Saturday, September 28, 2013

For Freddie Henderson, a mentor and friend

I don't write on Saturday's as full-time readers know. But I needed to get this out for a good man who passed on to his eternal home late Thursday night.

This is from a book titled God's Calling, from a couple years back. It's long, but, well, Rev. Freddie Henderson had a long ministry.

This is for him.


           When we respond to our call, and work to fulfill its mission, we have found our true voice.”
            It was like that for Rev. Freddie Henderson, who didn't seek God as much as God sought him, found him, wrapped him up in decorative paper and presented him to the church at a young age.
            Henderson grew up with his cousin, baseball pitcher Vida Blue in the hilly Louisiana countryside near Shreveport in a town called Mansfield. Mansfield, like Bethlehem was a couple of 1,000 years before,  wasn't known for producing much.
            The town, at the time, was heralded for a few things, primarily for the battle of Mansfield, a Confederate victory under General Richard Taylor (Zachary's son) that was fought in the town on April 8, 1864, when the war was winding down. The battle turned away 42,000 Union troops from their conquest of the Louisiana Confederate capital, Shreveport, and sent them into retreat. They would wind up in New Orleans. The town is about as far northwest in the state as one can go and not be singing the eyes of Texas. But the fact that its most notable happening occurred almost a century earlier told you all you truly needed to know about Mansfield.
            If you went four miles south of Mansfield off Louisiana Highway 175, you would find a Mansfield State Historic Site that commemorates the battle.
            There were more little things. The Methodist Church founded the first women's college west of the Mississippi river there in 1855, a college known as Mansfield Female College. The War between the States and an economic downturn closed it, turning it into a hospital. In 1930, Mansfield Female College merged with Centenary College of Louisiana and shut its doors permanently.
            There's talk now of turning the main building of the college into a museum.
            The film The Great Debaters was partially shot in Mansfield and released Christmas Day in 2007. There's little to recommend the town other than that.
            Oh, yes, it is the birthplace of one Vida Rochelle Blue, Jr. Blue, like Ocie Lee Smith (who sang with Count Basie's orchestra) and professional football players Albert Lewis, M.C. Reynolds and Sammy "Joe" Odum, became more famous than the little town they grew up in.
            It was a town that as of the census year 2,000 was still only 5,582 person. More than half the population was African-American, and its people were quite poor, the kind of town that you wanted to be from not be in. What’s the country song, happiness is Lubbock in your rear view mirror. The same could be said of Mansfield, and many, many little Louisiana towns throughout the state.
             Blue's most important possession was a left arm that could throw a football 70 yards in the air and a baseball close to 100 miles per hour, and that arm took him out of the town and set him right in the middle of a pennant race. Of course, his notoriety would one day lead him into drug use, and the problems that are inherent with even those prescribed. But who's to say Blue couldn't have had those same problems had he stayed in Mansfield?
            Blue's athletic ability was a ticket out of town that he punched, eventually winding up with the Oakland A's and into the World Series.
             "(But) people don't realize that Vida was as good a quarterback as he was a baseball pitcher," said Henderson. Henderson was three years older than his cousin, but they played on some of the same dusty fields and even at times in the same games, and they shared a lean athletic build.
            But Henderson had other things to absorb his attention. He played sports, of course, and still maintains of love of them, but they weren’t the most important thing in life, the way they were to Blue.
            "I was told that my grandfather said when he held me when I was a baby, 'God has something special for this child,' " Henderson said.
           The same year Henderson began his long love-affair with the ministry, 1958, he felt that strange tugging on his heart that many feel when God apparently is calling someone.
            It's the person behind you on the diving board virtually making you jump. It's the person behind you at a traffic light finding their horn while you are asleep at the switch. It's the call of the mild, as it were, with God's howl felt as much as heard by those Paul says He calls. Not everyone, in fact not many, have the experience Paul had on the road to Damascus.
            While Blue was just beginning to master the fastball that would eventually take him to the major leagues where he would throw a no-hitter just 10 days into his professional career, Henderson was answering the call to ministry in a diluted manner.
            He was 12 years of age, probably about the age when Samuel was called.
             "I can't remember a time when I didn't sense He was calling me," Henderson said.
            Henderson understood the idea that a nurturing congregation was so vital to hearing and understanding the call from God. He was guided to get what was then called an exorbitor's license, which doesn't exist in the United Methodist Church today. There are few 12-year-old pastors in waiting in United Methodist churches, fewer Samuels. Or at least few who answer the way Henderson did, which is to say to God, “I’m ready. What’s next?”. Maybe they're called and because of some rule out there they aren't allowed to answer.
             It wasn't so much that he preached as he read from scripture and did other things during worship services as he was prepared to one day take the pulpit. In the same way that Blue was drafted and placed in the minor leagues to hone his craft while keeping his valuable left arm cranking, so, too, was Henderson nurtured. Maybe God calls his people and because we don't nurture them as He would have us do, the people’s answer to the call dies for lack of vision. The answer to the call fades away, like a wisp of smoke from a morning campfire in the South.
             "There were several people who helped me along the way," Henderson said. "And they never were cruel about it. I remember once reading that Jesus was in the 'dessert.' Someone said, 'No, son. Jesus was in the desert.' They could have been mean about it, but they weren't. I was learning. They were very careful not to push me out there before I was ready."
            When Henderson finished high school, he continued learning his "craft." though it wasn't always easy at all. He didn't drive, couldn't afford a car and wasn't universally accepted because of his age.
            At one point he heard the congregation said, "Don't stop here. We don't want a boy preacher," spirit-crushing words for a young pastor.
            He was appointed to a student charge in the "Methodist" church, right at the time the church was dealing with its own issues..
           On April 23, 1968, The United Methodist Church was created when The Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist church merged at the General Conference in Dallas, Texas. Robert Muller, a Bishop representing the EUB, joined hands with Bishop Lloyd Christ Wicke, representing the Methodist Church joined hands. With the words, "Lord of the Church, we are united in Thee, in Thy Church and now in The United Methodist Church," the church supposedly changed. The merger didn't happen as quickly as that hand holding, though, and it would take ministers like Henderson, who would one day be a local district superintendent (or leader of pastors under a state-wide Bishop) in the New Orleans district. Henderson was the superintendent in New Orleans when Katrina struck, and it was his leadership as well as others that helped the city’s churches through a devastating time. He also and helped spark African-American churches to flourish.
            While he was in college, he would take the bus on the weekends from Shreveport down to a little town called Keithville 10 miles outside the city. He was “appointed,” a United Methodist term basically meaning assigned to two small churches. Some UMC pastors have even more points on a charge. Some have up to four small churches on one “charge.”
            “I would take the bus to Mansfield, and my dad would take me to the bus station when the weekend was over," he said. These little churches and their congregations helped nurture his call along the way, helping him with the ideas of sermon preparation and enunciation, and all that wonderful food that would be prepared.
             "It seems there has always been things that prepared me for the next move in my calling," Henderson said. "Sure, there have been times that I asked, 'Are you sure you want me to do that?' That kind of thing. But there has never been a time when I didn't feel his calling on me from the time I could understand what it might be."
            Like Samuel before him, Henderson heard that call at a young age. Like Samuel before him, he listened even when he didn't quite know what it might be. Like Samuel before him, others pushed and nurtured him toward his ministry. Like Samuel before him, he answered God's call with a simple, "Here I am."

       

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