When my family moved to Logan in 1971, Rev. Casey was our pastor. We moved in a few houses up from the parsonage in Midelburg Addition, so Joe and Martha and their children, Tom and Peggy, were also our neighbors and, soon, friends. I was sad when, just a few years later, it was announced in church that they would be leaving to serve another church. There were tears at church and in the neighborhood. Other parsonage families came and went, and other rich relationships developed with the Savilles, the Turleys and the Chenoweths. But Rev. Joseph Casey was always special to me.
Rev. Casey taught my confirmation class. Five or six of us would meet after school in the pastor’s study at church. I recall that Rev. Casey took the task very seriously, teaching us about the Wesley brothers, Methodist classes and bands, and about United Methodist beliefs. I was confirmed and joined the congregation of Nighbert Memorial United Methodist Church on Sunday, March 25, 1973.
I ran into Joe and Martha again in the late 1990s, when I attended Annual Conference for the first time as a lay member from Johnson Memorial. By then, they had retired to North Carolina. I looked for them at the Conference sessions each year thereafter.
After I started working at the United Methodist Foundation, I reconnected again with Joe and Martha when they created a scholarship trust for seminary students. That’s Joe and Martha Casey; they know well the sacrifices involved in answering God’s call to ordained ministry, so they have given generously to provide help for others on that path.
I was pleased when I learned a few years ago that Joe and Martha would be returning to West Virginia and moving into a retirement community in Huntington. Then I was especially glad when they began attending Johnson Memorial. I liked seeing Joe in his clergy vestments on special Sundays like Convocation Sunday.
Then, as if coming full circle, my mother became neighbors again with the Caseys when she moved to The Woodlands in 2011. While I was having lunch with my mother at The Woodlands in the spring of 2013, Martha Casey stopped by our table with a gift for me: a photocopy of a couple of pages from one of Joe’s journals. It was dated March 25, 1973—the day I was confirmed. In the pages, Joe described a visit I made to his study that morning. I left Sunday school crying and went to his study because my Sunday school teacher, obviously not a Wesleyan, had told me that I would have to be baptized before I was confirmed. She said my baptism as an infant didn’t “count.” Rev. Casey explains in the journal entry that he calmed my concerns, and that I was confirmed and “received into the church but not” baptized again. (Emphasis in original).
Although I have no surface recollection of the subject of his journal entry, I must have a subconscious memory of it, and of his pastoral response to me, entrenched in my soul. I confess that my insistence on the sufficiency of my infant baptism was more likely a result of my stubborn precociousness than it was based upon any faithful understanding of baptismal theology. I evidently paid attention during Confirmation Class and was not going to let the Sunday school teacher trump the preacher. Yet, as I reflect on the contents of the journal entry, and Rev. Casey’s concern for me, even to the point of convening a group of church leaders that very evening to discuss the problem of this particular Sunday school teacher’s misleading and upsetting remarks, I give thanks for the life and ministry of Rev. Joseph Casey, and I remember my one baptism.
Jeff Taylor
[1] Quoting a remark from Bishop William Boyd Grove upon the occasion of the death last month of Rev. Frank Shaffer.
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