningham left before I could speak the grown-up version of English, and I don’t remember meeting either man.
Rev. Keith Tonkel, Rev. Clay Lee, and Rev. Bill Gober shaped my earliest version of the Christian faith. Margaret Kea and Dr. Tommy Ross populated my family of faith. They helped keep the Methodist Youth Fellowship active, even though I was too shy to attend most of the time.
In school, I was handed off to Fathers Larry Maze, Jerry McBride, and David Elliot. They taught me the similarities and the differences between Methodism and Episcopaleanism. One of them taught me what all the verses to American Pie meant. David Smith, Tom Stemshorn, and Mitch Myers tried to teach me what loving yourself as an athlete meant, even though it took me a while to understand what they wanted me to know.
In college, Lee Reiff and TW Lewis taught me that the bible wasn’t at all what I thought it was. They helped me to understand what the authors were about and what they were getting at, and more than anything, they taught me to continue searching for the answers my life long. Catherine Fries taught me that these stories meant more than I had ever imagined. Seeing the parallels between the Jesus story and the Hercules story opened my mind to a much broader understanding of what any faith might be about.
After college, I studied the atheism of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan to try to understand what these things meant beyond “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” As a man, I acted in a play about how the greatest English Christian Apologist, CS Lewis, lost his faith and found it again. I played his brother, who helped Lewis digest his sorrow for the sake of his adopted son.
You’ll notice that most of this story is just a list of names—names of the living, names of the dead, names of people I knew intimately, and names of people I never met. More than anything, becoming Christian is a matter of encountering Christians. Meeting other Christians in such a positive way that you want to know more about what they’re about is what makes the strongest Christians. You have to do the work yourself, but meeting other people who are also doing the work will keep you searching and trying.
