I had lived in the 902 Acacia Drive house for a little over a year now, and one of the most convenient things about this house was its proximity to my church, Jeromeville Covenant. I was involved enough in church activities in those days that I typically went to church multiple times in an average week, and most of the time I walked. Today was a Saturday morning, it was already eighty degrees out, and I was wearing long pants and carrying a sweatshirt since I knew I would be in a cooler climate later that day, so I was sweating by the time I got to the fellowship hall.
When I arrived, Adam White, the youth pastor, was there, along with Noah Snyder, Cambria Hawley, Taylor Santiago, Courtney Kohl, Erica Foster, and a girl I had never seen before. She had short, chin-length brown hair and brown eyes, and appeared to be around my age. I knew that someone I did not know would be here today, but for some reason, this was not what I expected her to look like.
A few weeks ago, Adam had sent an email to all of the youth staff with the subject line “Welcome Faith!” I thought it was going to be something inspirational, or the title of a new sermon series at church or something, until I read it and quickly figured out that Faith was the name of a person. Noah had previously had a part-time position as the junior high youth ministry intern at church, and he had not chosen to continue in this position for the 1998-99 school year because of his academic commitments. According to Adam’s email, the new intern was a 22-year-old girl named Faith Wiener, and she had never seen the western United States before other than for her job interview, so he asked us to brainstorm fun things that we could do as a group on her first weekend in Jeromeville.
Of course, the thing that stuck out the most to me was that Faith was a girl, and she was my age. I wondered, what did she look like? Was she cute? Was she single? I knew she was a Christian, since she was moving from some other part of the country to take a job at a church. The second thing I noticed was her last name, since I still had a teenage boy sense of humor.
While I was laughing at Wiener, I got a silly, snarky idea. I hit Reply and started typing.
9:00am Meet at the church.
9:05am Taylor and Noah have tickets to the Titans game, so they leave for Bay City for the rest of the day.
9:10am Courtney, Cambria, and Erica start practicing swing dancing moves.
9:42am Brody shows up late.
10:00am The rest of us all start a big game of Settlers of Catan.
11:52am The game finally ends. Greg narrowly loses.
11:54am Greg gets out a borrowed video camera to film footage for another Dog Crap and Vince movie.
My silly itinerary continued with lots of inside jokes and activities suited to the interests and quirks of the people in the group. Adam replied, “LOL!” That was the end of that, or so I thought, so I was surprised to realize that someone had taken one of my suggestions seriously.
“Hi,” the new girl said to me as I approached the circle. “I’m Faith.” Faith shook my hand, and I noticed a hint of a Southern accent in her voice.
“I’m Greg,” I replied. “Nice to meet you.”
“Are you a student at the University of Jeromeville?” she asked.
“Yes. I just finished my degree, and now I’m in the student teaching program.”
“That’s nice! What are you teaching?”
“High school math.”
“Math!” Faith replied. “I was never good at math.”
“I get that reaction a lot,” I said, laughing.
“Have you started teaching yet?” Taylor asked.
“Yes. Monday was the first day of classes. At the start of the year, I’m mostly just observing.”
“You’ll have to tell us all about your first week on the drive down!”
“I will!”
“Drive where?” Faith asked. “When are y’all gonna tell me what we’re doing today?”
“So this is a surprise?” I asked. “Faith doesn’t know what we’re doing?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. I looked over at what Taylor was wearing, wondering if the writing on his shirt and hat had given away our plans.
“We’re still waiting for Brody,” Adam said. I smiled, knowing that my silly email correctly predicted that Brody would be late. “But I guess we can tell you now. Do you like baseball?”
“I don’t hate it, but I’ve never been to a real Major League Baseball game or anything. We’re gonna watch a baseball game? Is that it?”
“Yes,” Noah said, taking over the explanation. “We were brainstorming what to do to welcome you here, and Greg wrote this silly email with all of our habits and idiosyncrasies. Taylor and I go to a lot of Bay City Titans games, so Greg said we would show up for five minutes and then leave for the Titans game. So, I thought, why don’t we all actually do that?”
“That’ll be fun!” Faith replied. “I’ve heard Bay City is beautiful! How long does it take to get there?”
“Probably about an hour and a half. We were going to go in the church van.” Brody walked in as Noah was explaining this part. “And here’s Brody. So we can leave as soon as everyone gets their stuff together.”
“Great!” Faith exclaimed. “Let’s go!”
Brody showed up as we were packing the church van, so his tardiness did not delay our trip. The first nineteen miles of the drive to the Titans game, from Jeromeville to Nueces, was exactly the same as my commute to my student teaching assignment, where I had been going every morning for two weeks at that point. Taylor picked up on this and asked as we were approaching Nueces, “So, Greg, you’re making this drive every day now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What school are you at again?” Noah asked. “Aren’t there two high schools in Nueces?”
“Yes. I’m at Nueces High, on the north side of Nueces. Wald High School is on the south side.”
“So tell us about your first week!” Cambria said.
“I have two classes. Basic Math B 1st period, and geometry 3rd period. Then I go back to Jeromeville for education classes in the afternoon. And I hang out in the teacher lounge 2nd period.”
“What’s Basic Math B?”
“The teacher described it as the math class for kids who will never take another math class in their lives. It counts for high school graduation requirements but not for college prep requirements. They just do a very brief entry-level survey of a lot of topics that you don’t usually see in math classes.”
“Interesting.”
“I’m not really doing much yet. So far I’ve just been observing, and the two master teachers have talked to me about what they do, and given me some tips. I’m supposed to take over geometry by November and Basic B by January, but both teachers have said I can start as soon as I’m ready.”
“That’s exciting!”
“Also in January, they’re going to add a third class for me to observe but not take over. I don’t know yet what class that’ll be.”
“What are the students like?” Noah asked.
“I don’t know them very well yet. And it’s hard to talk about them as a whole group. Everyone is a little different.”
“Do any of them stand out in your mind yet?” Taylor added. “Like, this one is going to be difficult, or this one is going to be a class clown, or anything like that?”
“There’s one guy in the geometry class named Andy,” I said. “He seems like he’ll be fun. Really friendly. But I wouldn’t really call him a class clown, because he’s in geometry as a freshman so he does well enough in school that he’s a year ahead in math.”
Courtney, who had been listening to the entire conversation about my student teaching so far, asked the next question. “What do the students call you? Mr. Greg? Or Mr. Dennison? Or just Greg?”
“They call me Mr. Dennison,” I said. “That was one of my first questions when I started the program. Usually, the students call student teachers by their last names, the same as they would regular teachers.”
“Mr. Dennison,” Courtney repeated.
“Andy, the friendly guy I was just talking about, asked if he could call me ‘Denny.’ Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. But I’m still not used to being called Mr. Dennison. A student who isn’t in my class asked me who I was the other day, and I told him I was a student teacher from Jeromeville. He asked my name, and I said Greg. I realized afterward that I should have said Mr. Dennison.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Noah said.
Nueces and Fairview were separated by only a couple miles of oak-dotted grassy hills. Just west of Fairview, Highway 6 southbound split off headed toward Los Nogales and San Tomas. This was where I normally turned to go to my parents’ house. After Nueces, Highway 100 climbed into the hills for about six miles, then dropped down to the city of La Yegua on the other side. We then crossed a bridge and drove through a string of small cities along the shore of the Bay, then crossed a much larger bridge leading directly into downtown Bay City.
Somewhere in the hills between Fairview and La Yegua, Erica asked Faith how she found the job at Jeromeville Covenant. “The Internet,” she replied. “I had just graduated with a degree in Christian education, and I wanted to see a different part of the country, so I went on this website with job postings in ministry.”
“Wow,” Erica replied. Of course, a decade later there would be nothing unusual about Faith’s story, but in 1998 the idea of posting jobs on the Internet was a newly emerging technology, and finding a job that way was not something that everyone heard about every day.
“Where did you say you were from?” Brody asked.
“North Carolina.”
“Have you lived anywhere else?”
“I went to college in Tennessee. And I did a month long mission trip in Brazil.”
“What do you think of it out here so far?”
“It’s definitely different. I’m still trying to get used to everything.”
“Jeromeville isn’t exactly typical of this area,” Adam explained. “Or of anything, for that matter. I’ve lived in Jeromeville for eight years now, since I was a freshman at UJ, and it’s a very unique place. An extreme example of a university town.”
“How do you think that affects ministry?” Faith asked. “And the church in general?”
“You have a lot of kids whose parents have a very high level of education. Professors, researchers, and people with money who just like living in a community like Jeromeville. So the kids tend to have a lot of pressure to succeed, academically and financially.”
“I see.”
“Also, the local culture isn’t always supportive of Christianity. It’s a college town, so you have a lot of people who emphasize cultural diversity, different world religions, New Age spirituality, stuff like that. And a lot of atheists among the intellectuals.”
“That makes sense. And I think that’s part of what drew me to look for a job far from home was the challenge of working with a different student population than I’m used to. To see how God is working in a different part of the country.”
When we arrived at the stadium, we parked the van near the outer edge of the main parking lot. I wondered if we were going to park in that sketchy neighborhood a mile away from the stadium where Noah and Taylor usually parked when they went to games; apparently not.
According to the clock in the van, the game had already started by the time we parked. It looked like a fairly full parking lot, but probably not full enough to suggest that the game was sold out. We had not bought tickets yet; it would be kind of disappointing if we came all this way and were unable to get into the stadium.
The only places with nine available seats together were high in the upper deck in the outfield. That would be the farthest away I had ever sat at a baseball game, but given the circumstances this was not unexpected. We had no other choice unless we decided to split the group, and splitting the group would have completely defeated the purpose of us hanging out together so that Faith could get to know us. Adam paid for the seats using church youth group funds; I could tell from the section number that we were in left field.
After passing through the turnstiles with our tickets, we rode a long escalator to the upper concourse. Once we arrived at our section, we had to climb up about twenty rows to the very back. This stadium was a huge, oddly-shaped ring of concrete that the Titans baseball team shared with the Captains football team, and because of its odd shape, the seats in the upper deck in the outfield were quite far from the actual field. We could not see the big screen scoreboard from where we were, but a smaller scoreboard positioned on the opposite side of the stadium from the big one proclaimed that it was the second inning, and Philadelphia was leading Bay City by a score of 1 to 0.
Faith sat next to me on my right. “Have you been to a lot of games here?” she asked. “You seem to know your way around the stadium.”
“I’ve gone to a few every year since I was ten years old, with my family,” I explained. “Noah and Taylor are the ones who really go to a lot of games.”
“We got season tickets this year,” Taylor added, overhearing what I said and pointing to his seats in the lower deck behind right field. “We usually sit down there. My dad and his friend are using our tickets today. I’m gonna go say hi to them later.”
A little while later, Faith asked Adam some questions about the church government at J-Cov, and in the Evangelical Covenant Church in general. Adam said something about congregational governance. I did not really know much of what that meant. I knew a little bit more now about the history of the Evangelical Covenant denomination, and of J-Cov specifically, because I took the church membership class a couple months ago. I had never thought much about how different branches of Christianity have different kinds of hierarchies of leaders who oversee groups of churches. I got the sense that being governed congregationally meant that the important church leadership decisions were made locally, by a board of elders composed of church members, not imposed by the denomination. And I knew that, as a full member of J-Cov now, I would get to vote on whether or not to confirm future church elders.
An inning or two later, I was listening to Courtney, Cambria, and Erica talk about their new apartment, a large four-bedroom townhouse that they shared with Sasha Travis and Kirsten Mendoza, when I suddenly heard the loud crack of a ball being hit hard, followed by cheers from the crowd. I looked up. Barry Bonds, the Titans’ star player and leading power hitter, was dropping his bat and slowly rounding the bases, as if to indicate that he knew right away that the ball he had just hit would be a home run. I looked around and spotted the ball in the air just as it landed, directly below me to this part of the park. The Titans now led 3 to 1.
At the next inning break, Adam got up to use the bathroom. Faith thought of another question to ask, and since Adam was gone, she asked me instead. “So are most of y’all on youth staff students at the University of Jeromeville?”
“Yeah,” I said. “All of us are, except I guess Noah isn’t anymore. He graduated last year, and he’s doing teacher training, like me, but he’s commuting to Capital State for their teacher training program. Cap State is less expensive. I thought about doing their program too, but I decided to stay at UJ, because I already knew the professor who runs the program at UJ.”
“I see.”
“Taylor is our year too, but he has one more quarter before he finishes his undergrad. Courtney and Cambria and Brody are all in their third year, and Erica is a sophomore.”
“So you and Noah and Taylor are all the same age as me? Twenty-two?”
“Yes. Actually, Taylor’s not quite twenty-two yet; his birthday is on Tuesday.”
“Huh?” Taylor said, overhearing his name.
“I just said your birthday is coming up.”
“Happy early birthday, Taylor!” Faith said.
“Your birthday is easy to remember,” I explained. “9-8-76. Like counting backwards.”
“I’d never thought of that,” Taylor remarked. “Leave it up to the math guy to think of something like that.”
“Anyway,” Faith continued, “I was just thinking about how college students make good youth group volunteers, so having the university nearby is good for a strong youth program.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Most of us around our age in Jeromeville just moved here for school. But Erica and Brody grew up in Jeromeville. They attended our youth program as students, before I was around.”
“Oh, okay.”
Adam returned to his seat in the middle of this conversation and added, “Until recently, J-Cov went several years without a permanent senior pastor. The previous pastor, who had been there a long time, resigned abruptly, and the next pastor that they called was not approved by the church members, so they had to start the long search process over again. It really was our strong youth and college ministry that kept the church surviving through those years.”
“I came to J-Cov right at the end of that time,” I said, “so I don’t know all of the history about that. But we definitely have great youth and college programs.”
“That’s good,” Faith replied. “That’s important for any church to have.”
Of the many baseball games I’ve been to over the years, that one on the day I first met Faith is probably the one I remember the least. We sat so far up, and we had so many conversations going, that it was hard to pay attention to the game. I do not remember who won or what the score was. But that day was not about the game.
Many years later, in 2018, Adam, at the time forty-six years old with a wife and two girls, left his position as youth pastor at J-Cov, which he had held continuously since 1996. I drove across the Drawbridge to attend the service at J-Cov that morning and a reception for Adam at the church afterward. During the reception, those of us who knew Adam were invited to share things we appreciated about him as a youth pastor, and I was one of the first to stand up.
“What I appreciate the most about Adam,” I said, “was the way that he not only invested in the lives of the youth, but he also invested in the lives of the other leaders. He hung out with us, he checked to make sure we were doing okay, and I always felt like the youth leaders were like part of a family.” Noah was there too, and after the reception, he said that if I had not said what I did, he would have said the same thing about Adam.
Today’s baseball game was one of those moments. I did not pay much attention to the game, but I paid attention to the other leaders, the conversation in the van on the trip there and back, and the music of Edge Mix ‘98, the mixtape of Christian music that we gave to the youth group kids who came to Winter Camp, playing in the background. Therse were the people I would be volunteering with for the next year, and possibly longer if I stayed in Jeromeville longer. Faith was a new person in our family, new to the area, and this trip was about making her feel welcome in our family. That in and of itself made the experience worthwhile.
Readers: What was an experience you had where the time with friends ended up being more memorable, or more important, than the experience itself? Tell me about it in the comments.
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