Our family attended the Wesleyanna United Methodist Church in Star. Most of the people we knew were either Baptists or Methodists since we really only had two choices in our little town. I had heard of Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Pentecostals and Seventh Day Adventists and so forth, but until I was in at least junior high school, I probably couldn’t have named one. Church was a regular part of our lives, and it was about as predictable as anything else in a small Mississippi town like ours.

Wesleyanna, which is now over 165 years old, is a pretty little natural-stone building with an extremely steep-pitched roof over the sanctuary. It sits on a modest rise just off th...

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