REMINISCENCES OF GOOD SHEPHERD
by Claudius Miller
first rector of the church on the 25th anniversary of the founding of Good Shepherd, 1978

In our inward parts, at least the suspicion remains that all things began with God.  Any other starting point begs the question since each of our genealogies trails off into the vapors of Creation eventually.  Yet, we are impelled to mark more specific and less accurate beginnings, so it might be said that the Church of the Good Shepherd began on September 2nd, 1945, as Douglas MacArthur closed the proceedings aboard the USS Missouri.  The Japanese retired to turn defeat into a favorable balance of trade, and Americans wheeled towards home to embrace their first love - the automobile.

Henry Thoreau saw us making machines, which - in turn - would remake us.

The transformation of American life by the automobile was stalled in the autumn of 1929 for 16 years by Depression and war, but by Christmas 1945, monumental forces were gurgling to the surface which would make the private car dearer to us than clean air, and would change the face and feel of our country to such an extent and in such a short time that nostalgia would come to compete with science fiction for our attention.  A vast army of Americans set about to start a family, build a home, and buy a car (the car, like charity, being the greatest of these).  Our suburban city was formed by the spiritual energy of more than one million people who dreamed of living in houses of their own, surrounded by green grass, and maintained by money made at jobs put within reach by the automobile.  Do we know what caused us to dream with powerful delight of grass and grills, or what promise we presumed would justify the cost (part of which was the near-mortal wounding of the Old City)?  Nonetheless, without this widespread and profoundly driven hope - these countless imaginings of a new and better life - there would have been no suburbia and no Good Shepherd.  The automobile was to put us on the Road to Happiness, so 'tis no wonder that Easter outdraws Good Friday ten to one.

Like sperm and egg, another and more complicated but shorter-lived spirit joined the Suburban Surge to conceive Good Shepherd.  Stirring as if from a long nap, millions of adult Americans found their churches to be objects of irresistible curiosity after the Second World War.  Apologizing for their previous indifference, they poured through the church doors, ready to learn of their neglected faith with the same attention a poor man gives to the reading of his rich uncle's will.  The Postwar Church Revival was primarily corporate in intent - a revival of belonging to and believing in the church - in contrast to the Privy Religion that is today's fashion.  By and large, the same buildings that housed clergy and theological propositions which were rather sheepishly avoided in 1940 were being lavished with affection by 1950, and those who had held the Body together during the years of indifference may be excused for some bewilderment and premature euphoria.  Though churches had not changed discernibly, apparently untold numbers of Americans had, and perhaps they needed a holy place in which to baptize their idealism, hopes for a new world, and their babies.  The degree to which the churches met those needs is unknown, but by 1965, it was clear that America's spiritual agenda had shifted to civil rights, poverty, and the increasing voltage of the Vietnamese War; and the arena from the sanctuary to the streets.  It became more difficult to make the mortgage payments on the emptying pews of suburban churches.  By the later 70's, the debts of the Postwar Church Revival were being retired (as well as some of its ministers), the pews were no emptier than they had been a decade earlier, and if the idealism that built those churches had become an uneasy memory for one generation, at least their children had a place to send their children to Sunday School should the time come when the generations would pass from ME to THEE.

The Suburban Surge and the Postwar Church Revival conceived Good Shepherd, but its midwife was the rector of St. Peter's Church, Ladue, the Rev. William Laird. St. Peter's had moved from the environs of St. Louis University on Lindell Boulevard shortly after the war, and by the autumn of 1952, their handsome, new buildings were bulging with people.  Blessed with a naturally modest and generous disposition, Dr. Laird convened members of St. Peter's who lived farther west (notably Betty & Guy Oliver, and Betty & Walter Zemtizsch), and by September 1953, the congregation of the Good Shepherd met at Jack & Jill School to read from The Book of Common Prayer for the first time.  The Old Manchester School on Henry Avenue was the next stop for the nomadic congregation, but in October of 1956, under the driving leadership of the Rev. Paul Bankston, the people moved into their new chapel and parish hall on Mason Road.

Paul Bankston was Bill Laird's assistant at St. Peter's and was charged with providing the clerical leadership for the energetic mission on the western approaches, but by the spring of 1956, the mission needed a fulltime minister, and Paul was detached from St. Peter's to become the first vicar of Good Shepherd.  (In October of 1956, the Rev. Claudius Miller of Mecklenburg County NC was asked by Dr. Laird to take Mr. Bankston's place at St. Peter's, but this altogether admirable young Southerner declined this chance-of-a-lifetime only to reappear in our story ten months later.)  Paul preached his last sermon at Good Shepherd on Easter Day 1957 - a mere six months after the church was used for the first time - but his legacy is remembered to this day by David Hensley: "That church would never have gotten built without Paul," presumably, both of them.

To find their second vicar, the executive committee sent Cameron Higginbotham, Guy Oliver, and Allen Trumbull across the land to search the Episcopal Church for the best and the brightest.  They found themselves in a hotel in Charlotte NC one hot Saturday night in June of 1957, and the Millers arrived in St. Louis County two months later.  That summer, CGS could count among its physical assets two hectares of prime land in a rural part of metropolitan St. Louis, a church with air conditioning and a parish hall without.  There were no classrooms.  The vicarage was a rented house on Des Peres Road, and the Mercantile Trust held our note for $52,000.  Two years later, the rectory (CGS had become a parish in May of '58) had been built with an interest-free loan of $30,000 by Edith and Jack Wolff, and by the fall of 1962, the classroom addition was in use due largely to a gift from Emily and Otto Balser.  The years between 1957 and 1962 had seen the adult class and Sunday School meeting in every nook and cranny on the premises, including the rector's study, the chapel, narthex, and choir loft, for it was not uncommon to have 160 present at 9:30 of a Sunday morning during those years (1977-78 average: 62).  As Parkinson would have it, no sooner than we had gotten the extra space than attendance began to decline.  By 1968, the average total attendance at Sunday services had plummeted from 163 to 99 (some 40 %), and the dismal statistics were the same for most of the rest of the churches.

Our test as a congregation came after our salad days, 1953-1965.  By 1968, we had aided and abetted in the establishment of a cordon of Episcopal churches on every side of us - St. Timothy's to the north, St. Martin's to the west, St. Luke's to the southwest, and Epiphany to the southeast - and St. Peter's and St. Matthew's guarded any insinuation on our part eastward.  Our parish territory consisted mostly of land owned by the Missouri Department of Highways, or the Christian Scientists (jointly and severally).  Yet, we were not above mollifying our anxieties with self-congratulation, causing one senior warden, Frank Hitchings, to turn to the chalkboard at an Annual Parish Meeting and write, "If we're so good, how come we're so small?" Another senior warden, Seaton Hunter, was to answer that question on a cold Saturday morning ten years later.

In spite of feeling beleagured - quietly harrassed by free-floating doubts - the almost constant one hundred families (ten of whom were new each year) that were Good Shepherd hung in. As far as I know, the parish never ran to hide under the altar.  From a resolution on fair housing passed by the vestry in the summer of 1962 (audaciously virtuous for the time and place), through a partnership with a building in the late Pruitt-Igoe and the establishment of the Good Shepherd School for Children, we have been blessed with enabling each other to speak and act the truth, not only in our church buildings but at home, play, and work. When faced with facts, we rarely blinked.  The Columbarium itself (for which Jean Bascom was the prime mover) is a statement about looking death in the eye, greeting its intimacy with life.

After 25 years, what is there to show for all this money, time, worry, and heartbreak that has kept our show on the road? God only knows, and that, my friends, you can believe.  Anyone foolish enough to try to measure, count, or tote up will get as his reward nonsense and illusion, if for no other reason than we shall never know who we might have been had we never known this place. The vital comparison is lacking.  There will be those who will testify for, and those who will testify against.  Their testimony is a fact, but the truth is the usual, subjective groping with which we pass the time of our days. We can say with reasonable certainty that a constantly changing group of people have kept a set of buildings in tolerably good condition for more than two decades at 1166 South Mason Road in St. Louis County, Missouri flying the flag of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.  What actually went on in those buildings (or in the lives of the caretakers) is anybody's guess but God's. He knows.

And perhaps that's the point of the exercise in the end.  Here is a congregation that has sought the truth, "cost what it will, come whence it may" and what it has gotten for its trouble is a wistful reverence for its ignorance.  Out of the pilgrimage has come what is perhaps our greatest and happiest virtue - a gentle, deft, and slightly salty sense of humor - a reconciliation through comedy of struggling opposites in our souls.  Cry, and the world is ready to cry with you, but to laugh, you'd better go to church.