Hank Pierce and Amy Quitman were neighbors on Rural Route 28. Their mailboxes shared a weathered post at the end of the gravel lane. This seemed fitting, since their families also shared a weathered pew at Granby Presbyterian Church. Hank and Amy—along with Tom, the tire salesman, and Luther, the county’s public defender—made up Granby’s Pastoral Search Committee. Though a thankless job, their assignment did mean that every Thursday night they’d sit in the church’s empty manse, drink Folgers, and enjoy a few minutes shooting the bull. Then they’d return to the pile of résumés that represented the fleeting hope for their beleaguered flock.
This night, though, after the coffee and the gossip, they sat quietly, staring at the stack. Over these last several months, they’d endured phone interviews with four candidates and visits from two more. After confirming the town’s modest population or seeing the church’s humble clapboard building, three candidates quickly exited the process. One candidate turned out to be an ex-con and abruptly stopped answering their calls. Last they heard, he was back preaching in the pen.
Another of the candidates had only been in the room with them ten minutes before commencing his pitch on how necessary it would be to change the church’s name. Two leadership books and a weekend conference had convinced him that “Revolution Tribe” would attract folks by the truckload. The final candidate, after an hour of meet-and-greet, pulled out his MacBook to cue up a presentation on the exponential growth curve of satellite campuses. Somehow this aspiring clergyperson missed the miles of farms and the Blue Ridge tree line as he drove into town.
