by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

“Can’t I just do Children’s Ministry?” asked Rev. Jodi McCullah, negotiating with God about “the calling” to devote her life to ministry. “Why do I have to be in charge? Why do I have to be the target — which as a minister, you are,” McCullah confessed. After serving over 25 years as a minister in rural Tennessee, McCullah could claim both ‘boss’ and ‘bragging rights.’ But instead, the collection of narratives in her memoir resounds with humility and humor. “Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm” recounts her experiences in her first nine years in the ministry. Now retired, McCullah acknowledged people are often surprised to learn she was an ordained minister. More surprising, still, are the stories this “girl” minister has to tell.

At a county wide Thanksgiving service, McCullah and the only other woman pastor were welcomed with the greeting, “Aren’t they doing a fine job, for girls.” For McCullah, whose first career was as an English teacher, writing became a way of understanding those early years as a then unordained “local pastor,” her only monetary compensation payment for expenses like travel and her robe.

McCullah takes the reader with her, walking in the cemetery where Jimmy’s arm was buried with the marker reading, “Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm,” amputated in a car accident. Jimmy would wave his prosthesis in rage, directing the choir, rage Jimmy’s MO. For years McCullah puzzled over why Jimmy was so mean and such a bully. “I didn’t grasp it until I wrote the story,” she said. “He didn’t want us to pity him. He didn’t like people feeling sorry for him.”

Another epiphany followed, when desperate for someone to talk with, she confided to a woman in her congregation she had been abused. The woman betrayed McCullah’s confidence, and told her husband, a Vietnam War veteran. He confronted her, demanding she “get over it.” She responded, “Getting over it is not my goal. I’ll get through it, and I’ll get past it.” He broke down sobbing. In the war, he served as a bomber pilot and killed hundreds of people, among them many innocent children.

“It was a moment of affirmation for me,” McCullah said, “If you create a place of hospitality, a safe place, others will step into it.”

The challenge of a safe place posed itself from the beginning for MCullah. She nearly left unordained minister “boot camp.” Deciding “the calling” was not for her, on the way to the payphone to ask her husband to come get her, she met a man who struggled with the same self-doubt. “I realized being a minister was what I needed to do,” she said. “My husband thought I was nuts.”

McCullah has served at four churches, and except at Morton Memorial Methodist in Monteagle where she served from 2017-2022, she learned the church leaders had told her supervisor, “Don’t send us a woman.” Yet eventually all her congregations welcomed with open arms.

“God kept showing up,” she said with a laugh, seeming amused by her good fortune.

In a particularly grating encounter, a parishioner chased her around her car, and she locked herself in the church to escape from him. When she complained to her supervisor, her supervisor replied, “It’s just part of the job for women.” Later, in a hospital waiting room after visiting with the licentious man’s wife, the man grabbed her and pulled her into his lap. McCullah decided to resign, but the next day the husband of a woman who witnessed the incident contacted her and promised, “He’ll never touch you again.”

“Who else was there?” she found herself asking, who else had he tried to force himself on? Certainly, there were others and very likely she had made a safe place for them, as well.

McCullah’s greatest affirmation for her book had come from the congregation of that first church, pseudonymously named “Potter’s Creek United Methodist,” and from congregants at other small rural churches. “They’ve told me, ‘You help us understand the dynamics, why we acted the way we did,’” McCullah said. Still others have told her, “I love it.” The “characters” in the Potter’s Creek congregation do not fare badly in McCullah’s hands. On the contrary, she takes the reader to meet them as if she were taking them to visit a country neighbor, a person perhaps a bit quirky. As McCullah did, the reader comes to understand those quirky souls and to love them as well.

Asked what her advice would be to a young woman entering the ministry, McCullah stressed, “Make sure you have a good support system, other women in the ministry. I didn’t have that.”

Interestingly, the things women ministers discuss with one another, are often quotidian and practical. How to deal with your bra straps sliding down under your robe. Always to wear dresses below knee length. Why? “Because when you sit in the pulpit facing the congregation, your crotch is at eye level,” McCullah said, explaining the obvious with a sly chuckle.

McCullah homeschooled her two sons. When they reached high school and college age, she decided to pursue ordination and attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School. McCullah’s duration in the ministry and the surprises awaiting her upon ordination form the subject of her next book, a work in progress. Among the things McCullah would learn, being a divorced woman was frowned upon and, an even bigger “no, no,” engaging in prison ministry. “It’s one thing to talk about it,” McCullah observed. “It’s another thing to do it. People find it off-putting. My district supervisor got as far as the door and couldn’t go in.”

McCullah will read from “Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm” at 10:30 a.m., Saturday, April 5, at 301 Kirby Smith Road, Sewanee. The book is available from Amazon. Those wanting to contact McCullah about hosting a reading or just to talk can reach her at (615) 347-9071. “Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm” is a delightful amalgam of the quirky and unexpected, a journey to within the “fruit bowl” menagerie of a rural congregation where the private and personal bares its soul to show the reader the things that are the most universal and part of everyone’s experience.