Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 16, 1993 TAG: 9312160422
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: E-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now 85 and "retired" for nearly 20 years, Lockett still visits the elderly homebound and hospital patients among the congregation of Greene Memorial United Methodist Church. He's on the staff of the downtown church in the role of "parish care."
Moreover, he makes his visits five afternoons a week, a task he regards as a pleasure because, he said, church people of all ages need the personal touch.
Ministers used to make more visits in the 1930s and '40s, when Walter Lockett was a young pastor serving Methodist parishes in Arlington, Norfolk and Danville. He was married then to his first wife, Helen Booth Lockett, who died in 1968, and they were rearing Gaylord and Caroline, who now live in Newport News and Wayne, Pa., respectively. The pastor has four grandchildren.
Pastoral visiting in the home or sometimes at an office was a major part of the work week, Lockett recalls. Afternoons, women were generally at home, and the minister saw children growing up there. Arlington was still a town with relatively few people in apartments.
This kind of visiting has had to change with the times, Lockett observes. Today church staffs plan programs to get people together. This is especially necessary in an old downtown parish where no one lives close by, and it's a daily struggle to attract and keep young adults and children, he said.
Today's United Methodist church spends a lot of money on educating its clergy and providing them with benefits unheard of when Lockett, newly wed and fresh out of his "trial ordination" ceremony, began serving Community Methodist Church in Arlington.
In those days, when the southern and northern branches of the Methodist church still existed, young clergymen - women were far from ordination - were approved at the annual conference for a two-year probationary period for their career. If they met the requirements, said Lockett, they were advanced to the rank of deacon and still later to elder.
In 1939 the union of northern and southern branches of the church resulted in a new administrative structure which put the church's Virginia headquarters in Richmond.
By then the Locketts had seen their Arlington neighborhood change greatly. The tiny white frame chapel with no plumbing, heated by a stove next to the pulpit, had given way to a modern stone building still used on North Bryan Street. Lockett's visiting had raised the membership from 113 to more than 400.
"For the first five years I was there, we had no car. I used to walk around the neighborhood in about a mile radius visiting my people," Lockett recalls.
In his 41 years in full time ministry, Lockett served eight congregations. He got to know not only Arlington, Norfolk and Danville but Harrisonburg, Hopewell, Martinsville, Falls Church and Lynchburg as the itineracy system of clergy transfer sent the Locketts to different churches.
Always, he says, he tried to balance three major tasks of a pastor: preaching, pastoral care and administration, and often he had little paid help.
"I think I enjoyed the visiting most. Maybe I should have let the lay people do more of it. That's a trend now."
Lockett learned about pastoral visiting from a mentor in his home state of Oklahoma. An older minister there, who came to Washington in the pre-Roosevelt days, urged the recent graduate of Garrett/Evangelical Seminary in Chicago to accept assignment to the little Arlington congregation because the national capital was full of hope and excitement with the new president's program. Later the Oklahoma pastor went home. Lockett stayed in Virginia.
In the little Arlington church Lockett occasionally saw Virginia Henry, a young volunteer from Washington who helped with youth programs. In 1969, a year after the death of his first wife, Lockett was in New York at a meeting related to his long involvement with United Methodist world missions.
He met there a considerably older Virginia, who had remained single and was completing a long career as a Methodist Christian educator. They have been married for nearly 24 years and have spent much of that time in Roanoke. They were among the earliest residents of retirement apartments at the United Methodist Home.
Grateful for his still vigorous health - he often walks three miles daily - Lockett says he has lived longer than his parents and believes in keeping active. He noted that the church of today has both a large supply of healthy retired clergy and many members who need the personal friendship available from them.
by CNB