Amid controversy, Tangier’s strongest commitment still thrives

FISSURES IN THE ROCK

External issues threaten Tangier’s religious foundation

Nick Bonadies Staff Writer

Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, in its present building has met continually since 1897.

A number of public icons – like this cross in the marsh and the red cross on the Tangier water tower – reflect the island’s deeprooted religious commitment.

erhaps as strong as any Tangier resident’s loyalty to their home is their attachment to their religion. The island’s emblematic water tower, which juts out from a wide stretch of patchy, dry grass near the marsh, bears an ornate cross on one side in deep red.

“I think you can say that everyone on the island believes,” said Rev. Patricia Stover, pastor of Tangier’s Swain Memorial United Methodist Church.

The church building, small by many standards, seems larger, more imposing among the island’s slim roads, compact buildings and golf cart traffic. It holds prominence in the Tangier skyline from a distance, overseeing the townspeople’s day-to-day life.

While the building has been in continual use since 1897 – its congregation extant since 1835 – Stover has served as its pastor for only three years.

“We joke about this being a cross-cultural appointment,” Stover said of the bishop which assigned her to Tangier Island – before moving to Tangier, she spent 16 years serving ministries in Bridgewater, Virginia and Smith Mountain Lake. “The culture here is quite different. … They have all these unspoken rules that you have to hopefully educate yourself in.”

Not unlike their uniquely preserved dialect, Swain Memorial holds regular “class meetings,” a meeting separate from regular worship or Sunday school, which dates from the earliest origins of the Methodist church and is no longer widely practiced outside the island. Stover said she regularly hosts visiting pastors from different parts of the country who want to see how it’s done.

PStover, who pursued degrees and research in biology for many years (including some time on VCU’s MCV campus) before turning to religious service, said that there were some raised eyebrows on the island at the outset of her appointment on account of her being Tangier’s first ever female pastor. “Some of them told me outright, they’d never in a million years thought that they would ever accept a woman pastor,” she said. But it did not take long, she said, for the islanders to make her feel right at home in the community. “Some of them went digging through the scripture and they said, ‘Well, yeah, women are supposed to do this, there’s no question,” Stover said. “They just know their scripture here. They really try to live by the Bible – and be bold about it.” “The church is the center of our life here,” she said, as it had always been. She spoke of what the townspeople remember of earlier generations on Tangier, in an era before golf carts: “Didn’t matter – snow, sleet, ice. They literally would all be here every Sunday. Whatever was going on, they’d be here. Had to crawl across the bridge sometimes.” “Course, they didn’t have TVs,” she said. All has not been well, however, in Tangier’s religious community. Whereas before Swain Memorial had hosted a congregation of “about 210,” according to Stover – or about half of the island – an ideological conflict culminated this past January in a rift among the Methodist congregation. Attendees at Swain Memorial now number “about 40 to 60.” Young people, Stover said, are where she has lost the most members.

But, since the split, “We’ve had some people start coming who would never come to church,” she said. “So I guess God is in there somewhere.”

The split came about as a result of stances the greater Methodist Conference has begun to take on different issues – particularly, the church’s support of a Palestinian state.

Mayor James Eskridge and his family are among the most visible and outspoken of Tangier’s dissident camp. He has two tattoos, one on each forearm, of the star of David and an Ichthys (sign of the fish), and flies an Israeli flag outside of his house underneath the American flag.

“The Methodist Conference has become politically correct, and a lot of times that makes you biblically incorrect,” Eskridge said. “I believe the land belongs to Israel, and if they want to give their land up, that’s up to them. … But the Methodist Conference has no business forcing them to do so.”

Stover, for her part, said the Methodist Conference’s resolution had been “misunderstood.”

“I support Israel, too,” she said. “But … Christ is first.”

Another factor is the Methodist Conference’s growing ever closer to accepting openly gay pastors in its ministries. When asked about it, Stover only responds that she thinks a real decision on the matter won’t happen this year – but that “it’s coming,” and that its impact on the Methodist church as a body will be “immense,” probably causing its own ideological split.

“It’s going to happen in the next four to eight years,” she said. “It’s going to hit every church, with everything going on in the United States – what with the atmosphere and … so forth.”

Tangier residents who no longer agree with Methodist Conference policies have not had to go farther than down the street to fulfill their religious needs. The New Testament Church is a non-denominational Christian congregation – and it was established, itself, around the same time as another rift in Tangier’s community in 1946.

While the two denominations now coexist in harmony on the island, at the time, their split resulted in what nearly escalated to violence. Records and photographs in the Tangier Museum document people’s boats and property being vandalized; one photograph shows the words “HA HA JOKER” smeared across the side of what was then the New Testament Church’s home.

Stover, recounting the incident, described it as “a civil war” having broken out on Tangier.

“Things got really ugly,” she said.

The community’s present troubles, she said, have not resulted in any such conflict – people are still neighbors and friends outside of the church.

“I think (the conflict 60 years ago) just hurt them so badly,” she said. “They were terrified when they saw another split was coming, because they knew how ugly it had gotten in the past. … They see (the church) as a lighthouse – and they don’t want anything to happen to it.”

“They were scared,” Stover said. “So I said to them, and I know the opposition leaders said to them too – ‘We are Christians, and that’s not how we act.’ … I don’t know what’s going on, except that I know God’s in it. And I’m just gonna go on trusting.” R