Sometimes the Holy Spirit hands you a gift, a teachable moment where metaphor becomes reality. On October 27, we had one of those visible reminders of God’s grace as we celebrated a baptism at First Presbyterian Church of Freehold, New Jersey.
Baptisms are not uncommon in this congregation. One of the blessings of serving in Central New Jersey is that many people pass through this region. There are always newcomers attending our church, including the occasional young family. Some of the baptismal families have remained in active membership, others have not.
Our congregation is warm and friendly, rejoicing in the opportunity to celebrate these sacraments. But since I became their pastor in 2018, I’ve sensed an undercurrent of anxiety. Roughly 10 years before I arrived, FPC Freehold took out a large mortgage to renovate the church buildings. A few years after that, turmoil within the congregation resulted in as many as 300 members leaving. The finances became tenuous.
Shortly before my arrival, the baptismal font was also moved, disassembled, to a closet in the narthex. A young person had tried to squeeze past it but misjudged the space between the font and the chancel, knocking the marble font over and badly chipping it. At the time, the congregation couldn’t afford to repair it, so it went into the closet. For baptisms, we moved to using an antique silver basin on the communion table.
A focus of my work has been addressing the anxiety that remains from this time. We had eight baptisms in my first 18 months as pastor. I thought that would chip away at the congregation’s anxiety. It did not. Then came the pandemic.
The congregation paid off the mortgage in 2021. I thought that would take away the congregation’s anxiety. It did not.
In 2022, the congregation replaced the church’s boiler. I thought that would take away the congregation’s anxiety. It did not.
We continued to baptize and teach, yet the anxiety remained.
A year or so ago, a member of our Presbyterian Women’s Circle approached me about fixing and reinstating the font. The Presbyterian Women agreed to fundraise half of the $2,500 needed, and the session agreed to find a way to pay for the rest.
At the same time, a young couple asked me to baptize their almost-3-year-old daughter. When they requested October 27, the wheels in my head began to turn. I checked with Jason, the artisan who was repairing the font. Yes, he told me, he could complete the repairs in time.
Days before the baptism, Jason arrived with the restored font. His work was flawless. I asked him how he had matched the marble so perfectly. Then Jason unwrapped the base of the font. He had drilled out a small section, a drum, and he fashioned the replacement pieces from that drum.
As Jason reassembled the font, it dawned on me. All the materials that Jason needed to repair the font were already in the font. He had everything he needed.
In the same way, my congregation, despite its anxieties, had everything it needed to repair itself. It was there all along. There is still work to be done and there are still some anxieties about the future of the church, but in 2024, it began to feel like our anxieties became manageable, too.
No one sermon can take away a congregation’s anxiety. Nor can any single act of the session. What worked for us was a commitment to our most basic principles: love God and love neighbor; baptize and teach; act as good stewards of the resources we inherited. Our newly restored baptismal font, first dedicated in the 1890s, stands as a visible reminder of those principles. It’s also a visible reminder that the Holy Spirit is still with us, giving us our daily bread.
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