33 Church 6 – Frenchtown Baptist, etc

Church 6 – Frenchtown Baptist, etc

In the exodus at QBC, most families went to our already strong daughter church Exeter Chapel, but I joined Frenchtown Baptist, thinking we might contribute. Their pastor led a men’s retreat at a rural conference site; since we both liked wrestling, we went together to the RI state tournament held at Coventry High School in a nearby town. This man resigned due to burnout, so I served on the search committee.

The man we called was a committed believer who had grown a large adult Sunday School from a start-up; however, he lacked a seminary or Bible school education, and was a working engineer. His wife wouldn’t move from their home north of Boston, so they commuted; this situation couldn’t last long, and didn’t. One Sunday our new pastor demanded to be paid comparable to his engineering salary, which we couldn’t do. After meeting with the members of the search committee who had hired him and a “sermon” in which he stated his case, a man of the congregation told him to leave, and I made several phone calls that afternoon explaining our position, that this pastor was basically a wolf, and had to go. Figuring that the church must correct its mistakes, I served on the next committee too. During the ensuing months, the church had the benefit of a retired local pastor and a former nursing home chaplain, who served as interim preachers. The committee also sought counsel from two other older ministers.

The man we chose was a laid-back Filipino man, a Dallas Theological Seminary product, who bought a home near the church, where he lived with his wife (a hospital nurse) and their two children; he is still there now.

Meanwhile. I served as leader of the church’s trustees (responsible for property and maintenance) in the vacuum that ensued upon the resignation of my predecessor (his wife died). In this role I organized monthly work parties and oversaw the preparation and sale of our parsonage, which we no longer needed since our pastor would own his home.

The Frenchtown church’s other problem, which the pastor couldn’t help, was that it was deeply divided. The long-time pastor, a friend of mine, had retired after serving the church 25 years; his wife (they later divorced) was the church’s pianist/organist and choir leader, and stayed in those functions. Several in the choir, pillars in the church, were loyal to her in those roles, but not to the office of pastor, and a retired one at that. In fact, she was given the former youth pastor’s home to live in while she pursued divorce proceedings against her husband.

When it became clear that far from making a difference as we had hoped, our children were being driven off and would no longer worship there, we told our youngest daughter (Irene, living in an apartment near the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, where she was a student) that Ginny and I would join her in the church she preferred. Our daughter helped with the worship music team of a church near URI, so we affiliated too, attending QBC’s service on Sunday evenings, since our long-time missionary friend had come back to be pastor. That church was going through its own leadership crisis, having hired a church consultant after the elders voted “no confidence” in
the pastor. When our daughter married, Ginny and I re-joined QBC.