Glenmary Father Francois Pellissier
is hard to miss, especially in a small town where most everything
is centered around the quaint town square. The 6’5”
priest, originally from Paris, France, has a black pickup
truck and can often be seen driving or walking around town.
“I’ve been very visible,” Father Francois
says of the year he has spent as pastor of St. Anthony Parish
in Fayetteville, Tenn.
Fayetteville, a typical small
southern town near the Tennessee-Alabama border, is enjoying
a somewhat atypical collaboration among religious leaders.
The Fayetteville-Lincoln County Ministerial Association
has about 30 ministers from area congregations involved,
including several from the Washington Street Church of Christ
which has one of the largest congregations in town.
The Church of Christ ministers
first attended the association’s monthly breakfast
meeting in April—much to Father Francois’ surprise.
“In 20 years as a priest, I have never, never seen
a Church of Christ fellow come to a local ministerial association
meeting,” he says. “It was the very first time
I could shake hands with a Church of Christ fellow, period.”
Father Francois has long been
involved with interfaith activities and dialogue, dating
back 20 years ago when he was teaching French in Morehead,
Ky. He was the first Catholic to join the local ministerial
association—made possible after he appealed to the
group to remove the word “Protestant” from their
name.
While the vast majority of
the Fayetteville-Lincoln County Ministerial Association
members are Protestant, Father Francois says he has always
felt welcomed. “There seems to be a willingness to
cooperate, talk and go a little bit beyond just smiling
at each other,” he says.
At a recent breakfast meeting,
talk turned to the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals dominating
the news. Other ministers were quick to acknowledge that
it was not just a “Catholic problem.” Allen Black,
pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Fayetteville
and president of the ministerial association said Father
Francois “is one of our dear friends and we support
him in the midst of these struggles. Every denomination
has its problems and we support each other as part of our
Christian responsibility.” This type of support, Father
Francois says, is “a tribute to the kind of guys we
have here in Fayetteville.”
Jim Black (no relation to Allen)
is a minister at the Washington Street Church of Christ.
He has been in Fayetteville since December and says he sees
attending the ministerial association meetings as a chance
to “get to know the different ministers and swap ideas.”
As a minister, he says, he
represents Christianity to the community and has a responsibility
to dialogue with other religious leaders. “We can all
work together to be influential in the community and (within)
the culture in which we live.”
While admitting that Church of Christ members are generally
not very open to other denominations, Jim Black explained
that every Church of Christ operates independently and the
attitudes vary among members in each congregation.
“There may be some things
we can’t do as part of the ministerial association,”
he says. For example, he says, it would be very difficult
to have combination worship services with other denominations
because of the different views of Scripture and God within
the denominations.
Ministerial association president
Allen Black says that the monthly ministerial association
meetings are “an opportunity to work together for a
cooperative ministry that we, as individual churches, could
not otherwise have.” This outreach into the greater
community includes collecting money to help pay power bills
and providing food for people who could not otherwise afford
it.
The ministerial association
also works together to coordinate the chaplaincy at the
hospital and plan the two major ecumenical events of the
year: Palm Sunday and Thanksgiving. Throughout Holy Week,
interfaith services are held at different churches in town,
culminating with the Easter sunrise service.
This article by Theresa
Laurence was reprinted with permission from the May 10,
2002, Tennessee Register, the newspaper of the Nashville
diocese.
