The Pastor’s Wife Forgot Her Mic Was On: ‘Relax, Nobody Knows the Building Fund Paid for the Beach House’
During Sunday announcements at an Alabama church, the pastor's wife whispered to her husband without realizing her lapel mic was on. Then an old deacon stood up holding a folder: 'We know.'
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The words were still echoing through every speaker at Grace Hill Community Church in rural Alabama. “Relax. Nobody knows the building fund paid for the beach house.” Charlene Pruitt, the pastor’s wife, had forgotten her lapel microphone was on. And seventy-six-year-old Deacon Harold Simms was standing in the fourth pew holding a thick tan folder over his head, saying two quiet words: “We know.” Pastor Wade Pruitt was backing toward the side door.
The Side Door
The side door by the choir loft had a broken latch. It had been broken for six years. It was on the repair list for the new sanctuary. When Pastor Wade pushed it, it stuck. He pushed again. It still stuck.
He turned around. Two hundred people were looking at him.
Charlene tried first. Her voice shook through the microphone she still hadn’t turned off. “Y’all, that’s not what I meant. It was a joke. Harold, sit down. You’re confused.” Somebody finally reached over and switched off the sound board.
Harold didn’t sit down. He walked slowly down the center aisle, the way he had walked it as an usher for forty years, and laid the folder on the altar rail.
“I’d like the church to see this,” he said. “Today. Before anybody leaves.”
What Was in the Folder
Harold Simms had spent thirty-one years as a bookkeeper for the county school system. He knew what a fake invoice looked like. Three years earlier, he had asked Charlene, politely, to see the contractor’s bills. She told him it was confidential. So he started doing what he knew how to do.
He kept a copy of every quarterly report. He called the contractor named in the reports. The contractor had never heard of Grace Hill. He went to the county permit office. No permit for a new sanctuary had ever been filed. And with the help of his granddaughter, who works at a title company in Montgomery, he looked up the “generous friend’s” beach house in Gulf Shores.
It was owned by an LLC. The LLC was registered to Charlene Pruitt.
The folder showed the rest: checks from the building fund account to “construction consulting” companies that didn’t exist, payments that matched the down payment and mortgage on the beach house almost to the dollar, and a new truck and SUV bought within weeks of large withdrawals. Of roughly four hundred and ten thousand dollars donated over nine years, the account held just under twenty-two thousand.
The deacons read the pages aloud, one after another, right there at the altar. Nobody went home for lunch.
The Widow’s Mite
The worst moment, people said later, wasn’t the numbers. It was Miss Ida.
She stood up when they read the total. She had been giving twenty dollars every Sunday for nine years. Over nine thousand dollars, from a woman who cleans houses. She didn’t yell. She just looked at the pastor and said, “You preached the widow’s mite to me. You looked right at me when you did it.”
Then she sat down and cried, and the women around her held her.
Brother Earl, who had sold his late wife’s piano for the fund, never said a word. He got up, put on his hat, and walked out to his truck. The men from his Sunday school class followed him out to make sure he was all right.
Justice in Millbrook
The deacons voted that afternoon to remove Wade Pruitt as pastor and change the locks on the church office. Harold’s folder went to the Elmore County district attorney the next morning.
Wade and Charlene Pruitt were both charged with first-degree theft of property. Charlene was also charged with forgery for the fake invoices. A judge froze the LLC and the beach house. Their lawyers negotiated a plea: the Pruitts agreed to sell the beach house, the truck and the SUV and return the proceeds to the church, and both received prison sentences followed by years of probation. Wade’s ordination was revoked by the association of churches that had licensed him.
The sale of the Gulf Shores house brought in more than the original building fund goal.
The New Sanctuary
Construction started the following spring, with a real contractor, a real permit, and a church treasurer who posts every receipt on a bulletin board in the foyer. The treasurer is Harold Simms.
The plywood thermometer by the road is gone. In its place, by the new front steps, is a small bronze plaque with two names on it. One is Miss Ida Coleman. The other is Margaret Earl, Brother Earl’s late wife, the woman whose piano helped pay for God’s house twice.
The side door by the choir loft got fixed first.
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