The Visitation (45 page)

A week later, a voice from my past called: Brother Smith, the dean of men when I was in Bible college. He now held a position with the Northwest District of the Pentecostal Mission, and noticed how I’d taken pains to maintain my credentials. Perhaps I’d be interested in taking a new church in Antioch, Washington.

“Well who’s running it now?” I asked. I didn’t want another territorial battle with somebody already there.

“Nobody,” he said. “You’ll have to run the whole show, start it from the ground up. It’ll be your church, Travis. It’ll be your vision.” Brother Smith was no stranger to my nature, or my illustrious ministry career thus far. He knew I’d find the opportunity tantalizing.

And I did. My own church! No religious machinery already in place. No customs or traditions to fight against, no one to say, “Well that’s the way we do things here!” No Sister Marvins, no Brother Rogenbecks. Just Marian and me.

I tried to talk myself out of it, reminding myself that for the first time in our marriage we had some stability, some hope for a normal life. But the more I talked to the Lord and myself—aloud, pacing about the apartment—the more stirred up I got and I couldn’t sit still. “It’ll never work,” I told the mirror. “
Would
it work?” I asked the Lord.

What about Marian? She had a good job with a great salary and chance for advancement. I couldn’t ask her to move to Antioch, Washington! I looked for Antioch on a map. It was marked with the tiniest little circle available. She’d never go for it.

Brother Smith gave me some phone numbers in Antioch. I made some calls and got some details.

I knelt by our bed and prayed some more. After I rose from my knees, I started preaching to the empty apartment. I already had a great idea for my first sermon. I’d talk about relationships, I thought. We didn’t have a big city church, but we had each other, and that was what mattered!

Oh brother. What’s Marian going to think?

“Lord, if this is your will, then speak to Marian’s heart. Give her a peace. No, not peace. Make
her
excited! Make
her
want to do it!”

I was excited. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I couldn’t wait for Marian to get home.

I was out of school and still waiting on a steady job, so I was pulling my weight by fixing dinner every night. Marian would scribble out instructions each morning and I’d give it my best shot. That night, when she got home, I served up pork roast and stir-fried vegetables over rice, and brought up the subject of Antioch.

“How many are in the church now?” she asked.

“Well, I talked to a guy named Avery Sisson. Right now there’s him and his wife and their four kids.”

She held her fork in midair. “And?”

“That’s it. Right now there’s no Pentecostal Mission church in that town.”

“Why should there be?” She wasn’t trying to be difficult. It was a fair question.

My answer was just as fair, I think. “I don’t know. According to Avery, there isn’t another Spirit-filled church in Antioch, and according to Brother Smith, the district thinks it’s time to get a church started there. Avery’s looked at a church building. It used to be an old Congregational church, but now the guy next-door owns it. He says we can rent it or buy it from him.”

“And what would we do for a living?”

“Avery says I can work for his brother in construction until I get a teaching job. Antioch has a grade school and a high school.”

She took another bite of stir-fried vegetables, chewed a while, thought a while, and then said, “What are you feeling, T. J.? What’s in your heart?”

I looked down at my plate, a little reticent. “I think maybe I’d like to find out more . . . you know, think about it.”

She reached over—we always sat close together—and tapped on my heart. “What’s in here?”

I took a moment to search out the answer. “I just . . . I just want to do, you know, what Jesus did: I want to go about doing good. Win some souls, change some hearts, bring some light into this world. I want to tell people about Jesus because he’s a wonderful Savior and Friend.”

“You think God put that in there?”

I actually got choked up. “Since I was a kid.”

She gave me that smile that always made me feel like a conqueror, and then she rose and hugged me from behind. “Then we’d better check it out.”

MR. FRAMER
owned the building, and met us there. “It needs a little fixing up. It hasn’t been used for a church in fifteen years.”

Standing there on Elm Street with Avery Sisson, his wife, Joan, and Marian, I saw only future potential, not present condition. The plywood over the windows, the paint peeling off the lap siding, the wrinkled, moss-covered roofing didn’t discourage me at all. This was an adventure, a vision to be fulfilled.

“How’s the roof?” Marian asked.

“It leaks,” said Framer.

“What about plumbing?” I asked.

“Just a sink in the basement and no toilet. There’s an outhouse out back.”

“Any pews?”

“Burned ’em. There’s nothing in there but a bunch of lockers.”

The old chapel sat forlornly in the middle of an unmowed field, looking as discarded and neglected as the rusting harrower, burned-out van, and immovable old bulldozer that sat in the grass alongside it.

Mr. Framer led us through the grass and weeds to the front steps. “That bulldozer belongs to my son. He can come and move it if you want. I don’t know where that harrower came from.”

“What happened to the van?”

“Kids set it on fire. I was hoping to sell it, but now . . .”

The front door sounded like it hadn’t been opened in a while. Inside, Mr. Framer turned on the lights—the building
did
have electricity and four simple chandeliers hanging from the vaulted ceiling. It was cold in there. It smelled musty. The floor was old tongue-and-groove planking painted gray.

All we could see was lockers. Stacks of them. Rows of them. Ugly, green battered lockers.

“My son got these lockers when they tore down the old high school. I don’t know what he was planning on doing with ’em, but they’ve been sitting in here for eight years and I’ll be happy to get rid of ’em.”

I squeezed through the lockers to the front and found the platform and the square footprint of unpainted planking where the pulpit used to stand. I stood on that spot and looked back at my congregation—three people and maybe Mr. Framer, standing among the lockers. I could see pews in that room and a hundred people filling them. I could see sunlight coming through the windows, feel the warmth of the oil stove, and hear the sound of singing. I could see people kneeling at the front pews and at the foot of the platform. There were Bibles and hymnals in every row, and boxes of Kleenex up front.

And the bell! “Does the bell work?”

Mr. Framer walked to the back of the room and unlooped the rope from its hook on the wall. He gave the bell three gentle yanks to get it rocking, and then we heard it ringing from the steeple outside,
clang, clang, clang,
like a sound out of history, a sweet, oldtimey voice of hope reawakening in a new generation. Marian broke into a wide grin and clapped.

“Praise God,” I said, and beckoned to Marian. She joined me on the platform and looked out over all those lockers in the yellow light of the chandeliers. “What do you see, Marian?”

“We could put the piano over there. And maybe we could get some carpet to run up the middle and sides. We need a cross, a big cross to go on that wall. What about classrooms?”

Mr. Framer looked at us funny. “It’s got a basement with a sink, that’s all.”

We went down the steep, narrow stairs. The basement wasn’t much more than a crawlspace barely high enough to stand in. It was dark and tomblike, smelled of earth and dead mice, and the floor timbers hung low above our heads, festooned with spider webs.

“We could divide this into four, maybe five classrooms,” I envisioned.

“Where are we going to put the bathrooms?”

“There’s an outhouse out back,” Mr. Framer reminded us.

I tried the sink. The water came out a rusty brown. “We could fit a kitchen in here, I suppose.”

“It’s going to be a lot of work!”

“All in good time. A building does not a church make. We could meet in our home while we’re fixing this place up.”

“As soon as we get a home.”

We could read each other’s eyes. This was it. We had to be here. This was where God wanted us.

“We’ll take it.”

“
WELL,
it needs a lot of fixing up, but if you want to put the work into it, I’ll count that as rent.”

To this day I’m not sure what it was, a storage shed or an old bunkhouse or perhaps a shop. It sat out behind Mrs. Whitfield’s place between her barn and her chicken coop, roughly ten feet deep and forty feet long, with a sagging shed roof, three doors, eight four-paned windows in the front and four in the back. It had shiplap siding on the outside, and on the inside, bare studs and the backside of the shiplap. It was divided into three rooms, all cluttered with farm machinery, engine parts, old lumber, poultry feeders and brooders, and broken bales of straw. The middle room had a toilet and sink. The wiring was exposed and very basic: a bare light bulb in each room and maybe an outlet or two nailed to the bare studs.

The roof was good. Mrs. Whitfield had it redone just a few years ago. The floor was good—as much as I could see under all the junk.

“What do you think?” I asked Marian.

She cringed, and then she gave the place her best try. “That could be the living room. This could be the kitchen, and maybe we could put a wall in here to make this the bathroom. We could make a bedroom out of that last room, but we’ll have to put in a closet.”

“Dad’ll help us. If it’s church, he’s in.”

“My dad’ll help too. He loves doing things for his kids.”

Avery nodded confidently. “One month and you won’t know the place.”

I turned to Mrs. Whitfield. “We’ll take it!”

WE WERE STAYING
with the Sissons, sleeping on a borrowed hide-a-bed in their garage and sharing two bathrooms with Avery, Joan, and their four kids. Our small, apartment-sized collection of furniture and almost everything else we owned was locked in a rented storage space in Spokane. We would be living in a renovated shack between a barn and a chicken coop, and pastoring a church without a usable building for who-knew-how-long. Neither one of us had gainful employment and we had only three to four months of savings.

But we were the happiest we’d been in five years of marriage.

M
ARIAN AND I
pastored in Antioch for fifteen years. We lived in five different houses, worked at ten different jobs. I didn’t draw a full-time salary from Antioch Pentecostal Mission until we’d been there ten years.

Antioch Mission began with Avery and Pete Sisson and their families, and we met in Avery and Joan’s living room. Within the year, we moved into the old church building we rented from Mr. Framer, and three years after that we finally got an indoor toilet. We bought that building from Mr. Framer in 1987, the same year Marian and I got burned out of our home. We started our new building in 1990, were approved for occupancy in 1995, and moved in Easter Sunday.

On my last Sunday in November of 1997, the church was well established in its new building on the west side of town, on a quaint knoll just above the highway. There were one hundred and fifty in the congregation, a bank account in the black, a big yellow bus that ran well, a good youth program, and the church’s name on a fancy, sandblasted sign out front.

Fifteen years. A journey that felt so long and was over so soon, in a little town few people ever heard of. Fifteen years. Ninety-three souls saved. Twenty-three weddings. Fourteen funerals. A small retirement account, no real estate, a little savings.

When I left the ministry, I was alone, and wondering what in the world I thought I’d been doing all that time.

MORGAN AND I
declined a dessert but asked for coffee.

And then she just looked at me, studying me. I regretted sounding so depressed at the end of my recap. My stories tended to end on a blue note these days.

“Give me some names,” she said.

“Beg your pardon?”

She gave a half-shrug and picked up her coffee cup. “Just some names. People you remember from those fifteen years. Tell me some stories.”

JOE KELMER.
He was in his fifties, a rancher with five hundred acres south of town. I was working with Pete Sisson’s crew, preparing to pour a slab for a new stable out on his place. Pete, Johnny Herreros, Tinker Moore, and I were knee-deep in a ditch, digging footings and hurling dirt like a chain gang when Joe came out to see how we were doing, his hands in his jeans pockets, his face a little glum. It wasn’t like him. Usually he’d come over to check on our progress and talk so much he’d hinder it.

“How’s it going?” We told him fine, and Pete said we were hoping to get the steel in and pour by the day after tomorrow.

“So how’s Joe today?” Pete asked.

“Oh, not too good,” he replied, sitting on an overturned five gallon bucket. “My bowels ain’t worth the poop that goes through ’em.”

“What’s the problem?” I expected one of Joe’s typical complaints about the water, his wife’s cooking, or his advancing age.

“Cancer,” he said. “Just found out this morning.” We stopped digging. “Doc says they’ll probably have to take the whole thing out.”

We all stood in the ditch, our shovels in our hands, trying to adjust to the news and wondering what we could say.

“We’ll have to pray for you,” said Pete. “Get old Travis here to lay hands on you and get the Lord to chase that cancer out of there!”

Oh, thanks a lot, Pete! Set me up, why don’t you?

But Joe just got up like a tired old man and said, “You’d better keep working. I’d like to see this barn while I’m still around.” Then he left.

I first met Joe and Emily Kelmer on another project the year before, and immediately returned, more appropriately dressed, for a pastoral call. It turned out they considered themselves Catholics, meaning that was their background, but they never attended mass and had never been inside Our Lady of the Fields. They didn’t have much use for my ministerial side, but they did appreciate my skill with hammer and saw and shovel and said so.