Love Notes

Bill Love is an Interim Ministry specialist

The first church I served outside my native South was in Pennsylvania, not far from Gettysburg and even closer to Hershey, the chocolate city. Foreign missions work, I explained. I felt a little like Amos, the prophet from Judah (the Southern Kingdom) called to prophesy to Israel (the Northern Kingdom).

I move by rental truck. My stuff gets there the same time I do and with less breakage and is cheap enough that congregations will move an interim pastor great distances; I’ve lived in 14 states so far. When a group from the church was unloading the truck and I was telling them which room to put things into, I told them the den for a lot of it when I wasn’t sure where it went.

One of the men, whom I had noticed looked a little puzzled, finally said to me, “We call it the family room.”

“Too many syllables,” I said. “Use that many syllables in the South, and you work up a sweat.”

Fifteen years earlier, the church had been known as the “farmers’ church.” Now there was only one working farmer as the farms had become upscale housing developments.

One of the daughters of the remaining farmer had recently graduated from Penn State with an agriculture-related major and had spent several weeks traveling following graduation. Her travel included the Heifer Project ranch in Arkansas.

As she described her experience to me, she said, “A lot of the people who work on the farm are volunteers from all over the country. The people who work in the office, are local people, so they have an accent.”

I said, “When I’m in Pennsylvania, I have an accent. When you’re in Arkansas, you’re the one with the accent.”

One of the members seemed to think that a Southern accent was a sign of diminished intellectual capacity. One day, when I’d enjoyed enough of his comments, I asked, “If Southerners are so dumb, how come so many great writers come from the South?”

He said, “Name one.”

I said, “William Faulkner.”

He asked, “Was he from the South?”

I rested my case, and he never brought it up again. Some differences are easier to identify. We can do them at a distance. With accents, we have to be close enough to hear.

I walked into the bank when I was living in New Jersey. The teller greeted me with, “I like your tie.”

I said, “Thanks.”

She said, “You’re not from here, are you?”

When we encounter something different and don’t reject it right away, we may take a little more time and pay a little more attention. Just the way, when we rearrange the furniture in our homes, we have to pay attention lest we whack our shins.

The first time I served a church in Michigan, I put out manuscripts of my sermon the day I preached it for people to pick up as they came in, so they could translate from Southern into Midwestern. (They call their accent “unaccented.”)

I learned to listen, too, since I listen with a Southern accent. One day, at coffee hour after worship, a member asked me, “Have you met my twin?”

I didn’t know he had a twin but looked around the room to see if I could spot him. I realized he was looking at Mike Quinn, whose name had sounded like “my twin” to my ears.

Recently, I read in an airline’s in-flight magazine about the different ways different cultures pronounce the sounds that animals make, a difference based on how each hears differently.

I have not noticed any notable differences in the humanity of those whose accent (both speaking and hearing) is different from mine or whose cultural heritage or racial heritage is different.

The stuff of being human is the same. Maybe when we sound different, we could listen more closely to understand. Maybe that’s part of what Jesus meant when he said, “Those who have ears, let them hear.”

The church I served after Pennsylvania was in South Carolina. A friend from the Pennsylvania church asked me what it was like being back in the South. I said, “The biggest difference I can tell is that, when I go through the drive-thru at a fast food restaurant, I only have to give my order one time.”