Arise ! Shine!
September 21, 2008
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a crisis going on.
Yep, don’t want to be Chicken Little, but the economy is a mess, the country is fighting two wars, hurricane season is far from over and the Yankees are out of the playoffs for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first term.
Like I said, there’s a crisis going on; but a crisis doesn’t necessarily bring all bad news. I, for one, am happy to see the Yankees get October off this year and let somebody else have a turn. Crises bring opportunities.
In the midst of all this, for some reason, I’ve been thinking this week about the Northside Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s the church I grew up in. It sits on the top of a hill on Mississippi Avenue, right next door to the Normal Park Elementary School, where I spent a few happy years back in the 1960s.
Northside Pres is, and always has been, considerably larger than Clarendon. Today, having stabilized over the past decade, the membership is a bit more than 300. I suspect that when I was a child it was more than three times that, but I don’t really remember.
Let me tell you what I do remember, and, more to the point, who I remember.
First, the what. Northside is more than 100 years old, and the older part of its building dates to the 1920s. The newer part is circa 1960 – the height of the Baby Boom and of church attendance across America. I would guess the place had more than 1,000 members in the early 60s, when I was a little boy in Sunday School, literally climbing the walls of the place while waiting for my parents to finish chatting with folks after worship on Sunday mornings.
We always sat in exactly the same pew in worship – it was right next to a long crack in the plaster that ran from floor to ceiling in a room with extraordinarily high ceilings. Naturally, that crack was an item of endless fascination for a little boy sitting through another sermon. It’s funny, but even after all these years, several restorations and paint jobs, the crack is still there. These days I take it as a theological reminder that we are all of us broken and in need of grace even if we are the church.
By the end of the decade of the 60s, the membership was half what it had been at the dawn of the decade, and attendance was probably less than half of membership.
In other words, it was a fairly typical mainline Protestant congregation, held together by fairly typical, yet extraordinary mainline Protestant men and women.
There was Mr. Eckerd, who taught Sunday School through my middle school and high school years. I remember two things about him: most instantly noticeable, to a teenage boy, was the striking fact that Mr. Eckerd literally had blue hair. When the sunlight hit his graying mane just right, it was quite clearly blue, and that fact always amazed me. Less noticeable, but far more important, was the simple fact that Mr. Eckerd cared enough about other people’s kids – for his own were grown by that time – to show up each week and listen to our thoughts and opinions and share his own as we tried to learn how our faith and our adolescent lives related to each other.
Then there were the two Mr. Smiths. Jim Smith, a WW II vet, who gave me my first job, ran an upholstery shop and I helped strip furniture and deliver it back starting when I was 14. He was a quiet, soft-spoken gentleman, and we never talked about church-related things that I can recall. What I do recall was his dedication to craft, his honesty in dealing with customers and his unfailingly gentle and polite manner. That, and the fact that he introduced me to the Northside Lunch – the most wonderful dive lunch counter you can imagine.
The other Mr. Smith, Hal, was a runner who became great friends with my marathon-crazed younger brother. What I mostly remember of him, however, was the singular talent he had of being the first person to stand for every hymn. He was like the great sign for the congregation – when Mr. Smith stood up it was time for everyone else to stand. I’m not sure how they know these days.
There was Mrs. Cooper, who taught the little kids Sunday School, which was both appropriate and, perhaps, necessary as she stood barely four feet tall herself. But she packed a lot of attitude and energy into that small frame, and everyone knew that you didn’t cross her. Her husband, Paul, created the large, wooden cross that centers worship in the sanctuary.
Then there were the Pipers: George, whose tall, bald head stuck out over all the other basses in the choir, and Mary, who was unfailingly upbeat. Their kids were all at least a few years older than I, but they still reached out to all the children in the church with a familiar kind of hospitality.
Our family doctor, Dr. Clark, was a member of the church as well. I can recall on several occasions receiving an impromptu examination while laid out on a pew following worship.
As I said, none of this is unusual, but all of it is formative. The quiet witness of these and so many others formed the incubator in which I came to my own faith. Their faithfulness created space for me to hear Jesus when he said, first, “come and see,” and then, later on, “follow me.”
As I consider what God is calling forth from the church today, I know that it is vastly different from what we were called to be as church in the 1960s and 70s. But I would be fooling myself and lying to you if I suggested that we have it tougher now.
Oh, to be sure, we are into at least the second post-establishment generation in this country, and we live in a much more transient time and place than the sleepy southern city I grew up in. Our minister could ask of his flock, “how many of you grew up Presbyterian?” and anticipate that most of the congregation would answer in the affirmative.
How many of you grew up Presbyterian? How many in some other Christian tradition? How many in no faith tradition at all?
Our context is certainly different. On the other hand, we are living through the end of the cultural upheavals that were just being named in their time. They experienced the mass exodus from mainline churches that is memory here, but not the present reality.
The Vietnam War raged at its most violent in those years, and the Civil Rights Movement was a cultural upheaval that informed everyday life. Martin Luther King observed in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail that he was meeting young people every day who increasingly viewed the church as an irrelevant social club; Northside was part of the club struggling to remain relevant. As Will Willimon, the insightful Methodist bishop names our time, we are living in exile; my parent’s generation were the leaders on the scene when the dislocations and disruptions leading to the exile happened. The accepted verities of the culture were rudely yanked right out from under them.
Why rehash this ancient history now? It is not for the sake of comparative studies in suffering, I assure you. No. It is simply to remind ourselves that whatever the reality of the present moment, the church has been down difficult paths before and has persevered and prospered.
To us, the church in cultural exile, the voice of Isaiah rings out, saying, “arise; shine, for your light is come!”
Like exiles dwelling in deep darkness, we too often do not open our eyes to that light that shines forever in the darkness such that the darkness cannot overcome it.
But, I promise you, the light does shine for you and for me.
So, as I look around this morning, I do not see a dying congregation nor a congregation in crisis, but rather a congregation at a kairos moment. I look around, and I see the Mr. Smiths of our time, the Pipers of this flock – the people whose steadfast faithfulness holds us together, witnesses for our children and leads us on as we strive together to follow Jesus in our time.
Not every step of our striving will be along the line of faithfulness; there will be stumbles along the way. It has been ever thus. A few years ago, my childhood church came into a lot of money by way of a generous bequest. Some folks, my father among them, wanted to see the money spent on the church’s mission in the community. For better or for worse, the will specified spending money on capital improvements, so the church got a major facelift – although the crack reappeared in the sanctuary wall soon after it was repaired.
Along the way, my dad, who grew up in the church, raised his family in it, served his fair share of terms on session, got fed up with the way the money was being spent and began attending a different Presbyterian church.
Which is simply to say, there will be scars along the way as we try to follow Jesus together.
We need to look carefully at those scars, at the broken places, at our own weaknesses. Faith ought to be a clean mirror reflecting the deepest places of our lives.
The survey we did this summer is part of that mirroring process. It told us that we’re really good at being a warm and friendly place. We’ll reiterate that in a few minutes as we break bread together. But the same instrument reminded us that we are not good at reaching out to new folks and welcoming them into the community.
That’s an interesting set of findings, and perhaps suggests the seeds of restoration.
Indeed, over the course of the past 18 months, as we have done the work of restoring this old building, we have created a place of warmth and welcome. Our experience in the last nine months, since Wilson Hall was restored, is instructive. Now that the Hall is someplace that looks like people would enjoy gathering in it, well, what do you know, people have been gathering in it! A lot of people! A lot of times! For food, for fun, for music, for building the kind of community that so many folks say they long for these days.
So we have transformed the space such that it directly responds to an aspect of our common life that needs attention. The transformation took a lot of hard work and dedication, but, if we are honest, I think we will confess that transforming our space is considerably simpler than transforming ourselves. The reaching out and welcoming that we are called to in this next season of our common life is going to stretch each of us in ways that will not always be comfortable, to be sure.
But this is where Isaiah’s words of comfort are written precisely for us this morning:
Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
3Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a crisis going on.
Yep, don’t want to be Chicken Little, but the economy is a mess, the country is fighting two wars, hurricane season is far from over and the Yankees are out of the playoffs for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first term.
Like I said, there’s a crisis going on; but a crisis doesn’t necessarily bring all bad news. I, for one, am happy to see the Yankees get October off this year and let somebody else have a turn. Crises bring opportunities.
In the midst of all this, for some reason, I’ve been thinking this week about the Northside Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s the church I grew up in. It sits on the top of a hill on Mississippi Avenue, right next door to the Normal Park Elementary School, where I spent a few happy years back in the 1960s.
Northside Pres is, and always has been, considerably larger than Clarendon. Today, having stabilized over the past decade, the membership is a bit more than 300. I suspect that when I was a child it was more than three times that, but I don’t really remember.
Let me tell you what I do remember, and, more to the point, who I remember.
First, the what. Northside is more than 100 years old, and the older part of its building dates to the 1920s. The newer part is circa 1960 – the height of the Baby Boom and of church attendance across America. I would guess the place had more than 1,000 members in the early 60s, when I was a little boy in Sunday School, literally climbing the walls of the place while waiting for my parents to finish chatting with folks after worship on Sunday mornings.
We always sat in exactly the same pew in worship – it was right next to a long crack in the plaster that ran from floor to ceiling in a room with extraordinarily high ceilings. Naturally, that crack was an item of endless fascination for a little boy sitting through another sermon. It’s funny, but even after all these years, several restorations and paint jobs, the crack is still there. These days I take it as a theological reminder that we are all of us broken and in need of grace even if we are the church.
By the end of the decade of the 60s, the membership was half what it had been at the dawn of the decade, and attendance was probably less than half of membership.
In other words, it was a fairly typical mainline Protestant congregation, held together by fairly typical, yet extraordinary mainline Protestant men and women.
There was Mr. Eckerd, who taught Sunday School through my middle school and high school years. I remember two things about him: most instantly noticeable, to a teenage boy, was the striking fact that Mr. Eckerd literally had blue hair. When the sunlight hit his graying mane just right, it was quite clearly blue, and that fact always amazed me. Less noticeable, but far more important, was the simple fact that Mr. Eckerd cared enough about other people’s kids – for his own were grown by that time – to show up each week and listen to our thoughts and opinions and share his own as we tried to learn how our faith and our adolescent lives related to each other.
Then there were the two Mr. Smiths. Jim Smith, a WW II vet, who gave me my first job, ran an upholstery shop and I helped strip furniture and deliver it back starting when I was 14. He was a quiet, soft-spoken gentleman, and we never talked about church-related things that I can recall. What I do recall was his dedication to craft, his honesty in dealing with customers and his unfailingly gentle and polite manner. That, and the fact that he introduced me to the Northside Lunch – the most wonderful dive lunch counter you can imagine.
The other Mr. Smith, Hal, was a runner who became great friends with my marathon-crazed younger brother. What I mostly remember of him, however, was the singular talent he had of being the first person to stand for every hymn. He was like the great sign for the congregation – when Mr. Smith stood up it was time for everyone else to stand. I’m not sure how they know these days.
There was Mrs. Cooper, who taught the little kids Sunday School, which was both appropriate and, perhaps, necessary as she stood barely four feet tall herself. But she packed a lot of attitude and energy into that small frame, and everyone knew that you didn’t cross her. Her husband, Paul, created the large, wooden cross that centers worship in the sanctuary.
Then there were the Pipers: George, whose tall, bald head stuck out over all the other basses in the choir, and Mary, who was unfailingly upbeat. Their kids were all at least a few years older than I, but they still reached out to all the children in the church with a familiar kind of hospitality.
Our family doctor, Dr. Clark, was a member of the church as well. I can recall on several occasions receiving an impromptu examination while laid out on a pew following worship.
As I said, none of this is unusual, but all of it is formative. The quiet witness of these and so many others formed the incubator in which I came to my own faith. Their faithfulness created space for me to hear Jesus when he said, first, “come and see,” and then, later on, “follow me.”
As I consider what God is calling forth from the church today, I know that it is vastly different from what we were called to be as church in the 1960s and 70s. But I would be fooling myself and lying to you if I suggested that we have it tougher now.
Oh, to be sure, we are into at least the second post-establishment generation in this country, and we live in a much more transient time and place than the sleepy southern city I grew up in. Our minister could ask of his flock, “how many of you grew up Presbyterian?” and anticipate that most of the congregation would answer in the affirmative.
How many of you grew up Presbyterian? How many in some other Christian tradition? How many in no faith tradition at all?
Our context is certainly different. On the other hand, we are living through the end of the cultural upheavals that were just being named in their time. They experienced the mass exodus from mainline churches that is memory here, but not the present reality.
The Vietnam War raged at its most violent in those years, and the Civil Rights Movement was a cultural upheaval that informed everyday life. Martin Luther King observed in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail that he was meeting young people every day who increasingly viewed the church as an irrelevant social club; Northside was part of the club struggling to remain relevant. As Will Willimon, the insightful Methodist bishop names our time, we are living in exile; my parent’s generation were the leaders on the scene when the dislocations and disruptions leading to the exile happened. The accepted verities of the culture were rudely yanked right out from under them.
Why rehash this ancient history now? It is not for the sake of comparative studies in suffering, I assure you. No. It is simply to remind ourselves that whatever the reality of the present moment, the church has been down difficult paths before and has persevered and prospered.
To us, the church in cultural exile, the voice of Isaiah rings out, saying, “arise; shine, for your light is come!”
Like exiles dwelling in deep darkness, we too often do not open our eyes to that light that shines forever in the darkness such that the darkness cannot overcome it.
But, I promise you, the light does shine for you and for me.
So, as I look around this morning, I do not see a dying congregation nor a congregation in crisis, but rather a congregation at a kairos moment. I look around, and I see the Mr. Smiths of our time, the Pipers of this flock – the people whose steadfast faithfulness holds us together, witnesses for our children and leads us on as we strive together to follow Jesus in our time.
Not every step of our striving will be along the line of faithfulness; there will be stumbles along the way. It has been ever thus. A few years ago, my childhood church came into a lot of money by way of a generous bequest. Some folks, my father among them, wanted to see the money spent on the church’s mission in the community. For better or for worse, the will specified spending money on capital improvements, so the church got a major facelift – although the crack reappeared in the sanctuary wall soon after it was repaired.
Along the way, my dad, who grew up in the church, raised his family in it, served his fair share of terms on session, got fed up with the way the money was being spent and began attending a different Presbyterian church.
Which is simply to say, there will be scars along the way as we try to follow Jesus together.
We need to look carefully at those scars, at the broken places, at our own weaknesses. Faith ought to be a clean mirror reflecting the deepest places of our lives.
The survey we did this summer is part of that mirroring process. It told us that we’re really good at being a warm and friendly place. We’ll reiterate that in a few minutes as we break bread together. But the same instrument reminded us that we are not good at reaching out to new folks and welcoming them into the community.
That’s an interesting set of findings, and perhaps suggests the seeds of restoration.
Indeed, over the course of the past 18 months, as we have done the work of restoring this old building, we have created a place of warmth and welcome. Our experience in the last nine months, since Wilson Hall was restored, is instructive. Now that the Hall is someplace that looks like people would enjoy gathering in it, well, what do you know, people have been gathering in it! A lot of people! A lot of times! For food, for fun, for music, for building the kind of community that so many folks say they long for these days.
So we have transformed the space such that it directly responds to an aspect of our common life that needs attention. The transformation took a lot of hard work and dedication, but, if we are honest, I think we will confess that transforming our space is considerably simpler than transforming ourselves. The reaching out and welcoming that we are called to in this next season of our common life is going to stretch each of us in ways that will not always be comfortable, to be sure.
But this is where Isaiah’s words of comfort are written precisely for us this morning:
Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
3Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
posted by David Ensign at
5:18 PM
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