“This cup represents the New Covenant,” I proclaimed one dreary January Sunday as I looked out across my dwindling congregation. I lifted our most prized possession: a shiny, simply molded silver chalice with a dent on its lip.
For more than a hundred years, this cup had been lifted by countless pastors. Through a Civil War, two world wars, three floods, a fire, and two scandals, this tarnished silver chalice had helped hold us together. Generation after generation had gathered at this table to celebrate Communion, to drink from this cup. One generation handed it to another, and with the cup came a promise, a hope, and a responsibility.
But I wondered if it could hold us together now.
Struggling to survive in a declining neighborhood, burdened with a building we scarcely could afford, we were near death. And I had exacerbated a bad situation. A young pastor, fresh from seminary, I had surely asked too much too soon. An old, crusty congregation, they surely gave too little too late. They desperately needed to change, but I had no idea how to enable them.
As I tilted the chalice to the right, the middle, and then the left, it reflected light on all our faces, including the face of a frowning woman in the right seventh pew. I knew what she was thinking: What does he want from us-this angry young man who presumes to inflict his naive ideals on us all!
I had opposed this woman’s efforts to hold an annual strawberry festival. “Money changers!” I had preached.
Only now was I coming to realize the strawberry festival was more than a fund raiser. It was a time to show off, to fellowship; it was a sacrosanct part of the identity of this church. To oppose a strawberry festival was to place myself outside the history of this congregation. Whether or not fund raising was beneficial was a moot point. While I opposed fund raising on theological grounds, my parishioners supported this event on historical grounds. And history was winning.
Digging through documents
Like a family, every church has a unique history, full of successes, failures, triumphs, and heartaches. Each history has generated sacred cows, taboos, and unwritten regulations. This history may be celebrated or maligned, but it cannot be ignored. If I was going to bring change to this church-and it surely needed a pastor who could-I was going to have to work from within the church’s history, not without.
Belatedly, then, I spent the next few months researching my congregation. Old board records, treasurer reports, bulletins, even attendance rolls consumed my spare time. I had to learn and feel 150 years of rich history.
As I pored through yellowed documents, I cried with the church forefathers when their church merged with another congregation eighty years ago. I laughed when a congregant protested that the children were too noisy in morning worship. And I finally understood why the strawberry festival was so important: it had been started during the Second World War by the now-deceased husband of the woman in the seventh row. This elderly lady saw my opposition as a desecration of her husband’s memory. It was a violation of her sacred history-and her churche’s.
Some of the church’s history was worth celebrating-like the unselfish propensity toward missions that had always existed. But other patterns of behavior, if left unchanged, could destroy this church.
This congregation, I discovered, was founded six miles closer to the inner city. Four times in the last century the church leaders had closed the building and moved farther out. This solution had worked well. There was historical precedent for it.
But now the church had grown older, no new members had joined, and the budget had shriveled. Our neighborhood was changing much faster than our ability to cope. Even if survival were our singular goal-not always a laudable one, I admit-we had nowhere else to move. We were checkmated by churches on all sides, the suburbs were too far away, and merging was unthinkable because we could find no nearby church similar to our theological tastes.
I was pastor of a church that had lost its way. Its history could no longer provide a viable solution to its problems.
Yet I knew it would be much easier for the congregation to change if they saw their future connected to their past. I searched the records for some solution, a link between what had happened before and what we needed now. I found one.
Placing myself inside
Thirty-five years ago a popular pastor-still remembered fondly by my older congregants-began a movement to “stand firm and fight the evils in the neighborhood.” In board meetings, newsletters, and from the pulpit, he argued that this church should give up thoughts of moving, that moving was an escape. He claimed the church should stand firm in the changing community, invite that community inside, and get busy in outreach. Because the situation was not in a critical stage, however, everyone politely ignored the rallying cry. There was no need to close or to move at that time, and the trouble passed.
But now our troubles would not pass. I reprinted his sermons. I evoked his memory at every opportunity. I tried to recapture the spirit of this man, and in the process placed myself squarely in the history of my church.
Of course I offered plenty of theological reasons why we had to become a more community-minded church-sermons on Isaiah 58 and Matthew 25. But crossing theological, cultural, and racial barriers would be painful and difficult for us all. And rarely do congregations make major decisions solely on theological grounds. Again I prayed that God would place his clarion call in some familiar historical context.
He answered my prayers when a long-standing member and respected elder suddenly supported my position. This elder’s credentials were above reproach; she was a strong proponent of my church’s tradition. Even better, she had disagreed with me on many points, so no pastoral collusion was implied.
Perhaps the most radical idea promulgated in the 150 years of my church’s history was abruptly accepted. One year I could not convince my board to add another hymn to morning worship, but after we passed this crisis, we were buying a center for the homeless in our neighborhood. And the previously divisive strawberry festival, though not continued, quickly became a nonissue.
By deliberately placing myself in their history, by sticking to the past, I have seen change come for the future.
-James P. Stobaugh
Fourth Presbyterian Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
