Pastors and Religious Politics

Quite early after I arrived in San Pedro I started to attend a small mission congregation — it happened to be on the way between where I was rooming at the time and the Pacific Electric station, There were two Lutheran churches in San Pedro and I remember looking them over from the outside before I joined the mission congregation. I suppose it was because it was in the Augustana Synod that I made the choice I did.

The other congregation was Norwegian Lutheran. I’m sure that had I chosen the latter that I would have been less involved in church activities. One factor for the choice I made was that the minister at the Norwegian church was an older more aloof person and the church was better off financially so there wasn’t the urge there to acquire new members.

At the mission congregation (called that because it needed support from the church at large to continue existing) the pastor was Maynard Wellington and I became good friends with him and his wife. I became involved in the church activities, being at time a teacher in the Sunday school, deacon, usher, and what have you. I attended the Luther League as well as the Sunday services. I guess I spent early Christmases and Thanksgivings with the Wellingtons and I recall going to Knott’s Berry Farm (for their chicken dinners) with them. The two of them were transplants from the Midwest and I think I felt a little far from home out in the west.

The maintenance financially and otherwise was a struggle. The situation was not helped buy the fact that preceding Wellington the pastor had been one Lester Peterson. He was there as an intern in his seminary training and had become very popular with the members although he was to me a rather unattractive individual. He was supposed to stay only one year but actually stayed two in order to court and marry the Johnsons’ only daughter. So there were family ties as well.

So the Wellingtons had a difficult time of it and when the war was over, or nearing its end, they accepted a call to a congregation back in Kansas. By then their oldest child, a girl, had been born.

When it became necessary to arrange for a new pastor, the feeling in the congregation was strongly in favor of calling Lester Peterson but this was in conflict with the rules prescribed by the mission board, which were to the effect that the new pastor have no ties, family-wise, in the congregation. Somehow or other the mission board came up with the idea that they would accept Peterson as the pastor if he were called unanimously. This would have been all right except that they then proceeded to arrange that the vote would not be unanimous. Two people were to vote negative, one of them being me. I went along with the scheme, I suppose at the suggestion or urging of Wellington.

As it turned out the other individual who was to vote no didn’t show up so I was the only no vote. Several votes were taken, and I surmise as there were only a few members at the meeting (after all the congregation was small and meetings such as this were not well attended) that those present soon sensed who was voting no. Mrs. Johnson who was my landlady at the time was really hurt in her feelings to me by what she decided I had done, though later her composure returned to its normal tenor. As a consequence, Peterson was not called to be the pastor.

The whole procedure, in retrospect, left a very unsatisfactory opinion in me of church officials at an administrative level, and it was sort of a black mark even against Wellington whom I had rather liked and respected. I didn’t think much about it at the time but it was yet another development in my attitude toward the church and to officials in it whether they were pastors or higher-up officials.

With the passage of time, it served to emphasize in me a complete distrust in what persons in the religious field do or say. The excuse is doubtless that they are only human and make mistakes but that part of what they say remains untouched by human frailty. I’m afraid that to me all they do and say if touched not only by human frailty, but also by a subtle form of personal egotism that they have the correct picture of the cosmos and the human condition. Since then I have not seen anything in the conduct of church personnel to counteract this opinion on my part, which has only strengthened with time.

I think the Wellingtons left San Pedro about the beginning of the summer of 1946 and that summer the church was served by a student pastor by the name of Roderick Johnson. Since he was approximately my age I had some contact with him outside of church doings — a nice enough person but at the end of the summer he passed out of my life forever.

The replacement pastor came at the end of the summer and he was really a sad case. He was physically unprepossessing (his facial expression was heavy-lidded and ostentatiously pious). He tended to be on the fundamentalistic side which for me was an increasingly negative characteristic. Since I left for the San Francisco area later that year, I did not have a long period of contact with him, happily.