In a move signaling the new alignment of the town’s three United Methodist churches under a single leadership, the congregations from Wesley, Calvary and Trinity Churches will convene a joint service this Sunday. Calvary will play host.
“It’s a chance for all of us to worship as one,” said the Rev. Jocelyn Tupper, the new senior pastor recently tapped to lead the three-point charge. “And we’re going to have fellowship afterward, where everyone will be sharing in that time together.”
Tupper, who arrived in Iola two months ago from her previous post in Superior, Neb., frames the recent alliance between three of Iola’s oldest — and historically distinct churches — this way: “I remember hearing someone say early on, as we were meeting about this, that they wanted [the new alignment] to be viewed, simply, as the United Methodist presence in Iola. I think that’s the best way to look at it.
“This is a very new venture. We don’t have any blueprints; there’s no template for what we’re doing. Activities will continue in each church as they always have. But there is always great strength when people can come together, and we feel that we can be a stronger, more cohesive presence in the town by utilizing the talents in all three churches.”
Tupper, who — with the aid of new associate minister Ed Flener — will make the rounds at all three pulpits every Sunday, has spent her weeks in Allen County learning the many new faces in her flock. “It’s one of the most important things you can do, devoting the time to really meeting your congregation, to knowing them.”
TUPPER HAS spent a lifetime tracing a slow minuet within the same narrow band of longitude, making her home, across the decades, in Texas, then Oklahoma, Nebraska and, now, Kansas.
Tupper’s acquaintance with the Methodist church, however, is a thing rooted deep in her upbringing. Her father ran a country church set in the rice paddies and cotton fields of south Texas, and so, along with her two brothers, the future pastor was raised with Bible verses ringing in her ears and with an inherited understanding of the specific Wesleyan tenets — tradition, reason, and experience — that Tupper still relies on today.
After receiving her college education in Oklahoma — first at Oklahoma State, then at Oklahoma City University — Tupper followed in the career footsteps, not of her father — “That was the last thing I wanted,” admits Tupper — but of her mother.
“I became a schoolteacher. And, listen, I just had a ball doing it. … It was elementary school, where I got to teach the two things I liked best: science and math.
“During this whole period, though, there was something that wasn’t there, something missing. … And then, in that one morning, it all kind of clicked.”
IT WAS NEARING Easter. Tupper was 26 or 27 years old. She’d drifted some distance from the church. A handful of her friends — churchgoers themselves, who knew that Tupper had been raised in the church — approached the young teacher with a proposition. “They said, ‘We’re going to take you to church for Easter Sunday.’ They gave me four churches to choose from.
“I picked the ugliest, nastiest, smallest church I could pick. I don’t remember a thing the guy said. It was a small church, not a very lovely building. It was old. It didn’t have great music or a large congregation. We sat in folding chairs. But something definitely happened that day.
“Maybe it’s just that you get back into that place and you remember who you are — and remember whose you are — and it is somehow that meeting with God that calls you back in.”
Shortly after, Tupper quit teaching. She moved into the small parsonage of that small church, where she was given a small desk in a small office, and provided a small stipend for her help with the various church duties.
One day the wife of a doctor in the congregation entered Tupper’s closet-sized office. “She just said: ‘You need to go to seminary.’” Tupper demurred; the cost was too much. But the next week, the woman handed Tupper a check for $3,000, which paid for her first year at Phillips Theological Seminary, in Tulsa, and cleared the way for her life in the ministry. (The only condition of the gift was that Tupper, when in a position to do so herself, sponsor some other young person’s education — which Tupper has done in the years since.)
“You know,” said Tupper, remembering the moment, “when someone comes in and says, ‘We think you can do this’ and you look at yourself and think ‘I cannot do this.’ And then that person says again, ‘But we think you can’ — that is a moment of great permission.”
TUPPER’S theology is rooted in the tradition of her youth, burnished by her years in higher education (she eventually obtained a doctorate degree), and continually refreshed by her immersion in the wider culture. On the bookshelf in her office, next to a bright orange Oklahoma State basketball — Tupper is a die-hard Cowboys fan — are a handful of tattered Shel Silverstein books.
“He’s one of my favorite authors,” Tupper said of the poet and children’s writer. “And he was quite a marvelous theologian. Have you read ‘The Giving Tree.’?”
While Silverstein resisted allegorical interpretations of his own work, Tupper sees, not only in Silverstein, but in an assortment of otherwise secular art — Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts,” the comic strip “Cathy” — glimmerings of the divine.
“I think that we are all theologians,” said Tupper, casting her arms wide. “All of us.
“I’m a theologian,” she said. “You are a theologian,” she continued, stretching a point. “Our whole life is a dialogue with what God has done and continues to do in us. Everything that I say or do comes from the root belief that I am governed by something greater than me. And I don’t think you always have to use holy words. I’m not sure Shel Silverstein would talk like that. But his stories are about life, about who we are as people, who we should be.
“You know, I can go to the Bowlus and hear a concert and be moved beyond belief by three young female [singers]. Or the Mary Poppins musical [coming soon]. It’s that gift of music, that gift of song.
“If I’m only a part of the Sunday worship, I’m not complete. Our life as a whole must exemplify how God exists with us. There is a world out there that needs to be talked to and listened to and understood and cared about, and that’s part of my theology. I have to be out in that world.”
“I MUST BE honest,” said Tupper, “I’d never heard of Iola. I had to get my map out. But, listen, this is one neat town. I’m pleased that I’m close to the Bowlus. And I’m really looking forward to football on Friday nights. … One of the things I’m really impressed with is all the good, caring agencies in town.” Tupper mentioned Thrive Allen County; the anti-poverty group, Circles; the Iola Ministerial Alliance. “Someone is doing a good job making Iola a helping community. I don’t know where that came from. A lot of places don’t do that. I’m really impressed.
“The move here has been good. I’m happy. I love my churches. And the great people — they’ve been very welcoming and accepting. With the new change, I know, it’s different for them. And for me, too. But we will manage it, and we’ll do it together.”
