In matters of faith, when you hear the call — you heed the call.
Well, eventually you do, Martha Ognibene and Bart Thompson said with a chuckle this past Friday.
Both are United Methodist ministers, married to the Church — and, coincidentally, to each other.
And both were taking a couple of minutes from all that unpacking last week to talk about their arrival in Morgantown and what they’ll both be doing next Sunday.
Both will be behind the pulpit, but not under the same steeple.
They’ll be in their respective pastoring roles at two churches, three blocks apart.
“That’s going to be exciting,” said Ognibene, who is assuming her post at Wesley United Methodist, at the corner of High and Willey streets.
“Can’t wait,” said Thompson, on his appointment at nearby Spruce Street United Methodist.
For Ognibene, Morgantown is a double homecoming.
It’s a return to the ministry after years of serving the church as a district superintendent.
And, it’s a return to where she had a life before.
Before she went into ministry, the Garrett County, Md., native worked here in the late 1980s, with her first husband, the late Rev. Michael Ognibene, who pastored at Westover United Methodist Church.
That was when she thought her true calling was education.
She taught reading at the former South Junior High and busied kids in the classroom and her kids at home: She and Michael shared two daughters and a son.
And that was along with all those “pastor’s wife” duties, she said, with the meetings and the church clubs and societies and all the charity work.
Thompson, meanwhile, was mapping an entirely different trajectory. He came to Morgantown from his Huntington hometown to pursue a graduate degree in geography at WVU.
“I was going to be a geographer,” he said.
Questions (and excuses)
Along the way, he forged a friendship with Martha and Michael and they talked a lot about faith and the ministry.
As a teenager he kept getting inklings of the spiritual life.
“I wrestled with it,” he said. “I’d ask, ‘Is this what you want me to do, God?’ ”
Michael, in fact, was a mentor — who, all of a sudden, was gone.
He was fatally felled by a brain aneurysm.
By then, Bart was a pastor. The seminary won out over graduate school.
Ognibene, meanwhile, was emotionally tossed, after Michael’s death.
Given the itinerant life of the ministry, the family had lived in West Virginia and Ohio, where Michael pastored and she always got teaching jobs.
The thing was, though, she was hearing the same call as Bart.
She literally grew up in the faith. Her father, the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Franklin Sherwood Jr., was a big name in the Methodist church.
He pastored at churches in Maryland and across West Virginia and became an elder in the West Virginia Conference.
“I grew up in parsonages,” Ognibene said.
She was drawn by her dad’s sermons and his good works in the community.
Teaching, she loved, and it was a paycheck with benefits. But after her husband’s death, and with her children beginning to forge their lives, that call to preach that was always there, got more persistent.
“I didn’t really have any excuses anymore,” she said.
‘You know we’re dating, right?’
So she pursued her own path to the church.
She pastored at churches across the state, and, as fate (divine, or otherwise) would have it, she reconnected with Thompson.
He was a minister by then, who was divorced — “Sometimes, these things happen,” he said.
Thompson appreciated the renewal of an old friendship.
Ognibene had lost her husband, but not her sense of humor, or wonder at the narrative (divine, or otherwise) that simply threads everything together.
Their friendship had a call of its own, he said.
“Yeah, one day Martha goes, ‘You know we’re dating, right?’ I laughed and said, ‘Yeah, I guess we are.’ ”
Both put their faith in marriage.
It helped that they were in the same field.
Before Ognibene went into church administration, she had pastored at different churches in the Wheeling area, while her husband did the same at his respective places of worship.
“You could forget about Christmas and Easter,” she said.
“But we could still always be there for each other,” he said. “We always knew exactly what the other person was going through.”
Full hearts — and a prayer for empty boxes
What makes each one famous on Sunday morning?
Ognibene is a teacher who happens to be a preacher, her husband said.
“She’s a storyteller,” he said.
“She can weave it all together. Scriptures and current events. She can take an idea and make it accessible to everyone.”
Thompson is a unifier, his wife said.
A few years ago, he pastored in Northern Ireland during a church exchange program.
While there, he was profoundly moved at the sight of Protestants and Catholics working to simply get along after the Troubles, and three decades of strife and bloodshed wrought by the conflict.
“Bart includes everyone,” she said. “He brings people in, and he enlarges the circle.”
Both will bring their respective congregations together for church and community work, too, they said.
On this day, though, they were delivering sermons — of the unpacking kind.
A prayer for empty boxes, it was.
Amen to that, they said.
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