The President's Pastor

About this book

"Hey, Tony, this is Jimmy. I just want to let you know we enjoyed your preaching Sunday. If you like us and we like you, I'd like for you to consider being my pastor."Thirty-one seconds. A 229 area code. A voicemail Tony Lowden almost didn't play. He was a preacher from North Philadelphia now living in Georgia, driving his usual commute into Atlanta, running prison reform work for the governor of Georgia. The Sunday before, he had preached in a small church at the edge of a cotton field without knowing whose church it was - or that the congregation had been founded in 1977 by twenty people who walked out rather than keep a Black man from the pew. Within the year he would be its first Black pastor. Within six he would stand before the nation and preach the man's eulogy.The President's Pastor is the account of that covenant, told in Lowden's own voice. It is Saturday after Saturday inside the compound at Plains: a president wrapped in a blanket printed with Psalm 23; gospel music played from a pastor's phone into a dark bedroom; orchids and butterflies set around the house so Rosalynn would remember whose house it was. It is Jimmy Carter planting wild roses along a fence so his bride would have flowers every Mother's Day. It is a ninety-nine-year-old man dragging himself to his wife's funeral and closing his eyes so he could hear every word said about her. It is a call from Bill Clinton, an apology forty years late and accepted on the spot, and a frail former president still asking whether he could be of use.And it is eleven days in January - the hearse leaving Plains, pickup trucks lined up on the overpasses with signs reading He was one of us, and a kid from the projects riding in the car behind the body of the thirty-ninth President of the United States, carrying a eulogy he had been writing for six years.Underneath all of it runs the question Carter handed to Tony every time they met - Where have you been? What have you done? Who have you helped? - and the one he asked of himself first: Why not the best?Lowden hands both questions to the reader.