Doxology

Author: Mark Fenstermacher
April 01, 2022

Elkhart, Indiana, was once known by some as “the band capital of the world.” Several different companies turned out everything from pianos to high-end flutes. 

Many of those factories are now closed. My first appointment out of seminary was to a large congregation in Elkhart, and among the members of the parish was a retired United Methodist pastor named Ralph Holdeman. Even late in life, Ralph was a high-energy guy. He sometimes looked like he had dressed in the dark with both eyes closed. Ralph spoke with his hands, and his words came in quick bursts. When he walked, he walked fast. 

It would have been easy to write Ralph off as a rather eccentric older man—if you didn’t know that he’d been director of evangelism for the National Council of Churches and had worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama. He was also an artist. The music instrument companies, like all manufacturers, would end up with pieces of unusable material. These unfinished pieces of musical instruments would go in the garbage bins behind the factories. Ralph, in his late 70s and early 80s, would go dumpster diving, salvaging the incomplete or damaged bells of trumpets, trombones, sousaphones, and more. He’d pound out some of the dents, reshape the bells, polish them, and then use the pieces to create something beautiful. 

Out of those scraps he formed into the beautiful cross that hangs in the narthex of Trinity on Jackson UMC in Elkhart. Ralph titled the work Doxology.  In that early chapter of my ministry, I would often notice it. I would study the broken, discarded pieces and how the artist had made something beautiful out of them. I might think of the stories told in Luke 15 about the woman who searched for her lost coin,  the shepherd who went looking for his lost sheep, and the father who ran to the son who had been lost. 

Doxology spoke to my heart, and I saw God dumpster-diving to find me, cast aside because of my troublesome ego and failure of nerve as a pastor. I saw the aching loneliness I had carried with me since the catastrophic losses I had experienced as a child. I thought of the people I served and the people I loved and the messiness of all our lives, and I thought of Ralph, who looked like he got dressed in the dark, and I gave thanks for a dumpster-diving Redeemer.

Mark Fenstermacher

(This short article is being included in the current issue of Christian Century. It is one of several pieces that they have published over the last several years.)

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