Former Valley Girl, Welfare Mom Earns Methodist Appointment

Sounded at first like a routine church announcement, and a distant item at that: The Rev. Barbara Grace Ripple, a pastor on Saipan in the Western Pacific, was named the next district superintendent for United Methodist churches in Hawaii. She previously pastored churches in Ohio, and earned her bachelor’s degree at Cal State Northridge in 1972.

Turned out instead to be a remarkable story of a self-described Valley Girl overcoming very tough odds:

Suddenly forced by the breakup of her marriage to go on welfare in order to raise five small kids alone and still go to college, she perseveres with church support, becomes a teacher, then a pastor, and ultimately heads for Honolulu as a church official within the Methodists’ far-flung California-Pacific Conference based in Pasadena.

Toss in a U.S.-televised report on her exposure of garment sweatshops on Saipan and a few recent typhoons, and you have a good tale.

“It’s quite incredible,” said Pam Straub McPhee of Sylmar, a public school teacher who was in a singles group with Ripple 25 years ago at San Fernando United Methodist Church.

Ripple’s family, the Fridleys, moved in 1947 from Cleveland to Burbank, where Ripple and her brother, Alan, went to elementary school. Dad worked at Warner Bros. and Mom worked at Capitol Records in Hollywood.

Ripple graduated in 1960 from North Hollywood High School where one of her honors was the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award.

Two years later, she married a recent widower who had three small children. She took his last name, Post, and while living in Bakersfield, the couple had two children of their own. “When we moved to Sylmar in 1964, I was Mom to five children, aged 5 years down to an infant,” she said in a series of e-mail interviews with The Times this week.

She was attending the San Fernando church with her children when her marriage came apart. “This is when the people in the church really became my family and my spiritual and emotional support.”

With her departed husband not providing child support or medical insurance, “I went on welfare (the first in my family ever to do this!) and enrolled in college, studying to be a schoolteacher,” she said.

“Being on welfare allowed me to have medical coverage for my children and food stamps in addition to some money for rent and utilities.”

The Rev. Allyn Axelton, a CSUN campus minister then and now, said that Ripple was able to manage university expenses with Methodist student loans, grants and scholarships.

“Statistics show that a very high percentage of single heads of households go into poverty,” said Methodist Bishop Roy I. Sano, who recently appointed her to the district superintendent post in Hawaii.

“It was hard,” she said. “I studied when my children were asleep, and still found time to be active in PTA . . . attend Little League games and take my children camping.” At the church, she sang in the choir, served on church committees and began a single young adult group.

What would be a near-impossible situation to most people was overcome by Ripple, said Susanne Acker, wife of the Rev. J. Miles Acker, then pastor of the church. “She just rolled with it,” said Acker, who now lives in Rancho Santa Margarita.

“She had a lot of gumption and was a very determined person,” said Jean Tweist Young of Redondo Beach, who made friends with her in the church singles group.

The two talked about their spirituality, but also about having fun. “We did a lot of partying, and I never expected that she would become a minister.”

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In fact, armed with an elementary teaching credential after her CSUN studies, the then Barbara Post taught in Saugus and Orange County. She moved to Ohio in 1977 to become a Christian educator, teaching classes at a 3,000-member church. A few years later, she enrolled as a seminarian in the Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio, working part time as student pastor of a small church.

Upon seminary graduation in 1985, she was assigned as pastor of a church in Massillon, Ohio.

“My children were grown, and I was determined to stay single,” she said. But a few years later, through a lay leader in the congregation, she met his brother, James Ripple, who was passing through town on his way back to the Northern Mariana Islands and his job directing that U.S. commonwealth’s development headquarters.

After a couple of more meetings and extensive correspondence, they were married in 1991 and she went to live with him in Saipan that September. On ministerial leave of absence from the Methodists’ Ohio Conference, she yearned for a pastorate. She launched an English-speaking congregation by the following April, and eventually affiliated with the California-Pacific Conference.

When Ripple was at a Conference meeting in Redlands, Pam McPhee, who was a lay delegate from a Granada Hills church, instantly recognized her friend from the singles church group at San Fernando.

“She looked just the same as she did nearly 30 years ago,” said McPhee. “I wasn’t surprised that she became a minister--she was always a take-charge person who was also very compassionate.”

Bishop Sano, who visited Saipan recently, said Ripple’s congregations at this point have grown to include three other language groups--Mandarin, Tagalog (Filipino) and Fijian.

“She has an impressive record of leadership and relating to the community,” Sano said. “We stopped by a hospital briefly to pick up some cassette tapes, and we were there an hour and a half because she knows so many people and they all wanted to talk to her.

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“When she started to work with garment workers on the island, she discovered appalling conditions,” the bishop said. Ripple and her church informed mainland Methodist officials of the sweatshop conditions.

In the end, government officials were alerted and the syndicated television program “Inside Edition” aired a news segment on Sept. 10 sympathetic to the workers, including interviews with Ripple.

Ripple said thousands of workers, many brought in from other countries, are exploited in many ways.

“Our church is trying to help in whatever ways we can, providing food and clothing, writing letters, providing transportation . . . and advocating for rights they are guaranteed under local and U.S. Constitutions,” she said.

Saipan and Guam, about 150 miles to the south, were hit by three typhoons in eight weeks late last year. The pre-Christmas winds damaged 1,700 homes on Saipan and about 17,000 on Guam, which has three times the population of Saipan, she said. Her church supports an interfaith disaster response, created Monday, to work with Church World Service and Methodist relief efforts.

Meanwhile, her husband retired from government service in December, giving Barbara Ripple, now 55, the option to accept the administrative post of superintendent of the Hawaii District when it becomes open in June and move to Honolulu.

“I will be responsible for 39 churches on six islands, and be making 15 trips a year to Southern California for cabinet meetings with Bishop Sano,” she said. “I am not going to be retiring on the beach at Waikiki.”

Axelton, a fellow Methodist minister, observed that many pastors do not seek a district superintendent appointment, which often lasts about four years, because of the headaches dealing with the problems of many congregations.

“I think she has her work cut out for her,” said old friend Jean Young, now a psychotherapist and the wife of a pastor. “It’s a very complex situation in Hawaii because of the many many ethnic permutations there.”

The last word belongs to Dr. Karen Jones Cove of Santa Monica, who is chief of pathology at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Los Angeles and a friend since their North Hollywood High School days.

“Through all her adversities, she never lost her cheerfulness,” Cove said. “She is the most kind, caring, loving, giving person I have ever known--and she is smart. Hard to find that combination.”