In Monson, an Easter study of hope and resurrection for tornado-damaged church

Sent to me by Emma Ladd Shepherd --

click on the link for a photo of the church after the tornado


In Monson, an Easter study of hope and resurrection for tornado-damaged church
Published: Sunday, April 08, 2012, By Tom Shea

On a Sunday morning, 90 minutes before he is to take to the pulpit for the 10 o’clock service, Bob Price will once again read his work, this time in a near-empty church. Maybe a deacon, or the choir between songs of a rehearsal, will hear it before he delivers to the entire congregation what he hopes is a blend of the instructional, the informational and the inspirational.

“Easter and Christmas are the most challenging days to give sermons,” Bob says. “I have a rabbi friend who, in referring to Passover and the High Holy Days, says the hard part is speaking to the worshipers, the faithful, who hear a sermon every week, and the tourists. You want to inspire those who come every week, but you always want to say something to spark those who only come to church twice a year. So there is a little more pressure.”

Bob says this without any hint of stress, in a voice that is Brian Williams-NBC Nightly News - clear, a lovely instrument that sometimes hints at roots in Arkansas, where he graduated from Little Rock Central High School; he was a freshman during the year of its landmark desegregation.

He was once the sports director of the Columbia University campus radio station, calling football, basketball and baseball games. In the 1960’s, he even produced Holyoke’s Archie Roberts’ quarterback post-game football show. Bob was a chemistry major and believes he might still hold the school record for breaking calibrated mercury thermometers. He would become the official scorer at University of Massachusetts home basketball games. He considered a career in sports broadcasting. But God had other plans.

Bob is 68. He has been a professor at Springfield College for 33 years. This semester he is teaching introductions to the Old and New Testament; Religion in America; and Spirituality and Healing.

He is also the interim pastor at the First Church of Monson. “Pinch-hitting,” he says, for the Rev. Bob Marrone, who is on a three-month sabbatical.

First Church, crowning the hill that once overlooked a green and bustling downtown, had its white steeple knocked from the sky by the June 1 tornadoes’ unforgiving might. Suddenly the vantage point for viewing a devastated downtown through which the storm plowed before heading over the hill to crash through Brimfield, the church quickly became the town’s epicenter, headquarters for information, water, food, clothing, guidance and sunblock.

Bob was in Chicago when the storms hit, on his way home from his 50th high school reunion. He called his wife Barbara to update her on his flight details. She told him a tornado was twisting through town.

“When?” he asked.

“Now,” she answered.

When Bob came home he walked the town with heartache in every step. The house and neighborhood in the town he’s lived in since 1984 were undamaged. But he has friends that did not miss the tornado’s path. In Arkansas, he learned of tornadoes’ lack of conscience or mercy. When his mother-in-law, Emma Ladd Shepherd asked if he was interested in volunteering with First Church’s relief efforts, he hardly took a breath before he said yes.

Six months later, when the church needed an interim pastor, a member of the search committee asked Bob if he was interested in serving for March, April, and May. Again, he consented.

The man called “Doctor Bob” by his students, “Doc” by his three step-children, “Grampy Doc” by his grandchildren, “Reverend Price” or “Pastor Bob” by congregants is a retired elder in the United Methodist Church. From 1984 to 1991, he was a pastor in Monson. He also was a pastor in Ludlow in the early 1990s, and with his late wife, Janice, pastored in Greenfield and Leyden in the second half of the decade. He was an interim pastor at Springfield’s Old First Church in 2001.

With a science degree from Columbia, he had walked across the street from the school and entered the Union Theological Seminary in 1965. It was in his second year he took homiletics, learning the construction and soul of a sermon. He delivered his first 45 years ago at Henderson Methodist, the Little Rock church in which he was raised.

His sermons can have their roots in the Gospel of John or the letters of Paul, and, over and over again, in the words of Jesus. They are sometimes influenced by the commentary of Luther or Calvin. A remark by a student or a song on the radio can offer a needed turn of a phrase or a different way to deliver the Christ-centered message Bob is trying to stress.

When we talk, he hasn’t written a word of his Easter sermon, but has a pretty good idea it will take those three hours to write, fill those 11 triple-spaced pages, and takes those 15 or 16 minutes to deliver.

His theme for Easter Sunday, for those in this town or anywhere: the resurrection, the hope and promise of it in all its forms.