The Wald-Paper

Back in the mid sixties the Methodist Youth Fellowship was the center of my social and religious life. As the preacher's kid I suppose that was more true for me than the average Methodist kid my age, but our MYF was very active and so were the ones at other Methodist churches in the area. As a matter of fact, at that time the youth at all the Methodist churches in the area were organized in to very active larger groups called MYF Sub-Districts.  Our Sub-District was named after an active MYFer who had been killed in the famous Winecoff fire of 1947. Billy Walden, a student at Rome High School was staying in room 1030 at the Winecoff Hotel with many other Youth Assembly teens from across the state.

From the Winecoff Fire Remembrance Page

Somehow I was chosen at one point to edit the monthly newsletter for the Rome-area sub-district. The Billy Walden Subdistrict newsletter was mimeographed. I prepared a stencil using a stylus and drawing templates to scratch the stencils of simple illustrations or special lettering. Mrs. Lottie Duncan and later Mrs. Dot Storey, secretaries at Trinity, helped me with the typing.

Later I managed to get myself elected president of the sub-district. In MYF and especially at our North Georgia Conference youth camp at Camp Glisson near Dahlonega I began to think about the evils of segregation and racial prejudice.

Today, while going through boxes at my mother's house -- Mother died recently -- I came across a copy of the newsletter, "The Wald-Paper" that was published in 1964 when I was president of the group. If you are old enough to remember those years and the bitter controversy in the church at that time, you will appreciate the problems I made for my Dad by publishing things like this:

Like every person in America, I suppose, I harbor prejudices of one kind and another, but I know I do and I work to overcome them. I am so glad that I was a part of a family and a church that tried to do better. The universe is not yet just, and I and my church are far from perfect, but that arc keeps bending, sometimes in fits and starts, toward justice. And I was a part of the effort, however clumsy, slow, and inconsistent, to bend it a little around here -- even 57 years ago.

BUT, seeing this, one cannot but think of the parallels to the issues that are dividing our church today. In the sixties, as today, some folks could not accept the idea that the God of Love meant all that revolutionary New Testament stuff. Jesus turned over the tables and got very het up over excessive legalism, if you'll recall. He had just one commandment (Love) with two objects (God and other folks). He never even mentioned race or homosexuality -- though the story of the Samaritan gives one a pretty good idea, it seems to me, that he thought we ought to put up with folks who are different.