By Diane Huie Balay
Associate Editor, United Methodist Reporter
It was Sunday morning. The college student couldn't
leave town to visit her home church, some 30 miles away. So she
tuned in to the church's televised broadcast of a worship service
that would become a holy moment in her memory.
That was 15 years ago. Today the Rev. Betsy Singleton
Bauer is associate pastor of that same church -- Pulaski Heights
United Methodist Church.
On March 3 the congregation celebrated one of the oldest
United Methodist television ministries in the country -- 30 years.
Pivotal Encounter
Ms. Bauer vividly recalls her pivotal encounter with the
televised service. The Rev. James Argue, who started the
television program, was preaching.
"It was about communion, Ms. Bauer said, a subject
that had not meant a lot to her.
But Dr. Argue invited each person who was watching to go
into the kitchen and find something which could be used as a means
of grace, she said.
She found some crackers and grape juice and, from her
living room, participated in the service. "I felt so much a
part of the larger congregation," she said. "It was a
feeling of being a part of the larger community of faith, both
visible and invisible."
Pulaski Heights' television ministry has meant a lot to
many people over the years, Ms. Bauer said. Perhaps it has meant
the most to the people who have been involved Sunday after Sunday,
helping bring the Gospel to some 20,000 people, many of whom are
home-bound, she said.
'Three Musketeers'
The Three Musketeers of the ministry are architect Jack
See, who has directed the broadcasts for 23 years, and two men in
the insurance business -- Ed Strohm, producer, and Ray Schaap.
They are assisted by numerous volunteers year in and year out.
They do it for love. They do it for A.B. Hervey, 94, who
watches every week from a retirement village. They do it for a
young woman paraplegic in a nursing home who is wheeled into the
television room each Sunday to watch "her church."
And they do it for the elderly couple who can no
longer leave home but each week dress in their Sunday best and
"go to church at Pulaski Heights" -- in their living
room. The story goes that one winter when ice and snow made the
streets almost impassable, the television team arrived at the
church to find only a handful of people in the congregation and no
minister. They went to Dr. Argue's parsonage in a four-wheel-drive
vehicle, "plucked him out of the snow" and brought him
in to lead the entire worship service -- because "you gotta
have church." Seven were in the sanctuary, but thousands were
watching.
Dr. Argue, a native Texan, started the television
ministry with a couple of black and white cameras the church
purchased from a CBS affiliate television station in Dallas.
They have an in-house television studio, he said, with
specially designed paraments that decorate the studio windows
which open onto the sanctuary. The $150,000 a year ministry is
funded entirely by the 3,000-plus member congregation. No money is
solicited from viewers.
