Minister to Minister Part 2 – Gene’s testimony

I also have a hard time with cold weather, but you can always put them on to stay warm. You can’t take enough to get cool; it can’t be done. You get down to the skin, you’re still hot. My thermostat’s busted. I came down here in the hot weather because I felt like I wanted to get down there.

Well, I guess there’s no way to explain to you how dark the next two to three years were. I hate to tell you what it took to get the Baptist preacher out of me. I could let this story run for hours, forget the physical pain. I think the physical pain was unbearable, but nobody would hire me. Nobody would hire an ex-Baptist preacher. And besides, I was too sick to work.

By this time, I weighed about 220 lbs., and I could hardly move around. I was a semi-invalid, and I was allergic to almost every food there is, with a few exceptions. I’m still in that situation right now. I don’t really like talking about this, and obviously, you don’t need me to. When I could, I’d get out of bed, and I’d go look for a job. Helen and I lost everything we had. No one would hire me if they found out I was an ex-pastor; they would back away from me, and I didn’t have any skills.

You know, if you can’t be Pope, you can’t be anything. You don’t have any skill, brothers, and that’s one of the reasons you can’t leave the pastorate. Would anybody say amen to that? Is there anyone who has the courage to say ‘amen’? You know you’ve got to keep on doing this, it’s the only known kind of livelihood you’ve got. Therefore, you got the pastor, and you got to think in terms of what you’re going to do from the viewpoint of the pastor. And that’s why most of you are in this room, not wanting to hear as much as you’re hearing. You just want to hear some new ideas to innovate. And I had no interest in teaching you how to innovate, brother. None. For one thing, those innovations will not hold beyond your lifetime, and they will die, and the religious system and the organized church will eat them alive anyway.

They are doomed. I am not interested in telling you any innovative ideas. The system chews  up innovation by the truckload. How’d I get off on that? You know, I had all these beautiful evangelist suits, and they all wore out, and I had one left that I’d try to get jobs in, I’d always put it on. It was 100% pure silk; it had ripped all the way across here, and you cannot patch silk; you patch it, you just string it out. And I would have to go to these interviews with this beautiful silk suit on, it was easy getting in.

I think I lost most of my interviews trying to get out the door, and have you ever tried to back out of an office? It’s virtually impossible. I could not turn around. I got so close to being hired so many times. There were times when they would have 100 applications, get it down to 25 interviews, five interviews, and two interviews, and the other guy would get it. I was out of work for two years, and the second year, with all the strength I had, I don’t know how in the world I would have ever held a job, but if I got it, I’d go out.

One day, I had a job, and they called me up and said, “Gene, we gave it to someone else who came back unexpectedly.” I sat down in our little bitty apartment on Huntington Drive in Acadia, California, and I said, “Lord Jesus, this is not mathematically possible. This has got nothing to do with man. You’re doing this to me. This is between you and me.” As I told the brothers, I finally decided to, I finally gave in. And I said, “Lord, I’ll teach.” And man, I thought I’d done God a big favor, and I couldn’t even get a teaching job.

Finally, I was told that maybe I could substitute teach. Our situation financially was so desperate that I’d have the clock wake me. I don’t remember the name of the school that first started calling me for substitute teaching. It was $23 a day. It looked as big as a wagon sheet. I woke up and put my hand beside that telephone and waited for it to ring, and I’d grab it and I’d say, “Hello, Miss Henipith. I’m ready. I’m ready, in such a state.” And she laughed, and she gave me a job. One or two and sometimes three days a week. We not only had lost everything and sold everything and worn out everything, we were in debt. And this great preacher, down to less than nothing, had prayed the wrong prayer. There was a lady whose name was Sweeney, whose husband was a student at Florida Theological Seminary, who was teaching in a ghetto, and he got called to go somewhere.

Years later, I heard he had left the religious system. I was substituting in that district. It was about October, and Miss Sweeney, I didn’t know any of this about her, was resigning, and they couldn’t find anybody to teach in that ghetto, the eighth grade. Now, let me tell you, you don’t know this. Eighth grade is the worst grade there is, and don’t let anybody tell you anything else. I taught them all, and it’s the eighth grade, and a ghetto is the worst there is, and it can’t get any worse. And I went, and I met Miss Sweeney, and I found out she was a Christian. She found out I was a Christian, and she was going off with her husband to be missionaries to serve the Lord. And I was going off to become a schoolteacher. We were going different ways.

Her husband’s brother finally ended up in church life, and I kept up with him through the years. I sat there in the back of that classroom, and it was the only orientation and teaching training I ever had, and my mind was so full of notes and trying to remember this stuff, and at the end of the day, when she told me I had to remember to close the window, my brain split wide open. I knew I’d never remember to close those windows; that was too much.

The next day, I took that class over. I did not know what teaching was, minus nothing. I said to those kids, “Now, I know that I’m your third teacher this year, and I know you’ve been having a hard time. So, I want to do it exactly the way Miss Sweeney did. What did Miss Sweeney do at the beginning of the day each day?” And for about two or three weeks, I let those kids teach me what Miss Sweeney did until I had it down.

Now, let me tell you what happened. The very first day that I was in a teachers’ conference with this faculty, the principal said to us, “When you go around the corner, be careful. I’ve been warning you about this,” he said.  This is my first orientation on a professional level. He said, “Watch out behind you, to your side, and to your front.” He said, “This morning, one of the teachers went down in the basement to get something, and one of the students attacked him with a 2×4. Now, y’all have to be careful.” And that’s the kind of school we lived in. We laid our lives on the line every day.