Not forgotten

As I write these words on the second Sunday of Advent, 2016 (that annus horribilis) is winding down, and I’m thinking about the letter I received recently from the church I served in my third year in seminary in the late 1970s. That third year, in those days, was designed to be an intensive internship immersing students in a ministry situation so that we learned about ministry at the ground level. Then, in a final year, we went back to finish our requirements and take comprehensive exams.

My year in this particular congregation deep in the coalfields of West Virginia turned me upside down. Without it, I might have happily settled, for the rest of my life, into places altogether too comfortable. But

West Virginia was a state of profound contrasts — between stunning natural beauty and industrial disfigurement, between urban sophistication and abject poverty, between the classical Presbyterianism of the church in which I interned and the snake-handling practices in tiny hard-bitten chapels up in nearby hollows — and I learned much. I learned from thoughtful elders and an equally thoughtful pastor and prophet. At their direction, I devoured the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., and took them to heart. Those leaders were businesspeople and civic leaders and professors from the nearby college. To borrow from Karl Barth, they carried the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. When they saw a need for adequate housing, that 300-member church found a way to collaborate with government funding sources in order to build several multi-story, rent-subsidized apartment buildings. In a time when the town’s government was embarrassingly corrupt, leaders in that church initiated a city charter movement with the objective of cleaning up city hall and instituting a strong city manager/weak mayor system of governing.

That church was also beautiful —a bit of Tudor England in the middle of commerce. The first time I heard Faure’s “Requiem,” their choir was singing it on Maundy Thursday in a candle-lit chancel. The first time I heard Bach’s “Passacaglia in C-minor,” it was a prelude played on a Sunday morning. They were a magnet for many youth and college students, who went on mission trips and retreats to places like Washington, D.C., and Montreat. They were the people who mobilized emergency relief when nearby Williamson was inundated by the Great Flood of 1977. The Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other.

But life happened. In the last two decades, the church has declined precipitously. What went wrong in the life of that church? Nothing. This is not a case study in which turn-around specialists should come diagnose missed opportunities, poor leadership and the consequences of keeping the pipe organ instead of starting a praise band. No. Even when they had to move from the larger sanctuary to the tiny chapel, it wasn’t because of a lack of leadership. It’s just that the town is dying. Coal is no longer king. The college will close next fall. Businesses are shuttered. Even so, their missional vision has burned bright, and over the last decade or so they’ve coordinated mission trips for church groups from all over and have housed those groups in that building.

Nonetheless, the letter I received a few weeks ago was inevitable. It announced that on the fourth Sunday of Advent — two weeks away, as I write these words — the church’s remaining eight members and their guests would worship there for the last time.

I know they are sad, as I am. This, after all, is a death. Who and what this congregation has been — all of its heroic life and legacy — is fully and unalterably gone. But still, death does not get the last word. That word is that all of our endings are in the hands of God, who gathers our bravest commitments unto God’s own self and never forgets them.

Therefore: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.… They rest from their labors and their works follow them.”

Theodore J. Wardlaw is president of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Texas.