Being a preacher better than most

Conversations with Rev. Timothy Claude Dodgeson, born in Jasper County, South Carolina on September 2, 1912, recorded April 1 – 21, 2008 at Azalea Cottage, the Cottages at Brushy Creek, Greer, South Carolina. Recorded with a Sony ICD-P520 Digital Voice Recorder (256 MB), transcribed by the interviewer and transferred to CD, available on request at wylie.tom@gmail.com. Rev. Dodgeson was a reverend and high school history teacher in the piedmont area of South Carolina from 1934 to 1977.

I would have gladly been a reverend or minister or even a priest without anything before my name except mister but the job and the public want to know, “Is that man a man of God?” and somehow a little something before the name convinces them that if your title says you’re a man of God then you must be. I never believed it myself, not in the whole concept of man of God and I never got into the ministry because I thought of myself as being especially close to God or anything like that. I got into it because I guess like a lot of other people who go into politics or charity work and who see how the people in those jobs are so bad at what they do that I thought, “I can do better than that.” I always was a good speaker, like my mother was a good speaker, and I liked a good story and had passing social skills. That was about all I needed to be a reverend and if some people thought I was a good one it was more because I could tell a story and not just about the Bible, but about most anything. If you can get people to listen to you then you can have an impact on them and you can even make them angry with you as long as they still want to listen to you. And they will come back for more even if it is so they can be angry. Maybe especially for that for some. I’m like that with the Bible, even. For me the Bible itself was always like that. Even now I can’t read more than a page without having to put the book down and not because it’s so deep that I have to come up for air, but because it makes me so angry. But I still want to read it and I do read it. Have you seen the Bible in big print? It should be something you can’t take out of the reading room. But, no. I never believed in anything I had to say from the front of the church like the congregation did, but I knew I could stand up there and talk about things that mattered and tell stories and do that job better than most, and I think I was right. Some would say I was a hypocrite and they might be right but I never said I was holier man than anyone or even a better one. I was just a better preacher than anyone I knew could have been.