Lives of service rightly honored
Marshall McGill says he decided early in life that he wanted to help other people.
“Studies have shown that volunteering is so good for the mind and body that it can ease symptoms of stress and depression,” he told Ledger-Enquirer staff writer Larry Gierer. “… Serving others can also be the best distraction from our own worries.”
Marshall and Teresa McGill should be among the least depressed and most unstressed people around. Because their dedication to faith-based humanitarian service is a large-scale enterprise.
Marshall McGill is founder and senior pastor of Kingdom Metropolitan Worship Centre in Columbus. But their work is hardly limited to this area, as was made clear last month when the husband-and-wife ministers were among a select group in Atlanta honored with the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award, a distinction for which the McGills were nominated by staff at Trinity Broadcast Network.
“Doing service is not about getting awards,” Teresa McGill said. “You serve because you love God.”
The McGills have served in many places, for many people, and in many ways. Marshall is familiar with, and to, the Columbus area, having served in the Army at Fort Benning, and later serving as chaplain for both Columbus Council and the Sheriff’s Department. In addition to the church here in Columbus, he has founded churches in Bainbridge, Ga., and Tallahassee, Fla., and oversees others in Spain, Germany and Liberia; in India, an orphanage serving more than 300 children was named in his honor.
Not surprisingly, the McGills’ Columbus church is service-centered, having provided aid both in the U.S. and abroad after natural disasters. The congregation is diverse because that, Marshall McGill said, “is what heaven is going to look like.”
These are not ordinary people. If they were, this would be a dramatically different world.
Voice silenced
Longtime readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution remember — fondly or otherwise — the distinctive and unapologetically liberal journalistic voice of Constitution editorial page editor Tom Teepen, who died Sunday at 82.
Teepen articulated the progressive checklist — support for civil rights and civil liberties; opposition to regressiveness in tax and other economic policies; disdain for shamelessly self-interested climate change deniers. Most of all, wrote the AJC’s Ellen Eldridge, “he took delight in skewering politicians who wrapped themselves in the Stars and Stripes or a mantle of religiosity.” (Regardless of political orientation, that last should be among any opinion writer’s core values.)
In one of his later columns, Teepen wrote:
“Since our earliest days, the nation’s moralists have fretted that our degeneracy would have us soon going the way of the debauched Roman empire. Religious opponents said Thomas Jefferson, if elected president, would set prostitutes to dancing in the churches … The good-souled scolds had it all wrong. It has not been sexual but political degeneracy that has menaced us — a breakdown into political self-indulgence that loses sight of the whole, of the common good.”
He definitely didn’t have that wrong.
This story was originally published April 17, 2017 at 4:33 PM with the headline "Lives of service rightly honored."