My father died November 7. He was 90 years old, almost 91, and had served as an ordained minister for 64 years, all in Texas. After graduating from seminary, he was called to a congregation in Eliasville, a windblown West Texas town barely on the map these days. Most of his ministry, however, took place in the growing suburbs of Ft. Worth, Dallas, and Houston. In the 1950’s he wrote a book entitled Our Cities for Christ, which was a call to the Southern Presbyterian Church to pay attention to the rapidly urbanizing South and to be about the work of organizing new congregations for a post-war America.
This impulse toward evangelism was deeply rooted in my father’s theological make-up and represented his most consistent response to the gospel’s claim. Stephen Webb, in his book, The Divine Voice, has argued that we show we understand the gospel’s claims most truly when we preach its good news, an insight my father would have understood instinctively and with which he would have agreed.
The formative influence upon my father’s theology was the Student Volunteer Movement (which he encountered through the YMCA) and its aim “to evangelize the world in this generation.” The theological problems with that motto, and indeed, with that movement are almost self-evident to us today even though our achievements seem paltry when compared to those of the generations inspired by such a slogan. My father’s heroes were people like John R. Mott and later, Robert E. Speer and before them, Sheldon Jackson.
Of particular importance to him were saints whose names are on the verge of being forgotten today and whose status inside and outside the church seem almost inconceivable to us, people like Joseph H. Oldham, Sherwood Eddy, and Francis Pickens Miller. For my father, who attended the University of Texas in the 1930’s, the YMCA was not just a place to “work out” but was a place where students were challenged and encouraged to see the full reach of Christ’s Kingdom in the world. Under the auspices of the “Y,” he attended student conferences in Europe and Asia, as well as this country.
How much the world has changed can be measured in some respects by how we view the YMCA’s role today.
Yet, it would be a mistake to view my father’s efforts to “evangelize the world” as merely the naïve expression of an optimistic Protestantism of a by-gone age. No doubt, it was some of that and no doubt he was living off the social and religious capital of a much more intensely Protestant culture than we know today. But in a way that is difficult for us to conceive, his “evangelicalism” was also deeply “liberal.” He had been taught to believe that the lordship of Jesus Christ encompassed global, economic and political matters, and in the pre-1960 South called for particular attention to be given to the issue of race.
My father, for example, saw the link between the missionary enterprise that sent William H. Sheppard to the Congo to proclaim the gospel and the courageous work he undertook in exposing and documenting the barbarities Leopold of Belgium committed on the Congolese people. I hardly think my father was unique in this; the link between the claims of the Christian gospel and the violated integrity of colonized people was one that many saw. But my father thought the link was Christologically based, not merely theoretical or political, and that if the church lost interest in proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world, it would soon lose interest in issues of social justice, or rather its interest in matters of social justice would soon find a basis other than the gospel to pursue its aims, to the detriment of both social justice and faith.
Here is what is surprising: my father actually thought that the church’s efforts in evangelism put it in touch with what was most truly radical about the church’s own life, i.e., the lordship of Jesus Christ. Politics for him, therefore, began with the praise of God (with what he would have called “the Kingdom” — a political term – whose King was called “Master.” Those terms, for various reasons, make us uncomfortable today, a clue that we have lost perhaps as much as we have gained in recent years including the clear identification of who is Lord.
Years later, in the mainline churches of the 1960’s, the theology that sustained my father’s vision was deemed passé as church leaders sought to engage social issues more directly, and in any case, without the ecclesial and, confessional baggage that congregational life entailed. This was not true, I suspect, of African American congregations, whose faith largely funded the Civil Rights movement. In any case, in retirement, even his politics became more partisan and outspoken (he was an enthusiastic critic of President Bush and vigorously opposed the war in Iraq.) He chose to worship in a predominantly African American congregation not far from where he lived, and was happiest when engaged in inviting folks to worship there.
Another aspect of my father’s work was his passion for identifying men and women who had gifts for ministry and encouraging them to become pastors and teachers in the church. Every congregation he served as pastor produced candidates for the ministry, most of whom are currently serving the church in some capacity. My father happily served on his presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry until he died. One of the last tasks he took on was to find the money to enable a Cuban immigrant to begin studies for the ministry at Austin Seminary.
My father thought that identifying and encouraging such folk was a vital part of the church’s work and should be of particular concern to every pastor. Helping people to discern God’s call to the ministry (and to act upon that call) was not merely a matter of persistence or quiet prayer but the direct laying out of God’s claim on another’s life. Becoming a disciple, my father thought, had more to do with “joining a group” than is commonly recognized, and in any case, more to do with that than with reaching some blindingly clear vocational or theological certainty. The church, he believed, is called to risk much in its active pressing of the claim of God on the life of an individual to “come and help.” Farel’s encounter with Calvin in Geneva was, in this sense, formative for my father’s understanding of the church’s work of cultivating leadership.
My father went to Union Theological Seminary in New York for his B.D., studying there under such luminaries as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. However, he was not deeply influenced by either. His real heroes in seminary were the president of Union then, Henry Sloane Coffin, the professor of homiletics, George Buttrick, and Cyril Richardson in church history. Later, my father studied under another one of his heroes, Ernest Trice Thompson at Union Theological Seminary of Virginia, being guided by him in the writing of a doctoral thesis on the history of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
My father was fascinated by church history. His sermons were full of vignettes and stories of saints who bore witness to the gospel. Later, he would encourage local congregations to preserve and celebrate the history of the “surprising work of God” in their midst. Yet strangely my father was not nearly so interested in the past as he was in the future, or to put it another way, his interest in the history of the church was wholly for the sake of the future of the church. I think that is why he was always interested in candidates for the ministry, why he took such joy in pressing the claims of the faith on the young. He truly thought that the church’s most challenging days of witness were still ahead and would require of us every resource, every example, every encouragement that history and the Holy Spirit could provide.
My father was not always easy to get along with. He could be overbearing, insensitive, and even boorish at times — vices that sometimes put him at odds with his children and, in any case, with our more therapeutic and “sensitive” age. Though instinctively ecumenical in outlook, he was not greatly impressed by the Roman Catholic Church and in truth resented what he saw as that communion’s authoritarian demands on both the freedom and the intellect of the believer. Moreover, my father was not one to whom one might turn for comfort or patient listening when faced with a challenging task. His favorite mood was the hortatory, and until the end he was pushing books on others to read that would, in his view, change the world. He was a good Calvinist in this regard, believing that the Christian life was an active life, and not one that worried overmuch about one’s salvation or even one’s troubles for that matter.
My father taught me the Shorter Catechism, a love of baseball, and the power of the gospel to transform the world.
Mercifully, he was only in the nursing home a few weeks before he died. The last time I visited him there, I wheeled him into the dining hall for lunch, prepared to share the meal with him and to get to know some of his tablemates. At that time he was still hoping to get well and start driving his car again. It was hard for him to stand up; the doctor had told him to keep weight off his leg. But before we began to eat, he rose and tapped his spoon on the glass in front of him and announced to the none too interested patients: “We are going to have a blessing today, and I am going to ask my son who is visiting from North Carolina to ask it.” He still has to be in charge, I thought. I mumbled a few words of thanks, embarrassed to be praying for a roomful of folks whom I did not know. They, however, were not embarrassed, but grateful, just as my father anticipated they would be. The Gospel, he knew, was strong enough to get itself heard, and to evoke a grateful response wherever it was heard.
I stumbled out of the nursing home and found my way to the rental car, repeating to myself, He really does believe that stuff, doesn’t he? All that stuff about the gospel, all that business about the God who loves sinners and who in Jesus Christ gathers them to his table, and who gives us the gift of life. He thinks that’s the greatest thing in the world, and even from a wheelchair, in a nursing home full of frail and confused folk, he thinks this is a message that deserves nothing less than our best thanks and praise. Through my tears I fished out my car keys, started the engine and thought I could glimpse something of the Kingdom in the image of the nursing home in my rearview mirror, and perhaps for a moment I did. But, I suspect, that in fact it is still up ahead.
Thomas W. Currie III is dean of Union Theological Seminary-PSCE at Charlotte (N.C.) and professor of theology.
