Practical Parson

"Father's headquarters were in town, and there he preached on Sunday morning. Then, after dinner with one of his members (he quickly learned which sisters were the best cooks), he would hitch up his horse and go to one of the country charges for an afternoon sermon, returning to town for an evening service. During the week he had sermons to write, babies to baptize, sickbeds to sit beside, midweek prayer meetings to lead, couples to marry, people to bury, studying to do, men's and women's organizations to direct, young people to guide, and a business to keep going in three churches. He was on call 24 hours a day."

Thus Newsman Hartzell Spence describes his father's first parish in One Foot in Heaven: The Life of a Practical Parson (Whittlesey House; $2.50). The Rev. William H (for nothing) Spence was a Methodist minister who in 30 years of pastorates in Iowa, Colorado and Nebraska never left a parish with less than a 25% net increase in its membership. You seemed to hear an organ playing Onward, Christian Soldiers when he came into the room.

Small-town doctors, lawyers and editors have lately paraded between the covers of successful books. Now it appears that the preacher, a still older and more vital part of small-town U. S. life, is to have his turn as a best seller--for last week the lively, human story of Parson Spence went into its third printing. Reader's Digest picked it for its December book abridgement, and in Hollywood Warner Bros, rushed work on a movie script to add to its string of screen biographies.

Times changed fast from T. R. to F. D. R. Parson Spence changed with them, but without compromising on fundamentals. He cut his sermons from an hour and a half to 24 minutes. At first he would no more have drunk a highball than try to get a laugh in church. Later he even ordered a set of books called Wit and Humor of America from the Methodist Book Concern, took to reading Mark Twain. It helped.

As an Army chaplain in World War I, Parson Spence discouraged crapshooting in camp by rolling sevens himself. As an evangelist, he modernized his revival technique; instead of bringing sinners to the revival, he took the revival to them from house to house. He learned to "tell whom I was hitting by the way they looked over their shoulders to see if the family skeletons were sitting behind them."

Because a sister of the parish hates to be caught unprepared by her preacher, on his pastoral rounds he would linger out front tying his horse (later testing his tires) until she had time to whip off her apron and straighten up the parlor. Because the Methodist Discipline forbade smoking, he passed out chocolate cigars when his son was born. But he knew how to call his shots. When a parishioner begged him to tell her daughter not to accept a job in Manhattan because something might happen to her there, Parson Spence looked her in the eye, said: "Mrs. Knowles, did you ever think what might happen to her in an Iowa haystack?"

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