NORWAY — Selectmen on Thursday tabled a request for prayer at the start of each board meeting until they determine a fair, respectful and all encompassing way to do it.

“I want to support everyone’s belief, but we need more time to study this,” Selectman Russ Newcomb said. He and others on the board said they could support the idea as long as it was done equitably.

The request came from about 125 parishioners of area churches who had signed a statement attesting to their faith in prayer and God. It was in response to a question posed by a local newspaper on whether there should be open prayer at municipal meetings.

“This is a respectful way of opening a meeting,” Jinger Duryea, one of the signers, said. She attends the Deering Memorial Methodist Church in Paris where the statement of faith was signed during a recent ecumenical luncheon.

Duryea said other governmental bodies such as U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court open their meetings with a prayer, a practice which she called “an opportunity for a blessing.”

A dozen or so people were at the selectmen’s meeting hoping to hear that the board would institute a prayer at the beginning of each annual town meeting. Instead they heard the board say they might entertain a prayer at each board meeting.

“I would like to see God brought into the beginning of every meeting where the public is involved,” the Rev. Norman Jackson of the Norway Baptist Church said.

Jackson, who has been in the ministry for 46 years, said he remembered what happened to the public schools after the Bible and then prayer were banned.

“You take God out of something, and you have absolutely nothing,” he said.

But not everyone agreed.

“We live in a great Republic. But it does not recognize a specific religion,” Gene Shanor of Norway said. He argued that to be equitable the board would have to recognize every religion and those without a religion.

“I think it can be offensive to a lot of people…If you do this you have to do everything. That’s America,” he said.

Norway resident and Woodstock Town Manager Vern Maxfield said the Board of Selectmen in that town devised a two sentence statement that allows a pastor to say a prayer at the beginning of their annual town meetings.

“I can’t see that it would do anything but help our cause to have an opportunity for prayer at annual town meeting, he said.

Selectman Mike Twitchell, who asked fellow board members two years ago if a prayer could be said at the beginning of each board meeting, has volunteered to lead a prayer.

Town Manager David Holt said the town’s attorney has cautioned him that should the selectmen institute the weekly prayer, and if they were challenged in court, the town would probably lose the case.

Holt said the process has to be fair and open and respectful of everyone’s beliefs.

The board asked Holt to bring to its next meeting information on how other towns in Maine have handled similar requests.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

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