There are two pastors at the First Presbyterian Church of Savannah – Stephen Williams and Will Shelburne. I am attaching a copy of these next blog postings to an e-mail to both of them, primarily because I want to express the impact on me of being a very distant participant in their congregation and also because Stephen preached about “loving your enemy” and I said I would write him a letter after that moving sermon. That letter is now nearly four weeks overdue.
First I must say to both Stephen and Will that you are WELCOME and ENCOURAGED to read my blog – thirdcycle.blogspot.com – if something in this intrigues or puzzles you.
Mike and I stayed at Imlay House for the eighteen days we were in Savannah. Imlay House has two storeys and an attic, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a parlour - with a piano - that can easily accommodate twenty, a sitting room/TV lounge, a small patio looking over a park, a dining room to seat ten – outfitted much as my Grandmother’s was in the 1950’s, and a tiny kitchen and laundry facility.
Mike and I kept largely to two bedrooms and the kitchen because we did not want to mess up the more formal areas with artistic or domestic activities and because we felt no need to interfere in any way with congregational events that occasionally took place in the parlour. The kitchen turned out to be a fairly common area – the two who prepare the congregation’s Wonderful Wednesday church suppers and the man who caretakes the premises often use the kitchen and laundry as a sort of overflow – crates of eggs, etc. Although we were surprised by this overlap it was also quite welcome as these interchanges formed the basis of a growing sense for us of belonging and camaraderie.
Besides Imlay House the entire complex includes a preschool for thirty-eight children, a meeting/community hall with a stage and industrial kitchen – Stewart Hall, a church office building of two stories with meeting/classrooms, offices, counselling rooms and a library, and the church building itself in a very traditional style of the eighteen hundreds with a steeply raised pulpit, altar, choir, etc., stained glass windows on two sides, and the severest of wooden pews - capable of seating well over 500 worshipers.
First Presbyterian has a vibrant, community minded congregation that is dominated by greyed heads but still includes a good sized number of young families. Compared to the multicultural background of Toronto, First Pres is nakedly “white” with a mere handful of individuals who might identify as other than Caucasian.
Two dominant themes run through the ambiance of the whole establishment. One is “build and sustain your community here!” and the other is: “Help the less fortunate!”. Thus at the only Wonderful Wednesday supper I attended this trip there was a glass jar on every table to collect pennies for a food charity and the after dinner topic was a presentation from a Presbyterian missionary who has spent most of her career helping to restore congregations in the former Soviet Union. She had many stories of how the congregations there are often heavily persecuted on the one hand while being the only community many youth experience in that economically devastated region.
Stewart Hall is frequently busy as are the meeting rooms of the church offices, with everything from bagpipe lessons to ballet practice to discussions of city politics to youth groups of several types. Although a few people are clearly participating in nearly everything, most are participating in just two or three ways and so the congregation has gained a reputation of being a genuine community. Some participants drive in from great distances even though Savannah has as many churches per square inch as Toronto has coffee shops.
Beyond this, my impressions of First Pres are many and mostly strong. For example, the level of hospitality displayed by the congregation seems nearly limitless. They let us stay for free, they keep a bank account for us to raise money in the US for World Peace through Inclusion, people frequently offered generous amounts of food and we had ready access to the fax machine, the internet and other resources, (to be cont’d)
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