Birgitta Wolfe
FLORENCE There’s a lot of mystery in this world, and Pastor Jack Foster is OK with that.
”Too many people have defined God,” said the white-haired, bespectacled minister of the Florence United Methodist Church on Second Street.
Mystery is something he accepts as a natural phenomenon and has guided him on his journey as a clergyman.
Pastor Foster had the daunting task not long ago to comfort some 1,000 people, many of them teenagers, at the memorial service of Sarah Townsend.
The 18-year-old Florence resident was found drowned in Sherman’s Pond in Burlington Township in May, an apparent suicide.
”They’re so young and have so little experience” with tragedy, he said of the youngsters at the service, recounting his struggle with how to address the girl’s friends and family.
It was members of his former congregation at Cranbury United Methodist Church on Main Street who e-mailed him the answer.
They said he had to tell the story he often told at the Cranbury church about the frightened caterpillar surrounded by darkness as it is transformed into a lovely butterfly.
The message being that in some mysterious way, Sarah had transcended to a good and beautiful place, and there was no need to fear for her.
”Here in nature is a sign a metaphor of what happens, he said at his hilltop home on Valley Road in Hopewell Township, just outside of Lambertville, where he is spending his semi-retirement with his wife, Christabel.
The story made such an impact on members of his Cranbury congregation that when he retired there after 25 years in 2009, they gave him butterfly mementoes and trinkets, and one person framed a picture of a butterfly for him.
Another fanciful retirement gift much better than a gold watch, he admitted was a pricey Martin guitar.
”I’ve been playing guitar since a was 12,” said the 68-year-old John Denver fan.
At the farewell dinner, they asked him to come on stage and play something. When he demurred, saying he had no guitar with him, the announcer said, “‘Well, how about this?’” and handed over the Martin.
Not until he saw his own name on the guitar strap did Pastor Foster realize it was his to keep.
And now he entertains his Florence flock of some 100 souls on Sundays at the 175-year-old church and recently had a gig at a mother and daughter banquet.
Although the position at Florence is part time, the duties are still the same, bringing comfort and insight to his congregation.
Years of experience has taught him, “I’m not doing this alone. I have to get away from myself away from the intellect. I have to dig deeper,” said the Princeton Theological Seminary graduate.
Sitting on his farmhouse porch looking across the valley to Baldpate Mountain where he and his wife go hiking, Pastor Foster recalled a task that confronted him early in his career as a minister in Smithville.
”A 12-year-old girl has been raped and murdered. A man had followed her and then raped and killed her,” he said.
As the family’s minister, he went to the viewing the night before he was to conduct the service and saw the little girl in her casket.
”I drove home 6 miles crying. I was young how do you do this? I can’t do this by myself,” he remembered thinking.
After much turmoil and “reaching beyond the intellect to the heart,” he said, the answer mysteriously presented itself.
He knew then he had to present, not her tragedy to the mourners, but the joy she had given her family the short time she was here.
A policeman associated with the investigation later came up to him and said, “‘that was the best sermon I ever heard,’” the minister recalled.
There have been many sermons since then, and he said that body of work has benefited greatly from the critical guidance of his wife, who also edits his blog, nonordinarytime.blogspot.com.
She’s kind,” he said with a smile, “and she’s pretty much on the money” when it comes to critiquing his work.
Pastor Foster met his future wife when she lived next door to his church in Cranbury.
”After a while, we went on a lot of what we called outings, and finally my secretary said, ‘Those aren’t outings, they’re dates,’” he said with a laugh.
Their family now consists of his three sons and her two sons from previous marriages and their daughter who just graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans.
However, despite his wife’s the best guidance and his best intentions, sermons can go seriously wrong as in “The Blue Tarp” caper, fondly remembered in Cranbury.
Pastor Foster recalled driving home from a vacation on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, trying desperately to think of a sermon idea. They only thing that came to mind was the sight of a blue tarped cabana caught in the ocean breeze, rolling down the beach.
So, Sunday morning, he told the tale of the rolling cabana.
”But I couldn’t think of a point,” he said. The tale just meandered aimlessly, endlessly no point, no big message, no message period.
After that, his congregation used it to measure his other sermons, as in, “‘Well, at least that was no Blue Tarp.’”
”I’ve learned a lot from my congregations compassion, how to be a better person, and they don’t let me take myself too seriously,” he said with a chuckle.
Today, when he sits in his Florence office in the brick church building mulling over ideas for Sunday morning, he has a full view of the angel in one of the Palladian stained glass windows.
This is his “guardian angel” who, he said he believes, half-seriously, will come to the rescue if things go awry with the next sermon.
