24 years ago:
The author on his Honda, preparing for the big trip
A Day in the Life of a Church School Coordinator.
-from my 9/28/82 church school newsletter
Your Church School has allowed this Newsletter editor a one-year sabbatical after eight straight years (with three Sundays away), so he has decided to spend it visiting other churches to see how “the other side of the world” lives and worships and teaches. Thought you might be amused at the happenings of one such summer visit.
Four of us decided to share with the people of this far-northeast-Georgia parish the visitation of their Bishop Suffragan and so, clad in our appropriate protective wearing apparel that a motorcyclist would wear, we proceeded northward and found this little parish church, went in, found seats ourselves, courteously returned the apparent smiles and stares of welcome and otherwise enjoyed being there.
While there, a couple of the ladies ran to their reception room, collected and locked up all the silver. A person on Altar duty carefully awaited completion of Eucharist so that she could quickly whisk away the Communion silver and Offering plates, because they all thought we were there to rob them! Then, after being received and welcomed by the bishop in the reception line, he chose to conclude his greeting in his usual good humor by yelling “…and don’t steal anything, either” as we made our way to the coffee line. Once they learned that we were friends of the bishop, ALL WAS WELL! (Of course, a lot of this was not known until subsequent to our visitation to his visitation, but we did wonder why they had prepared this wonderful reception table for their bishop with plastic spoons!). And That’s The Way It Was — circa Summer 1982.
That story was in my church school newsletter (yes, I do other newsletters) and I thought it was rather funny and sent them a copy but they didn’t think it so funny! (To be fair, earlier, another church in the area was robbed.) They came to visit the bishop to complain that I had insulted them about their plastic silverware at the Bishop’s Reception and were rather angry. Pissed, too. And all this time I thought they were staring at me because I was so damn good looking! Later, to commemorate this “fun” occasion, I bought four sterling silver spoons, had them engraved “St. James Clayton” and sent one to each member of our motorcycle gang, and the bishop! A few weeks later they were going to install a priest as rector (Canon Lockhart) and I wanted to go, so I asked the bishop when it would be and he simply replied “I don’t want to see you anywhere near the place.” The motorcycle bandits were Philip, David, Ed and myself.