Founders’ Day Address
“Beginning a School of Theology for Mercer University;
A Dream that had Nothing to Sustain It
Except a Faith that God was Inspiring It.”
J. Truett Gannon, Emeritus Professor at McAfee School of Theology
August 25, 2009.
I want to say something to Carolyn McAfee, please.
My father ran a dry cleaning plant. At the back of the building was the boiler room. As you entered, the huge pile of coal was to the right, the boiler straight ahead. The bottom half of the boiler held the fire walls which contained the flames of the burning coal. In the top half were the flues where water was heated into steam. The steam escaped through pipes which led to the presses where pressers could apply the final perfecting touches to the appearance of the clothes that had been cleaned.
In those days, the fire was kept burning by manual labor, usually mine. You’d go in, put on your gloves, get the tool with which to open the furnace doors and then start shoveling in the coal. You had to guess at how much coal to shovel in. Having to leave the furnace doors open while you shoveled in the coal made the room much hotter while you worked.
Then someone created a mechanism that would open and hold the doors open by stepping on a pedal. You’d push your shovel into the coal and as you lunged for the doors, you could step on the pedal and keep the doors open until you had shoveled in the coal. If your timing was good, you could have the furnace doors open at the same time your shovel got there. If not, you covered your pants leg as well as most of yourself with a lot of soot.
Then someone else invented what was called a Stoker. It was a nice, large, bright red box, which could hold up to about a day’s supply of coal. Running through the bottom of the box was an auger-like drive shaft which allowed one piece of coal to fall into the grooves of the auger. As it turned forward, it pushed one piece of coal at a time into the fire with measured accuracy, so that the fire maintained its desired level of heat. There was no more shoveling, no more scattered soot and no more guessing at how much coal to put on the fire. You couldn’t see the Stoker doing its work, but you could hear the steadied hum of its turning auger letting you know that the cleaning plant would have all its steam needs met for the day.
Carolyn, you are a spiritual Stoker for me. Just sensing your calm steadied faith in Christ and love for people assures me that the work of this School of Theology, which bears your name, will get its work done today and tomorrow. Your faith helps me believe that God’s spiritual tongues of fire, resting on you and people like you, will enable us to speak clearly what God has done in Christ. So, I thank you, Carolyn; very much.
Now, to the founding of this great school; I do not say that this is exactly what happened but I do say this is precisely what I thought I saw happening. Ask a lawyer what color is the horse and she will reply, “This side is brown.” Lawyers have learned that witnesses cannot testify concerning places where they are not. I do not say this is what happened where you were, but I do say this is what was happening to me on my side of the event.
Beginning a school of theology for Mercer University; it was an incredible dream. Dreams are so important. They keep the spirit mobile even when the body has been immobilized.
The most intense theological treatise in the New Testament was written to a people by a man whose major interest in them was to see them on his way to see someone else. “I have been longing for many years to see you,” Paul writes in Romans 15:23; and “I plan to do so when I go to Spain,” he adds in verse 24 Then he states further, “I hope to visit you while passing through and to have you assist me in my journey.” It must be awesome to be gripped by a dream so strongly that you are willing to ask everyone along your journey to assist you in reaching your destination.
Well, that is how we felt about the dream that would become McAfee. It was a dream that had nothing to sustain it except a faith that God was inspiring the hope.
The first thing our feasibility study committee did was to engage a team of professional consultants. They recommended that we not begin the school. We see no evidence of support, they said; we see no donor support and no student market.
It was the most politely rejected recommendation I have ever witnessed. We didn’t even discuss it. Someone moved that the report be received, that we ignore it and proceed with our plans to start a school of theology.
This dream became the largest spiritual brushfire I have ever been consumed by. It did not start here and go there; it started everywhere and came together. While everyone of us does remember where we were when we first began talking about this school of theology, there is no single person who can be accredited with having lit the first match, unless it be the first two lighter knots I am going to mention. There were a lot of lighter knot-like people along the way.
Lighter knots are those places in the stump of a pine tree where rosin that didn’t fall into the cups placed on the tree to catch the rosin has fallen and formed. You could find these knots as you dug up the stump of a fallen pine tree. They became very useful in starting and building fires. There was so much rosin in them that you could light them almost by just holding a match close to them. Fires were easily built when lighter knots were used.
We have had so many lighter knot-like people along this McAfee journey, people so filled with hopes for a seminary to meet today’s needs that this dream quickly became for all of us a highly combustible commodity of spiritual commitment. There were so many:
Two of them were Jesse Mercer and Adiel Sherwood. These two could have lit the first match. Jesse Mercer had a school for preachers and Adiel Sherwood was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Eatonton, GA. Some of the classes for Mercer’s school were held in Sherwood’s church. I was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Eatonton a full century after Sherwood was. It felt good to preach in the pulpit for which Adiel Sherwood was once responsible.
There were Kirby Godsey and Jim Bruner. They were talking about a school of theology for at least a decade before we got started.
There was Loyd Allen and his 8 professor friends from Southern who came to see if a seminary could be started on the old Tift College campus that now belonged to Mercer.
There were Peter Rhea Jones and Floyd Roebuck. I’m still amazed at how much this man from Atlanta and that man from Rome were able to do, together.
There were Ches Smith and Horace Fleming. Ches and Horace were co-chairs of the Feasibility Study Committee.
There were Ches Smith and Griffin Bell. Ches made the motion to the trustees to begin the school and Griffin Bell seconded it.
And there were two people who were such highly flammable lighter knots; Alan Culpepper and Dock Hollingsworth. Alan enlisted four professors and Dock enrolled 40 students. They began meeting in broom closets over in the Davis Building and called themselves a school of theology; and they were; and we still are!
We had two basic dreams for the school. We wanted to encourage women and men and every member of any ethnic group of people, who felt God calling them into ministry, to enroll in this school and begin to to pursue their dreams of fulfilling God’s call upon them.
Women; have you read Sojourner Truth’s sermon, “Ain’t I a Woman?” It was preached in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention meeting in Akron, Ohio. Speaking of what women can do and of what some people think they can’t do, she said, “Look at me. Look at my arm. I have plowed. I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?
Oh, Sojourner, if you could see your gender now. One woman is a 4-star general in the United States Army. Eight women are now flying fighter jets for the United States Air Force. Thirteen women are pastoring Baptist churches in Georgia.
And ethnic groups; an Hispanic woman now sits on the bench of the United States Supreme Court; and we have elected an African-American as president of the United States. I cried when they asked a ten-year old girl what she thought of our new president and she said, “It feels so good to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me.”
We must continue to build a school on this spirit of inslusivity and we must help our churches catch up with and catch on to this spirit.
We wanted a school that would be built around a strong faculty. I was on the committee to recommend a curriculum. We decided to recommend no curriculum and to recommend, instead, that we call a faculty we can trust and just let them teach. I believe we have done this.
We wanted a faculty who could model for us the ability to disagree and still work together. During the first semester of our existence, I had all five professors come to Smoke Rise for a seminar. Each one spoke; Alan, then Ron, Nancy and Paul. Loyd was last and when he stood to speak, he said, “Well, you’ve heard from the other four; now you’re going to hear the truth.”
I wanted to stand and shout. I’d been praying for that kind of Christian deference to other people’s opinions ever since some Baptists had begun believing they had the right to tell other Baptists what they could and could not believe.
One dream that surfaced almost ahead of all others was for a new spirit of evangelism. We wanted a spirit of evangelism that would love and respect people while witnessing to them; a spirit that would name Jesus as the hope of our salvation rather than name our belief system as the requirement of salvation.
We wanted a school that would help students find the courage to try whatever they feel God urging them to do. We wanted them to be like Simon Peter and jump out the boat, sometime. When you see Jesus out there doing something you would like to do, get out there with Him and give it a try. You may fail, just like Simon did; but who rescued him? After that experience, Simon had a relationship with Jesus that those people who remained in the boat never knew.
Would you like to really sense the presence of Jesus? Then, don’t always stay in the sanctity of your church; go sit in a seminary cafeteria booth, drinking coffee with Martin Luther King, Jr., as John Claypool did, when no one else would do it. And the seas around that cafeteria booth were far more boisterous than the waters around Simon Peter.
We wanted a school that could help students never lose their faith in the actuality of God in human experience. This means they have to believe it, themselves.
When you live in New Orleans, you deal with the Mississippi River. They built the city where the river forms a crescent, which is why they call it the Crescent City, obviously. That crescent creates some strange patterns.
There are friends of mine who live on the West Bank of the river. What is interesting about this is that at that point in the crescent, the West Bank of the river is east of the city of New Orleans. These people who live on the west bank live on the Texas side of the river and on the Alabama side of New Orleans.
That created fascinating traffic patterns for me. There was not north, south, east or west, there was upriver and downriver. When I parked my car at the church, I was facing the river. When I prepared to go home, I could turn left onto St. Charles, or turn right onto St. Charles or turn around and go back up Napoleon. Any of these directions would get me home if I would just remember to drive up-river.
I came to love that river, as all Orleanians do, and to love the song, “Ole Man River,” especially as my friends at First Baptist Church did. We had a member, named Merrill Smith, who was one of the finest persons I have ever known. He had that deep, rich bass voice needed in order to sing that song. Merrill could and did sing “Ole Man River” as lovely and as effectively as I have ever heard it sung. You just have to have a deep, rich voice to sing it right; “get a little drunk and you land in jail-l-l-l- you have to be able to go down there and get that note if you want to sing this song right.
Almost every time we had a fellowship at church, we would ask Merrill to sing it. I loved it so much and I enjoyed hearing him sing it so much that I used to tell him, more than once, “One day, I am going to write a sermon around that song, have you sing it, then I will preach about it.”
I went back to New Orleans to do a funeral, 2 or 3 years, ago, 30 years since having seen Merrill. At the funeral, Merrill asked me if I had ever written that sermon on ole man river. I had to reply, “No, Merrill; no, I haven’t. I haven’t found the right metaphor, yet, that says what I want to say.”
Then, this summer, I read five books simply because they were written in 2009. I not only wanted to find out what people are thinking, I wanted to find out if any people are thinking. Not many; but I did find a quote by John Howard Yoder about rivers. He was trying to help us see God in everything. As soon as I read his quote, I knew I had found my metaphor for the Mississippi River.
Yoder was trying to teach us to see God in everything, even rivers. Think about the words of the song. “That ole man river, he must know something, but he don’t say nothing, he just keeps rollin’ along.” God is like that for me, sometime.
“He don’t plant taters and he don’t plant cotton; and them that plants ‘em is soon forgotten, but ole man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.” It refreshes me to realize that as people in New Orleans live by the river and die by the river, we live beside God and we die beside God.
I emailed Merrill, told him I had found the metaphor and would be using it in my Founder’s Day Address. He wrote back, “I’m glad. I wish I could come sing it for you before you preach, but I can’t. It looks like the next trip I take will be the one in which I go to meet Jesus. But I need to tell you, that while I still love the song, I am not like the last part of it. I’m now 90 years old but I am not ‘tired of living’ and I am not ‘skeered of dying.’ But I will be praying for you as you preach.”
Last week, I wrote Merrill and said, “Since you can’t be with me, next Tuesday, would you be willing to sing ‘Ole man River’ to yourself at 10:00 o’clock, CST? He agreed; and just a few minutes, ago, at the top of the hour, Merrill sang ‘Ole Man River’ in the privacy of his home on Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans. He sang it to himself but he sang it for us. It is making me feel good- about Merrill, about life and about hope in God. 90 years old and still not tired of living and not afraid of dying. As he has lived by the river, he has lived with God beside him. When he dies by the river, he will die with God still beside him. I hope he lives to be 100; but when he dies, he will just keep living in God, just as in God, ole man river keeps rolling along.
What was Yoder’s actual comment about rivers? “Rivers are,” he said, “always coming and always going, but somehow they are always there.”
“Granddaddy,” said the little girl; “can you see God?” Granddaddy replied, “Honey, it’s gotten for me so that I can’t see anything else.”
Like the river, only so much more so, God is always coming, always going but somehow always there. You need never lose your faith in the actuality of God in human experience. Even when the Mississippi River runs dry, God will still be beside you.
So, Dr. Underwood and Dr. Culpepper, thank you. Few honors have meant even as much as this privilege has meant to me. And faculty, students and friends; may you be sprinkled with God’s tongues of fire so that you may be lighter-knots in the Kingdom of Heaven, ignited by the Spirit of Jesus. Amen.