b. October 17, 1929
by Eugenie Waddell (Genie) Carr, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Winston-Salem, NC, 2016
Marjorie Rominger Joyner Northup
Marjorie Joyner was born in Winston-Salem into a family of staunch Southern Baptists. It was in the Baptist Young People’s Union that she started her lifelong practice of serving God through the church. As a teenager, for instance, for three summers she spent a week in the mountains leading Bible study for adults. “That gave me confidence,” she said. “These adults were listening to this teenager.” The teens also would knock on doors, inviting people to come hear their message … sometimes with unexpected results. “One time a man, an old country guy, said, ‘You’ve saved me. I got a message from God that he would send me somebody to marry!’”
Marjorie didn’t marry him. After graduating from Meredith College, she married architect Lamar Northup, whom she had known since fifth grade. He was a year older, her brother’s best friend. His family were members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and she joined the church. She remembers that at her Confirmation class, the Rev. Thomas Fraser, the rector (later Bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina), said to the confirmands, “If you don’t have questions about religion, you don’t belong in this class.” She was startled: “Baptists don’t talk this way,” she said.
When Marjorie joined St. Paul’s, one of the firs things she did was to talk to a longtime parishioner, Rosalie Wilson. “She took me under her wing. I led the youth Confirmation class, and I learned a lot because I had to study. I was asked to teach a Sunday School class, fifth and sixth graders.” She has always been involved in education in some way – for years she was the Director of Education at Reynolda House Museum of American Art and still leads tours as a volunteer.
Marjorie was an Education for Ministry (EFM) mentor for many years and often used a piece of art as an object of theological reflection. She is in one of St. Paul’s many Small Groups that meet regularly for study and reflection – hers meets at 7:30 a.m. on Fridays, examining the Gospel lesson for the coming Sunday. She is a member of St. Anne’s Circle at St. Paul’s, a group of women who take on a number of outreach ministries. She is active in the Order of St. Luke, a healing ministry that performs laying on of hands at church services, and she takes Communion to hospitalized church members. And, she said, “I go to prison regularly.” Along with a priest and other certified visitors, she regularly prays with inmates, which can be a heartbreaking and an uplifting experience. She asks each inmate she sees what he or she wishes prayers for, often getting the answer, “A prayer that I can get over my addiction.”
Marjorie’s long ministry is a big part of a life dedicated, as St. Francis said, “To preach the Gospel, sometimes using words.”
