Prosperity Church on Poorhouse Road

Brother Charley Edgar praises God but has an unusual day job

Brother Charley Edgar, pastor of the Prosperity Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, had a day job. He investigated murders, probed into court records and domestic relationships, and documented corporate negligence. He was the owner of Charles Edgar and Associates, the largest private investigations firm in Huntsville, Alabama. Every Sunday, however, private investigator Charles Edgar became Pastor Edgar of the Prosperity Church.

In 1999 I was on sabbatical from the University of Alaska Anchorage researching a book about a massive multiple-vehicle collision that had occurred eight years earlier just north of the Alabama border. One of the lawyers involved in the case had hired Mr. Edgar as an investigator. Charley and I hit it off, and every now and then we headed out to Gibson’s BBQ in Huntsville for lunch. Because I’m Jewish, he initially wanted to use our lunchtime forays to convert me. Early on I decided that was a nonstarter. Seeking common ground, we quickly decided on Biblical history. I liked history, and he liked the Bible.

One day at lunch, Charley blurted out an invitation to attend his Church. He said I could just sit in the back and watch him preach to the congregation. I didn’t even have to pray. I think he sweetened the deal as much as possible because he was pretty sure I would turn him down. Instead, I said “thanks for the invite. I’d love to go.” By then I knew he wasn’t proselytizing any more, he was just being neighborly.

a stately gray Lincoln

Brother Edgar and his wife picked me up at 8:30 sharp Sunday morning in their late-model gray Lincoln for the 25-mile drive from Huntsville to Prosperity. In a matter of minutes we left behind the wide avenues, automobile dealerships, strip malls, and fast-food franchises of suburban Huntsville. Wide roads narrowed, and straight roads yielded to the idiosyncrasies of topography. The asphalt hugged gullies and ridges of lush, gently rolling farm country. We motored past fields of winter wheat, soybeans, cotton, and tobacco.

Between two fields somewhere in that countryside, Alabama unceremoniously yielded to Tennessee. The Lincoln scattered a pink-hued wake of red dust as we sped by the small green sign, “State Line Rd.” We continued past the occasional mobile home or modest brick house that interrupted the symmetry of a surrounding apple, peach, or pecan orchard. In Tennessee the two-lane highway gave way to country roads. after a time those turned into narrow country lanes walled in by towering trees or laid bare among fields which met the sky at the horizon. Finally, after about an hour, we turned into Poorhouse Road.

Prosperity Church is a modest red-brick and white-plaster structure in a clearing surrounded by dense stands of trees dominated by enormous oaks. Immediately behind the church is a large graveyard that extends beyond both sides of the building, and continues perhaps two or three hundred feet into an open field.

the schedule for today

Brother Edgar parked the Lincoln, and the three of us walked up the stairs through the entrance into a small reception area. Mrs. Edgar pulled me aside to show me an older addition to the church, and to explain some of its history. She was a friendly, pleasant woman. Conservatively dressed, she was a soft-spoken, practical, and influential person in the church.

In response to my inquiry, she explained in a straight-forward manner what will happen the rest of the morning: First on the schedule is Sunday school which is traditionally taught in separate rooms for men, women, and children. That’s followed by divine worship and then Brother Edgar’s sermon. Finally, Church leaders attend the session meeting. After all the services and meetings everyone heads to the Barbecue Shack all-you-can-eat Southern buffet in Fayetteville.

The compact red brick and white column exterior enclosed a surprisingly spacious and rambling interior — the result of ambitious additions in past decades. The church’s rooms were bright, clean, and austere. The sanctuary was a cavernous room with a high ceiling and three rows of large pews. The interior was plain and unadorned, but well lit by several massive arched floor-to-ceiling windows that illuminated pale sky blue walls. The windows were constructed in an old fashioned way, from small panes of glass joined in a wooden grid-like framework.

getting ready to praise God

Brother Edgar was busy checking the air conditioning and the remote control for the recorded organ music. After a short while some of the local farmers began to enter the sanctuary with their spouses. Their children or grandchildren had already been shooed off to Sunday School. All the farmers were white, and most were middle-aged or older.

By tradition the first arrivals were those in the choir and their families. A few elderly women chit-chatted off to the side at the front of the sanctuary. Mrs. Edgar grabbed the remote control, aimed it at the stereo and pressed a button. Organ music blared out. Chit-chat time had ended and rehearsal had begun.

Several hymns were sung under the firm direction of Mrs. Edgar. At one point Brother and Mrs. Edgar did a series of duets backed by the choir and bellowing organ music. He was a tall, lanky Southerner with a deep, sonorous voice and a silky drawl. His praise to God filled the sanctuary and gently echoed from the pale blue walls.

after 20 minutes choir practice melted back into mixing and socializing. Simultaneously there was a slow but purposeful circulation of the flock in the sanctuary. Like a shaken jar of oil and vinegar, the parishioners begin to separate into a layer of women who poured out of the sanctuary and headed for their room, and a layer of men who flowed into a knot of pews at the back. The door to the sanctuary closed, and men’s Sunday School had begun.

shuffling out the door

Well after Sunday School attendees had reassembled in the Sanctuary for Divine Worship, and some time after Brother Edgar gave his thoughtful and intelligent, but not particularly linear sermon, presentation of the Benediction and Postlude brought morning worship to a close. Parishioners rose from their pews, circulated, socialized, and caught up with local news and gossip. Within a short period of time they ever so discreetly edged out toward the front door, and, saying their goodbyes, ambled down the stairs toward the shade trees under which they had parked their cars.

Just as the last group of parishioners walked to their cars, Mrs. Edgar approached me and suggested that since Brother Edgar was going to be attending the Session meeting for a while, didn’t I think this would be a good time to take a look at the cemetery? I really did want to take a look at it, and in any case Mrs. Edgar had a polite but firm way of asking a question that made it sound an awful lot like a declarative statement. She headed back into the church, and I headed toward the field of gravestones.

MATTIE. E.

Wife of JNO. A. DICKSON

Born Mar. 8, 1857, Died Sept. 22, 1880.

Aged 23 yrs. 6 mo. 14 days

In Memory of

MATILDA SMITH

Consort of John Smith

Born Mar. 22, 1810

Died Sept 6, 1869

To the Memory of

RALPH SMITH

A Soldier of the Revolutionary War

Born Aug. 24, 1763

Died Nov. 3, 1853

VARINA

Daughter of S.W. and Ethel Jobe

Born Jan. 25, 1901

Died Sept. 2, 1903

At some point while I was walking among the worn and broken gravestones in the oldest part of the cemetery, the Session meeting had ended and the Church’s leadership had piled into their cars and had driven away. Brother and Mrs. Edgar were patiently waiting for me by the Lincoln. We took our seats, closed the doors, and Brother Edgar gently pressed the accelerator. The metal behemoth moved quickly and silently down Poorhouse Road. Receding behind us was Prosperity Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church partly shaded by trees from the fierce midday sun, and behind the Church, the bare field of gravestones.

All of us were famished. We made a beeline for the Barbecue Shack all-you-can-eat Southern buffet in Fayetteville. The place was packed with local families who had just listened to sermons over rumbling stomachs and had trouble remembering those sermons because they were thinking about the Barbecue Shack buffet line laden with steaming pans of meat loaf in tomato sauce, turnip greens sprinkled with vinegary hot sauce, savory yellow squash casserole, warm and aromatic corn bread squares, and all the banana pudding they could ladle into a bowl.

Oh, yes, the food was great. After supper at the Barbecue Shack we boarded the Lincoln and headed back toward Huntsville, past the field crops, past State Line Rd., and past the dilapidated mobile homes and the modest brick houses by the orchards. But I was distracted ruminating about the terrible loss VARINA’s parents must have felt, and thinking about poor MATTIE E. DICKSON who died just halfway through her 23rd year, and the awful tragedy MATTIE’s death must have been for her husband. Even as the highways straightened and widened, and even as the fields filled with malls and used car lots, I was quiet in reflection about the lives of those now at rest in the bare field just to the side of Poorhouse Rd., and just behind Prosperity Church.

A true story