January 13, 2024
Dear family and friends,
Barbara Wendland’s obituary mentions the many things in which she was engaged during a long life well lived. Those of you here today know many of the details. We just heard some very moving testimonies commemorating and celebrating her life.
Let me begin by recalling a few of the landmarks of her life:
The following information is from her obituary:
"Barbara Cook Wendland passed away on December 25, 2023, after a brief but difficult illness with pancreatic cancer. She was at different times during her life a writer, theologian, philanthropist, church and community volunteer, mathematician, and homemaker. She was born Barbara Jean Cook on December 9, 1933, in Shreveport, Louisiana, the only child of Joe Berry Cook and Louise Elizabeth Patterson Cook. Barbara married Erroll Wendland in 1959 and moved to Temple, where she spent the rest of her life and for many years she was a key volunteer in local organizations. Among other things, she served as president of the Cultural Activities Center, she was active in several of its member groups including civic chorus groups, the Piano Ensemble, and Great Books. She was a lifelong United Methodist and active locally and nationally. In 1986, she received a Master of Theological Studies degree from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. Barbara Wendland was the author of three books, the most recent one titled Misfits: The Church’s Hidden Strength (2010).
"For many years, Barbara published a monthly newsletter Connections, about needed reforms to religious beliefs and the institutional church, which she mailed to several thousand recipients. With her husband Erroll and daughter Carol, Barbara was a trustee of the Joe B. and Louise P. Cook Foundation established by her parents. Personally, and through the foundation, she supported libraries, hospitals, church congregations, universities, literacy programs, museums, groups fighting poverty and addiction, scholarships, opera companies, symphony orchestras, a cultural center, a community theater, PBS TV stations, classical radio, a church-related retirement home system, organizations promoting progressive Christianity, and university professorships in math and theology. Barbara Cook Wendland was a longtime member of the Executive Board of Perkins School of Theology at S.M.U. One of her last major education projects was to support the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.
"Her husband Erroll preceded her in death in 2018. Barbara is survived by her daughter, Carol Wendland, with whom she enjoyed doing crosswords and puzzles and attending live cinema broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera; and a foster daughter, Maria Goreti Lima of Colombia."
In the next few moments, I want to take a look at the bigger picture of which Barbara’s life reminds us, and to which it testifies. This is the good news: Barbara’s life can make us see a bigger picture and something that is happening in the world, which is bigger than us. I take this to mean that we are never alone, even if it may sometimes feel that way. This is, of course, what Christians believe, but this is also what many other faith traditions tell us. Even people who don’t embrace any particular faith often have an acute sense of something bigger at work than the individual, and many intuitively grasp that we are not alone.
The first thing I want to mention is that Barbara Wendland’s many engagements, especially in the second half or her life, set her apart from many people today and in the past who assume that life is all about going with the flow. Such going with the flow means accommodating to whoever appears to have the power, refusing to think, refusing to raise questions, keeping quiet, being subservient, taking orders well, and so on. Unfortunately, this is what much of religion today has become also: going with the flow, accommodating to the status quo, refusing to think, refusing to raise questions, keeping quiet.
Those who knew Barbara know that she was not one to go with the flow. Not going with the flow sets her apart; but not going with the flow also puts her squarely in the company of many people who have made a difference in the world. This resonates with many examples in our faith traditions as well. In the early days of the Jesus movement, Peter, Paul, Mary, and even Jesus were not known for accommodating to the respective status quos of their time. Peter and Paul fought the accommodation of early Christianity to the forces of empire and dominant religiosity. Jesus turned around the common logic of the powerful when he made it clear that “the last will be first and the first will be last” (Matt 20:16). You might be surprised to find Mary on this list of “misfits,” to use a term from the title of Barbara’s last book. Mary does not say much in the gospels, but when she speaks in the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, she makes it unmistakably clear that God lifts up the lowly and pushes the powerful from their thrones.
To be sure, not going with the flow is sometimes seen as annoying and even dangerous. Peter, Paul, Mary, and Jesus all experienced pushbacks; all except Mary were executed by the forces of empire. Barbara experienced her own share of pushback in her life, as many of you know. The church made efforts to push her and her family to the margins, and even some of the universities which she supported did not always give her generosity the full credit it deserved. In a world controlled by status quo money and power, even million-dollar donations that go against the grain can get pushed to the margins.
A few months ago, I conducted the funeral of my dad in Germany. His last words to me were, “do not let yourself be thrown off course.” Barbara and my dad never met, but both knew what many Christians today conveniently forget, namely that being a person of faith means swimming against the flow.
Misfits Book Cover
UM Insight Screenshot
This brings me to my second point: I am presenting these reflections to you at this memorial service because there is some very good news here that I want us to explore together. The subtitle of Barbara’s book Misfits hints at it. The full title of the book is Misfits: The Church’s Hidden Strength. We could expand this by adding: Misfits: The Hidden Strength of the Local Community; of the Family, of the University, of Friendship Networks, of Politics, of Economics, of Culture, and so on. All of this applies to Barbara, who embodied these hidden strengths in various ways. But the truly hopeful message here is that together with Barbara so many more people are also embodying these hidden strengths. And this directs us to an alternative view of how the world goes. Misfits—people who refuse to accommodate and stay true to their values—are the hidden strength of the world as a whole. You might say that misfits are the hidden strengths that make the world go round in such a way that transformation becomes possible. Without them, everything would always stay the same or slowly get worse. Entropy would be the only thing we would ever know.
Consider Barbara’s life in this larger perspective and it becomes even clearer that we are dealing with dynamics that are bigger than us. Transformation is what life is all about; and transformation is also what religion is all about. Despite the current tensions in the United Methodist Church, of which Barbara was a lifelong member, the official mission statement of the church says as much: The mission of the church, according to the official United Methodist Book of Discipline, is “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”
Examples from Barbara’s life witness to the reality of this transformation. Closest to home for me is that she funded progressive programs in theological university education, in a way that was more visionary than even the biggest foundations that everyone is talking about in my field, like the Lilly Endowment and the Henry Luce Foundation. This work continues in the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt, which I am directing, and I was very moved that this program was mentioned in the obituary published in various of the major Texas newspapers.
Let me conclude with a third point. What I have said so far about not going with the flow, the hidden strength of misfits, and transformation, only makes an actual difference if we are not talking about isolated individuals. Disconnected individuals is where hope goes to die, no matter how exemplary their lives might be.
And this is the final point where Barbara’s life really made a difference. Although I know that she sometimes felt alone, as do many of us, she was always connecting people with each other. The title of her monthly newsletter, which she published for decades, indicates this: Connections! A common response of people reading Connections was profound joy in knowing that there were others out there with whom they could connect. Before encountering Connections they often felt like they were they only ones who were different.
Perhaps this is Barbara’s ultimate accomplishment: she connected thousands of people and helped build communities of transformation; she brought together so many of us who were, and still are, considered misfits in our communities and helped us understand that we are indeed the hidden strength of the church, of our communities, and ultimately of the world.
So, I don’t think I’m claiming too much when I conclude that the end of Barbara Cook Wendland’s life, which we are commemorating today, is part of the beginning. Something bigger than all of us keeps bringing us together, and I think it would be in Barbara’s sense for us to celebrate that, not only today but also for the rest of our lives.
Joerg Rieger 2022
The Rev. Dr. Joerg Rieger
The Rev. Joerg Rieger, Ph.D., a United Methodist clergyman, serves as Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion. He is Affiliated Faculty Turner Family Center for Social Ventures at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University
Full Disclosure: Barbara C. Wendland inspired the founding of United Methodist Insight and The Cook Foundation is a major benefactor of Insight.