Terry Mattingly

September 7, 2026

worship, Women, Pentecostalism, movies, mass media, Marriage

Dolly Parton: Was she a "none of the above" believer or a follower of Jesus?

Terry Mattingly

September 7, 2026

worship, Women, Pentecostalism, movies, mass media, Marriage

Dolly Parton: Was she a "none of the above" believer or a follower of Jesus?

When Robert Lee Parton died in 2000, the illiterate former sharecropper asked his large musical family to sing "If We Never Meet Again (This Side of Heaven)," his favorite country-gospel song.

"If we never meet again this side of heaven / As we struggle through this world and its strife / There's another meeting place somewhere in heaven / By the river of life," they sang.

Recalling that family salute to the eternal ties that bind led his daughter Dolly Parton to ask that Albert E Brumley's hymn be sung, once again, at her private August 28 funeral.

Celebrating the country music legend is an honor "mixed with absolute pride and great sadness," stressed Bryan Seaver, the son of Parton's sister Cassie Parton, in the family's announcement of her death.

"But sadness lies with us, not with Dolly," said Seaver, who served as Parton's security director and also spoke in her funeral. "Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus. Surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens."

Like her nearly 59-year marriage to construction worker Carl Dean, Parton's faith was something she never hid, but the details were mysterious enough to cause chatter.

"Very few artists -- outside of strictly gospel -- are able to clearly articulate the relationship between their music and their faith," said Steve Beard, a contributor to "Spiritual Journeys," a book about the spiritual lives of musical icons. But one thing is certain, he said, via email: "Dolly was raised to believe in and preach a God of love. She would be quick to point that out and leave the fine and important details of theology to eternity."

Parton grew up in mountain churches, with a grandfather who was a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal preacher and also with ties to Robert F. Thomas, a Methodist missionary doctor who delivered many babies -- including Parton, the fourth of 12 children in the family's one-bedroom cabin.

In her 1994 autobiography, Parton said she never lost her faith, but it certainly evolved: "One day as I prayed in earnest, I broke through some sort of spirit wall and found God. … Not as a chastising, bombastic bully but as a friend I could talk to on a one-to-one basis."

Terry Mattingly

June 23, 2025

Baptists, worship, Mainline churches, Godbeat, evangelicals

Quiet crisis: Who will lead those small churches all over the United States?

Terry Mattingly

June 23, 2025

Baptists, worship, Mainline churches, Godbeat, evangelicals

Quiet crisis: Who will lead those small churches all over the United States?

One of the crucial services the Rev. Tony Marr provides as leader of the Higher Ministries consulting firm is to connect young pastors -- fresh out of seminaries and Bible colleges -- with churches that need new leaders.

But there's a problem. Most of these churches seeking pastors have fewer than 150 members and are considered "small churches" in the Protestant marketplace. Many of them have around 50 active members or less. It takes about 80 to 90 active members, in most church traditions, to pay a full-time pastor's salary.

"This is a conversation I have almost every week," said Marr, who is based in Johnson City, Tennessee. "At any given time, we have three or four small churches looking for pastors. … It seems like nobody wants to go to those small churches. Nobody wants to serve God there."

When Marr asks young pastors to describe their ideal "first job," most say that they want to serve as an associate pastor on the staff of a truly large church -- one with 1,000 members or more. In other words, they want to prepare to lead churches of that size, or larger.

"They have no intention of taking a church with 45 or 50 or 60 active members," he said, reached by telephone. "Many of these young pastors would rather work in coffee shops than lead that kind of church, even if these jobs would let them preach several times a week while ministering to real people and real families. They would rather work part-time, or be volunteers, at the large churches that they see in their futures."

This is a crisis that denominational leaders will have to face, he explained, for a simple reason. A recent survey from Faith Communities Today (.pdf) found that seven out of 10 American congregations have fewer than 100 people attending their main worship services. The average church has 65 members in the pews on Sunday. Digging deeper, in some denominations -- especially shrinking mainline bodies -- most congregations struggle to pay full-time salaries.

Backing that up, a Baptist Press report stressed that the "most recent National Congregations Study (NCS) found the median congregation in the U.S. welcomes 70 regular participants, including adults and children, and has an annual budget of $100,000."

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What Do the Orthodox Converts Want? (2006)

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies to tell the difference between a Southern Baptist church and an Orthodox church. You can get some pretty good clues just by walking in the door and looking around. But there are some similarities between the two that might be a little trickier to spot. For instance, let me tell you about what life is like on Sunday nights in a Southern Baptist congregation.

Baptists worship at several different times during the week -- at least they did in the old days when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist pastor's son. One of those times is on Sunday nights. Back in the early 1980s, I was active in a church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in which the typical Sunday morning crowd would be about 200 to 300 people, which is rather small for a Baptist church, but fairly normal for an Orthodox parish. Then the crowd on Sunday night would be from 40 to 45 people.

Now, that ratio should sound familiar to many priests who lead Vespers services. But the similarities don’t stop there.

Before the age of 30, I became a deacon and the finance chairman of that church -- which, in the Southern Baptist way of doing things, meant that I was the only person, not excluding the pastor, who saw the annual pledge cards. I was the only person in the congregation who knew who was giving what.

If there is an experience in life that will teach you the meaning of original sin, finance chairman is that role. What I discovered through that experience is that there is no connection whatsoever between how much a family gives to the church and how much money that family makes. Instead, I found that the key connection is faithfulness in worship. If you attend the Sunday night service at a typical Baptist church and look around at the 40 people there in comparison to the 200 or 300 in attendance on Sunday morning, you will find that about 80 percent of the church's giving is accounted for in that group.

The bottom line: The Sunday night experience in a Baptist church is very similar to that in Saturday evening Vespers services in an Orthodox church. As Bishop Antoun told me once, if you look at who attends Great Vespers and comes to confession, you are looking at about 80 percent of the service, the giving, and the energy in most parishes.

Who comes to Vespers? Who comes to confession? Who comes to the feasts, and why do they come? That’s where I would like to start as we consider this question: What do the converts want?

What we’re doing @ GetReligion.org

Originally posted on getreligion.org

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don't. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don't get to see them. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.

I want to show you an an example -- a case study, if you will -- of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog that you are visiting (and we hope you come back often).

Democracy of the Dead - Snow Traditions

inter is over and it's time to pack away the shovels, down jackets, insulated boots and mittens until next year. The changing seasons teach different lessons and, this winter, I was reminded of a great truth about life. It goes something like this: There is a right way and a wrong way to shovel snow.

Perhaps you saw the headlines about the massive storms that hit the nation's capital, this past winter. Right after everyone calmed down from the Y2K scare, we were reminded that there are other ways to bring an entire region to a screeching halt.

Or, perhaps you had to dig your way out of record-breaking drifts in some other corner of the country, this year. Or perhaps you live someplace where it's normal to see several feet of snow. Perhaps you're a pro.

I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, which is hardly a great place to learn how to handle snow. We were masters of mosquito control.

But, after college, I found myself in the frozen Midwest, where shoveling snow is an art -- right up there with boiling corn and planning tailgate parties. The snow started about Thanksgiving and, before long, I realized that it wasn't going away on its own.

Several weeks, and several backaches later, I started watching the local talent. This is when it hit me: I was not the first person in the history of the world to shovel snow. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. There I was, a youngster, slumping to the side of the path in exhaustion while gray- haired neighbors soldiered on.

What did they know that I didn't know? Well, yes, there were different kinds of shovels and different kinds of techniques and some folks were more doctrinaire than others. But there were common themes, such as bending your knees, not getting the shovel TOO full and never flinging the snow into the wind. There was a right way and wrong way to face this challenge and, I decided, only a fool would go it alone.

Eventually, I humbled myself and started asking questions. The elders took me in, showed me the ropes and handed down what they had learned -- a kind of oral snow-shoveling Tradition.

Rediscovering Religion — Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue? (2003)

Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue?
(Copyright) The Poynter Institute Poynter Reports, May 2003

Lou Grant had a problem.

Actually, the city editor of the classic TV comedy had two problems.

First of all, the fictional Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor and no self-respecting journalist wanted the job. Second, Grant needed to ditch a lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter named Mal Cavanaugh.

Finally, Grant saw the light. He told Cavanaugh he was the new religion editor.

"That stinks! Before you stick me with a lousy job like that, I'd quit," said the reporter, before storming out of the room.

Grant's staff beamed. The religion beat was still vacant, but who cared?

That scenario rang true to the editors and religion reporters I interviewed while doing my graduate work at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, researching a project that reached the cover of The Quill in January, 1983.

Many religion-beat veterans were proud of their work, but felt like Rodney Dangerfield in their newsrooms. Editors kept saying that they knew religion was news, but that religion-beat stories seemed too boring, or too controversial, to warrant dedicated coverage.

That's the ticket -- too boring and too controversial.

Journalism strategies in a hostile marketplace (2001)

Soon after John Grisham finished law school in 1981, he started hanging out at the DeSoto County Courthouse on the town square in Hernando, Miss. He had tried writing a book or two at the University of Mississippi, but nothing came of it. Then one day he overheard the horrifying courtroom testimony of a 12-year-old girl who had been raped. What would happen, he asked himself, if the girl's father became so outraged that he killed the rapist?

Grisham couldn't get this story out of his head. Soon he was getting up at 5 a.m. with a notepad, writing chapter after chapter of his first courtroom drama. It took three years to finish the manuscript, and another year of rejections by dozens of companies, before Wynwood Press published 5,000 copies in 1988.

But there was more to this process than telling a story that was in his head and heart.

"While I was writing 'A Time to Kill,' I read everything that was on the New York Times list," said Grisham, at a Baylor University conference called "Art & Soul" in March, 2000. "Most of it, I said to myself, 'I can do better than this.' A lot of it, I said, 'I'll never be that good.' "

Grisham realized that he was not writing the first legal thriller. So he read the competition and he learned the rules -- the writing style of the marketplace in which he would have to compete. He created a likable hero and then he ensnared him in a dangerous conspiracy. Then he carefully plotted a way to get him out of that mess, with as many entertaining twists and turns along the way as possible to create tension.

"I didn't invent that," said Grisham.

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