The Early Years, Building a Congregation and a Church

By Stephanie Tames

(preceded by reading the children’s story, The Little Fur Family, by Margaret Wise Brown).

Thanks, Rebecca, and thanks to everyone else for inviting me to help kick-off the fellowship’s anniversary celebration. I know that many of you don’t know me, or know me only as a name on a list of “old-timers.” It’s funny to think of yourself that way – an old timer, but, I guess it’s bound to happen to us all one day, if we’re lucky.

The Little Fur Family is a sweet story, and one that I fondly remember reading to my children when they were small. I can’t say it was one of their favorites and I’m not sure why. It could have been that I told them the little fur family lived in their belly-buttons, which maybe was a little too scary. When I looked up the story on the internet, one reviewer said there were psychedelic themes. I’m not sure what he meant, but maybe my kids picked up on something strange with the little fur family that completely eluded me.

Nevertheless, when the UU fellowship asked me to speak on the early years of our group, strangely enough, The Little Fur Family was the first story that popped into my head. And this is why: when I moved to Statesboro in the summer of 1989, I felt like I was living in a strange world, a world where I was definitely not like everyone else, one which made me feel small and cautious about the larger community I was living in. Until, of course, I met others just like me, people who had many of the same feelings I had and soon we had formed our own community and that larger world we were living in – implicit in The Little Fur Family story -- no longer felt as frightening. But there was another reason I picked the story. It brings back such fond memories, memories of when my children were growing up and the important people that helped them in that journey, people who believe in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning in their secular and spiritual lives.

So those are the two themes of my talk today about the early years of the UU Fellowship: how like-minded people got together to create an expression for liberal religious exploration in a town that was, maybe I should say still is, not the least liberal in any sense of the word, and memories of special people.

I’m not an historian. I know Jane will get emails and phone calls from people saying I got the facts wrong, that the early UU group met at this place before that place, that I forgot to mention the contributions of so-and-so, that they remember things differently. I apologize in advance for any oversights, omissions, or incorrect information. I’ll do the best I can. Remember, you’ve asked a creative nonfiction writer to present this program, and I emphasize the creative part. Did I mention I don’t necessarily follow a linear path? Hang on and bear with me as I tell my story.

When we moved to Statesboro in the early summer of 1989, one of the first things I did was look in the phone book for the number of the UU church. I had discovered the UU church in Blacksburg, Virginia, where we had most recently lived, and I knew it to be child friendly, mother friendly, spirit friendly. And I needed a friend. That phone call put me in touch with Suzie Palfy, now Suzie Ritchie. She told me how a small UU group met at different members’ houses, the community room of a local bank, and at the public library -- really any place that would allow them to rent a small room. They met once a month in the evening for a speaker and discussion. She also told me about another group she attended with her children, what she called a Quaker/UU group. Within a few days of moving, I had persuaded my husband to come with me to this hybrid Quaker/UU “meeting.” The children went to something called First Day School and the adults, sometimes with infants in their laps, attended a very informal Quaker meeting. Here are the people I remember from those Sunday mornings: Suzie and her children, Cora and Ami, David and Holly Alley and their children Sonny and Jackson, Becky Bagette and Elmer Clark and their children, Emma and Morgan. Carol and Andy Ellis and their son Ben, Mary and Vernon Egger and their daughters, Rachel and Krista, Susan and George Cox, Pat Walker. We met at the Wesley Center that first Sunday and later moved to a podiatrist office on Zetterower. There were probably other places we met but I can’t remember them now. Mostly though we met at our houses for eating -- what we called “meeting for eating” -- and talking and just being together. It was there that I came to know a wonderful group of people who didn’t necessarily know what they were looking for in a spiritual community only that it wasn’t in Statesboro. They also knew that if they wanted a spiritual presence, they would have to create it. Most of us had children and felt an intense need to show them that there were alternatives to the mainstream religious community.

Now we have to jump back in time to the mid-1980s when the late Rev. Frank Anderson of Savannah circulated a list of Statesboro residents visiting his church. You see, even in the early 1970s, even before, that’s 40 years ago, there were people living here whose commitment to a liberal religious experience was so strong that they drove the hour to Savannah to be with like-minded people. Some of these people hadn’t realized that there were others, just like them, living in this small town called Statesboro. Others were acquainted with one another. A number of people on that list decided to try once again to start a UU fellowship in Statesboro. Believe it or not, there had been an earlier fellowship but it had been inactive for nearly 10 years and lost its affiliation with the UUA.

Between 1985 and 1989, the group included such notable Statesboro UUs as Bob Nelson, and later his wife, Mary, Norma Haley, Justine Mann, Sylvia Jones, Andy Edwards, Roland Hanson, Malcolm Katz, Ron Lyall, Ab Rosel, Martha Hughes and, of course, Suzie.

According to papers in our historical archive – a cardboard box in the office – the group met at various places around Statesboro and each other’s homes once a month for programs, and also often met for potlucks. In 1989, when I arrived, the group was meeting in the Isabell Sorrier room in the Statesboro Library one Sunday evening per month. This was an adult group – and here please note that there is an asterisk by adult group which I will get back to in a minute – and concerned itself with speakers on a variety of secular and religious themes. Some of the people who went to the Quaker/UU group also came to this meeting. In typical UU fashion, there was lots of discussion and polite disagreement.

At this juncture in the story – and I’m almost to 1990 when someone else on another Sunday will take over the narrative – Suzie, who at the time was president of the fellowship, thought it was not only time for our fellowship to re-affiliate with the UUA but to reorganize – to become a real UU group that met on Sunday mornings, held a regular religious education program for children, had an order of service with meaningful readings – maybe even had music -- and invited guest ministers to speak. It was time to make a commitment -- to the community and to our group of UUs -- that we could sustain a more church-like fellowship. We wanted a place to raise our children. We wanted more of a presence in the community. It was this desire, and the work that followed, that I believe created the fellowship that exists today. We had also hoped that some of the people who attended the Quaker/UU group would join us in our new Sunday morning endeavor. As I remember those days, it was this yearning, and Suzie’s work, that re-affiliated us with the UUA.

It’s funny how someone can make such a difference in your life and they don’t know it. Suzie was that person for me. I believe she laid the foundation for what our fellowship would become, and that fellowship made a huge difference to my life, and that of my children, here in Statesboro. I’ve been in touch with her through email and she shared with me a paper she wrote about her spiritual life. In it she mentions that someone gave her the courage to move the UU Fellowship to the next level of affiliation and organization, and how significant that person was to her. I wrote immediately back and asked her who that person was. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted to include whoever it was in the list of people who helped form the fellowship. You probably guessed before I did that the person was me. I had no idea I had played a role in her spiritual journey just as she had in mine.

So, this is the part I remember: long discussions with Suzie about the importance of building a church that is child-friendly, how bringing children into the group solidifies its place in the community, how a thriving UU fellowship must be more than a group of intellectuals talking about esoteric subjects -- Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I remember going to Columbia, SC, with Suzie for UU training on something called Church in a Box. The UUA, in their wisdom, knew there were struggling congregations across the U.S. just like ours, groups that wanted a structured service but had no resources to make it happen. And so they gave us what we needed, in a box – children’s programs, adult RE, order of service, readings, sermons, even music. I remember during that training weekend meeting wonderful people who encouraged us to pursue our dream of an active multi-generational fellowship, a dream that included having our own building one day.

Now back to that asterisk. As UUs, you know that historically we attract two groups of people: adults with no children who like to spend their time in long, sincere discussions; and adults with children who want a place for their children’s spiritual growth. Sometimes these groups find a happy middle ground, sometimes they don’t. It was that struggle I remember Suzie and I discussing – how to integrate the different desires for our fellowship. And it was the example of two of our members that convinced me that the Statesboro UU Fellowship would be one of those groups able to find a happy medium. The two members are Martha Hughes and Sarah Goss. I vividly remember Martha bringing Sarah to a Sunday evening library meeting – those adult-only meetings. She was the only child in attendance and while our speaker talked I remember Sarah crawling under and between the chairs, weaving her way up one row and down the other as some of our members squirmed, stone-faced, and politely lifted their feet. They weren’t necessarily happy, but they were tolerant. I knew then that we would get the financial and moral support needed to move the fellowship forward from an evening-only group to a family-centered fellowship. Not everyone would be happy, but they’d go along.

Soon after our move to Sunday mornings, Suzie left Statesboro. It was a terrible loss. Martha and I continued the children’s programs – Sarah, Ben, and Claire often the only children attending—while other members helped with the service. Our Church in a Box sometimes struggled, there were some disagreements, but somehow we made it. No. it wasn’t an accident that the fellowship survived – it wasn’t a “somehow.” It was deliberate, a conscious choice, made by the dedicated people I mentioned earlier but also so many others that were part of the group in those early years, people that I remember like Carol Simonson, Happy Hicks, Marge McClaughlin, Marky Lloyd, and many more. Some were doing the hard hands-on work, some supported us in other ways just as valuable.

It might have been a stretch to use the Little Fur Family as a metaphor for our fellowship, a small group of people living in a strange land. Maybe a more appropriate story is The Little Engine That Could. Or better yet, we could write our own story about how the desire for a liberal religious voice in the conservative South brought a group of people together who today are celebrating their 25th anniversary as a congregation and 20 years of affiliation with the UUA. They live in a safe, cozy home amid tall trees and lush grasses. And their door is always open – to anyone who seeks a free and responsible search for truth and meaning in their lives – newcomers and old-timers alike.