Mister Bob

From Random Thoughts Left & Right (1998) pp.71-74.

On a Tuesday morning, Mister Bob came in the back door of our store.  In my best retail manner, I asked if I could help him find anything.  “I just came in to check on you, ” he said.  “I just wanted to find out who that shine was that you were in such a hurry to shake hands with on Sunday night.”

Shine was an epithet I had forgotten.  I had painfully ignored the word nigger most of my life.  In Franklin, Tennessee, most old people still said nigra, while younger people used the term colored people.  Only occasionally was the word nigger spoken out loud.

After a deep breath, a forced smile, and a pause, I tried to recall the Sunday night event to which he had referred.  Sunday night had been the first night of our protracted meeting.  In the Church of Christ, we don’t have revivals, we have protracted meetings.  They are basically the same thing.  A protracted meeting lasts about eight days.  With or without counting Sundays, it would be six or seven days.  The purpose of the meeting is to build enthusiasm to encourage many to be baptized or restored.  This is enhanced by inviting some notable, dynamic preacher.  For eight days, rational or lukewarm theology yields to hell-fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

The eldership at Fourth Avenue had invited Brother John Allen Chalk to preach for the protracted meeting.  I had never heard of him.  Usually, I wouldn’t get too excited about any preacher with two first names.  After twenty or thirty years in the church, preachers all start looking and sounding alike.  Such was not the case with John Allen Chalk.

In the pulpit he was guarded in his delivery.  His sermons were Christ-centered, with the usual plan of salvation woven into them leading to an eventual invitation to come to the front to be baptized, or to confess some need for prayers and forgiveness.

At the time of my encounter with Mister Bob, I really didn’t know much about this new preacher.  Mister Bob called him a liberal, which to me was a broad umbrella of normality that could apply to any college graduate.  In the short time I had spent with John Allen on Sunday night, I had not detected his liberal leanings.  It wasn’t until Wednesday or Thursday night when he whispered to me aside, “Power to the people.”  This was a period in our history when the people was a reference to somebody else.  Nobody that I knew in the Church of Christ considered themselves in that category.

This was in the sixties and many of us were in some stage of unrest over integration and Vietnam.  I don’t think John Allen or I had mentioned Woodstock or Kent State or Montgomery or Selma to each other, but in the span of four days I had come to believe that in the seating arrangement of the Church, John Allen and I were somewhere on the left in the near-empty pews of liberalism.

But, back to Sunday night, a friend from my days at David Lipscomb College came to the meeting at Fourth Avenue with a group of seven or eight young people from a church in Nashville.  One member of the group was black, or African-American.  After church, we all went to Shoney’s for strawberry pie and coffee.  The seven or eight visitors, John Allen, and I rounded up several others and extended the Sunday night service into the secular realm for a more concise critique of the revealed word, which more often is clearer when discussed over dessert and coffee outside the walls of holy places.

Either fate or the universal appeal of Shoney’s strawberry pie brought Mister Bob to the same destination.  I probably gave little attention to his icy stare at the black member as he passed our table.  I later learned that Mister Bob had moved his membership on several occasions as churches had integrated.  I had not known the depth of his racial feelings.

Mister Bob was a faithful churchgoer at Fourth Avenue.  He was in the Sunday school class that I taught on Sunday morning.  I had always been cognizant of the fine line I had to walk when teaching a class of older people, including elders and deacons.  I had not considered Mister Bob’s scrutiny any more incisive than that of any other.  Any discussion of God’s being “no respecter” of ethnicity, or any reference to nonviolence, or turning the other cheek, or any liberal teachings of Jesus had to be modified to fit into southern tradition and Church of Christ orthodoxy.  Southern gentlemen are more impressed by the macho Jesus who drove the money changers out of the temple with the cords than the soulful, weeping Jesus of John 11:35.

My Tuesday morning visit with Mister Bob could have been an unpleasant confrontation, but we were friends.  Neither of us let disagreement detract from our friendship or respect.  I reached for my mask of humility and innocence.

Mister Bob continued his exploration of my feelings, “I don’t see why we had to invite some liberal preacher.  They just cause trouble.  We just need somebody who preaches the Bible and don’t mess with other things.”

I listened, not finding a response.  We talked for a long time.  He looked around, tried on a suit, and bought some socks and handkerchiefs.  We talked about Sunday school.  He was very complimentary of my teaching, giving me some concern that I might have been too compromising in my efforts not to offend anyone’s traditions.

With his package in his hand, he paused at the back door as he was leaving, and turned for one more remark, ”I just wanted to find out who that shine was that you were so anxious to make welcome.   You almost ran over me trying to get through the crowd to shake his hand.”

The words of Christ insisted that I turn the other cheek.  The fires of liberalism in my soul defied those admonitions.

“Mister Bob, this is very difficult for me.  I don’t know how to answer your question.  But, it is much easier and less painful for me to try to explain to you why I shook that man’s hand than it would be to stand in front of God someday and try to explain to him why I didn’t.”  Without another response, Mister Bob went out the back door without looking back.

The rest of the week, Mister Bob and I exchanged amenities at church and in Sunday school.  The revival ended and John Allen Chalk was gone.  He later left the ministry and became a lawyer.  Our black visitor, as far as I know, never came back to Fourth Avenue.  Mister Bob and I continued our friendship until he died at the age of eighty-four.  I miss all three of them.

On a Sunday night, we had gathered together in the house of God to worship and have fellowship.  Like in early church history, liberal Christians and conservative Christians were in one place, and with some minor differences were of one accord.

Years later, I attended worship on a Sunday morning at the Cummins Street Church of Christ.  I was welcomed by the entire congregation, which included maybe forty or fifty persons.  The preacher, Brother Curtis Cathey, is a big, dynamic man, and astute Bible scholar. While the words are the same, the emotion and phrasing of the black pulpit tradition always seems a little different.  I was very comfortable as the only white person in the assembly.  I wondered if Cummins Street had a counterpart to Mister Bob who might ask who that honkie was that everybody tried to make feel so welcome.  Brother Cathey introduced me to the members during the closing announcements and asked if I had anything I would like to say.

After the basic amenities that I had enjoyed the sermon and fellowship, I related to him a thought that had just crossed my mind during the service.  “I sat here thinking about all the people who have suffered and died to open doors and tear down walls, and I realized that Jesus’ dying enabled me to walk through the front door of the Cummins Street Church of Christ.”

I kept wishing that Mister Bob and John Allen could have been with me and could have heard several voices answering, “God bless you, Brother.”