Banks Community UMC July 1994 - June 2009
Six years in San Jacinto had been a journey, a time of growth, and a time in which we welcomed two more daughters, Susanna and Gabrielle. At our going away potluck lunch after church the last Sunday in June, Susanna ate plenty of Isabelle’s green jello, which we didn’t realize was artificially sweetened. Susanna was allergic to artificial sweeteners then. That jello showed back up about four hours later all over our friend’s car! We were travelling in two cars, 4 kids, 3 adults, our dog Tori and a traumatized cat, Smudge.
Banks, OR was a mystery to us. The DS had told me on the phone there were 5,000 people living there. When we drove into town the number on the population sign said 520. He was off by a few. I then realized why no one had given me directions to find Banks Community UMC or the Parsonage! There was one Main Street with several one-block roads off it only to the right. We came to Depot Street, turned right, and there it was. The little, country-looking, clapboard white building with a steeple church building, another couple of buildings down the street from it, in a similar style, then a 2-story, 2500 sq foot new-looking house, our parsonage. The next house was the final house on the block and there at the end of the road was the Banks Lumber Mill which worked 24/7 except a couple holidays and our house vibrated constantly from it and shook as if from an earthquake whenever they dumped a pile of logs!
In front of the parsonage stood many church people awaiting our arrival. Karen’s dad and brother had flown to California to drive our moving van north. They pulled in just after we did. We met Dexter and Nancy, immediate friends, and their 18-year-old sons Alex and Jeremy. Those guys unloaded all our beds and put them together. We located the box of sheets and in no time all six beds were made. The women, Gail, Leola, Leslee, Nancy, Sally, Dianne, Kathy and others had put together our kitchen, directed by Karen’s mom and sister, filled the fridge and cupboards with food and tried to make it a home. Linens got put into the linen closet, towels hung in the bathroom, and rugs on the floors. By the time they left that evening we had a home.
Driving into town that day, the Lord began to show me something amiss. I kept sensing what I could only describe as a split, a divide in the heavens, but didn’t know exactly what that meant. I was used to sensing the spiritual having walked in the revival movement happening in San Jacinto/Hemet. I began to ask around and soon discovered prior to 1981 the Banks UMC had been the only church in the community and a group of the folk in a Bible Study had experienced a spiritual awakening, speaking in tongues, seeing visions, and dreaming dreams. They came out strongly that everyone needed to experience the Holy Spirit as they did, and got crossways with the pastor at the time. The result was this spiritually energized group split within two years from the Banks UMC to form their own church. The group that split off then splintered into four groups. Since then, the other three had died out, and the one other church, “Dayspring Christian Fellowship,” remained.
It had been about 12 years since all this took place. I began to work for unity, to bring forgiveness and reconciliation between those on both sides of the divide. Part of this was to ask forgiveness on behalf of the pastor who had failed the original group who left. I did this on a Sunday visiting their church and their pastor, Skip Heiney, came and did the same with ours. He and I joined forces to bring unity to Banks sponsoring many joint worship opportunities and ministries. We also brought together anyone still harboring any resentment and hurt from the split to bring healing. It was an effort in reconciliation. God worked through this, although some still said they felt there was nothing to reconcile! Skip and I bonded through this time. He’s the one who walked the Camino ahead of me in 2013 and it was his telling me of their journey which lit the fire in my heart to take sabbatical.
We served in Banks for 15 years. By the time we moved, Anna had traveled to Brazil and Peru on Mission trips, graduated from college in Canada and was living in Peru as a missionary pastor in a local church. Grace had served as a missionary in an Albanian Orphanage for a month and spent a year working with a youth mission organization in Texas, and was living locally enrolled at Portland State as a piano performance major and doing hair to pay off school. Susanna had done mission work in Australia, New Zealand and Peru, and was starting her third year of college in Michigan and Gabrielle had served for a month in Botswana, and left for school in California, the same fall after our summer move to Westside. Later Karen would comment, “I feel like I grew up in Banks.” Indeed, we all did.
The folk in Banks are a patient, long-suffering, generous-hearted people. It is hard to have a pastor come with everything you think you want only to find out he’s just human after all with feet of clay, as imperfect as the rest of them. And I had come from a highly charged spiritual experience in which the pastors I hung with were doing major spiritual warfare to “take back” the valley from the enemy. Literally. Prophetic visions and dreams abounded, specific prayers against specific strongholds. And results of immense change afterward. We experienced the work of angels and demons, and saw God deliver people. It was like coming to earth after serving on the Starship Enterprise and needing to live an ordinary life! Plus in my personality I carried a ton of pride in my super spirituality! What’s ordinary after fighting for your life? Okay, I realize I didn’t describe much of this aspect last week, but life is a mix of all kinds of ordinary alongside extraordinary.
Life in Banks was real enough for those at the community church without all this spiritual warfare terminology. And they suffered long with me. Some of the guys took me aside and tried to help me come down to earth. “Brian, we are simple people,” one of them told me one day. “When Ramona Snowden tells the story of having thrown away the bag with her insulin in it and gone back later to find it still where she had tossed it in the trash at the bus stop, I can relate. It buoys my faith. But you telling of angels and demons, I have no place to put it.” It helped me.
One of the members mentored me in my speaking style, helped me be aware of my body, how I moved, when I moved, and how I spoke. It was great tutoring. Some other guys and I would meet sometimes over beer and often over breakfast to talk theology. This group just dug in and really tried to wrestle our understanding of faith between Wesleyan and Calvinist viewpoints. I discovered even though I felt this burden to visit everyone, I like connecting relationally, that I couldn’t. But if I visited Estelle Medearis, the 80+ darling of them all, then everyone in Banks suddenly knew I had been there and it was as if I had visited the whole congregation.
Leola, now 97, did the books and wrote the checks then and she still does so today! She and I still laugh about how mad she got at me. “Pastor, (she still calls me Pastor) you often made me so mad! But I loved you and I love you still! You’re my favorite!”
I’d remind her how she would get on my case for submitting my reimbursement form for professional expenses. “Pastor!” she reprimanded me more than once, “You buy too many books!” As if the money the church slated for reimbursing my expenses was not to be spent! :-) As I am giving away and packing up those books now, I am wondering if maybe she was right...
Andy and Gail came to one of my last services while in California before moving. They were in California on vacation and came to visit. That Sunday we had people praying in small groups, singing many contemporary songs, and one person doing a dance in worship, etc. At the door meeting them afterward they fessed up to being from Banks and said, “Well, you will bring some change to our lives, we are certain. After today, we are glad you are coming. ” Their solid support all the years of ministry there was a powerful gift to us both. Soon after we got to Banks, within that first year, Karen began counseling work and God used that safe place to unveil the real work of healing from a childhood filled with trauma. It took 20 years of hard work to make it through to a solid place of maintenance. In addition, my own work of healing from my own abuse happened simultaneously and as you know continued as I was with you here. So, need I say it, we were often a mess!
Through all this, Andy and Gail were solid. Whatever they thought of all we told them, they just were there, like Jesus’ sentries, praying, believing, loving, holding. It was remarkable, for I am certain they did not have a place to put much of what we were walking through.
In Banks at home, we homeschooled our children, Karen tutored other children, taught English, Math, History and other subjects for several years at Banks Christian Academy, and ended up also homeschooling many other local children as well. One year we had 6 additional kids in our “one room schoolhouse” in the parsonage living room!
At church the folk of Banks caught such a vision for their community. They went door-to-door handing out loafs of bread and welcome packets to all those moving into what was called the “New Development,” a housing tract of 2500 homes that began going in in 1994. They started home bible studies and prayer groups. They established a “House of Prayer,” setting aside a building on our property for a 24/7 prayer ministry. This never took hold. They taught release-time education for years joined by other congregations for public school kids and started a local food bank that has now moved to one of the church buildings. Anna introduced Operation Christmas Child and we collected and delivered 100s of boxes year by year, and this then expanded to them becoming a collection station for over 1200-1500 boxes a year. We sponsored joint youth ministries, prayer ministries, local clergy gatherings as new local congregations moved into the community. One of our members started his own outreach and local church to the biker community which is ongoing.
In addition, they were steady and supportive of every aspect of our lives at the parsonage. A guy who worked at the lumber mill would bring logs and drop them next to our house for wood. And guys from the church would cut them into shorter rounds and they, and Karen and I would split wood for our wood burning stove. They planned parties to celebrate our lives among them and supported the girls wholeheartedly. They even planned a surprise party for my 40th and helped to fund a trip to Israel for me. They helped with school retreats we had associated with Karen’s work at Dayspring Christian Academy. And they prayed for us constantly.
While in Banks three different Bishops came and went from the episcopal office! They left me there first because of the deeply significant healing work Karen was doing, then because of the work happening in the community, then because I was the chair of the Board of Ordained Ministry which began with a crisis of a pastor’s misconduct hearing. And then the wind changed, the door opened, the opportunity came and God said it was time to come here to Westside.