Finding the Center of the Universe

Marrying my sister convinced me of Kirby’s impeccable judgment of character, and so I was keenly interested in his reaction to meeting Michael Downing. “That guy’s a phony.” Truer words have never been spoken. This journal sometimes seems to me an exercise in hyperbole, but Downing was the epitome of egotism. It never once crossed his mind that he had anything other than absolute truth at his disposal, which validated his notion that he was God’s gift to the planet Earth. Michael was a second-career pastor—having been born-again following a stint surveying northern Arizona—and came to Trinity having served only one other appointment: Sedona, Arizona. His only experience with a staff had been as a student associate while he was attending the Claremont School of Theology, but that lack never once caused him to doubt that he knew everything there was to know about administration and preaching. His only real competition was his new district superintendent, Tom Mattick, but I don’t think that the two of them ever put together the pieces of the puzzle explaining why they didn’t particularly care for each other: there can only be one center of the universe, and each was convinced he was it. Michael’s arrival triggered a vague sense of panic throughout the Trinity congregation (less vague for staff members Altman and Petty) because consciously or unconsciously it was known that Smith et al had been engaging in some very untoward, if not illegal, conduct. The jig was up, so to speak, and Michael arrived with the blessing of the annual conference and the charge to clean up Smith’s mess. As someone who had been intimately involved with The United Methodist Church my entire life, Downing seemed a strangely inexperienced choice for the assignment, but I was still loyal enough to the general church to accept that the hierarchy knew what it was doing.

PS A little aside to reveal just how incestuous the UM church in Las Vegas is: Michael’s previous district superintendent was the Reverend Larry Gerber (whom I later learned was principally responsible for promoting Downing’s appointment to Trinity) who had himself served as senior pastor of Trinity. Remember the parishioner in Omaha who, for whatever reasons, confessed to me her affair with a Trinity pastor? By my deductions, Charlotte and Larry were both at Trinity during that time.