On Mondays each week I volunteer at a 24-hour skilled nursing facility that my congregation helped start for AIDS/HIV patients. Not a single one of the people with whom I play bingo there has joined my church, nor do I expect any ever will. On Thursdays each week I volunteer at a public high school not far from me to help a teacher run an afterschool book club. Not a single one of the students with whom I read such books as “Croak,” “The Book Thief” or “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” has joined my church, nor do I expect any ever will. Then what’s the point of this work? The point is ministry. The point is paying attention to where God might be at work in the world and then finding a way to help. The point is that recruiting people to become members of my congregation is rarely the goal of mission outreach. I tell the AIDS patients and the high school students with whom I volunteer that I do it as a member of my congregation. I find my motivation for this … [Read more...]

Earlier this year when I read about — and then read — the “Zionism Unsettled” report on sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I knew that it would cause more hard feelings between Presbyterians and Jews. The report from the Israel-Palestine Mission Network did just that. So before the General Assembly met in Detroit in June, I asked a rabbi friend and a Muslim friend to come to my congregation to talk about their views of the Middle East. I asked them not to focus on the new report, though clearly it was the occasion for our gathering. They came and it was helpful to hear the perspectives of two people with differing views who, nonetheless, respect each other. After the tight General Assembly vote to divest from three U.S. companies that the adopted resolution said were profiting from “non-peaceful pursuits” related to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, I knew the Jewish community would react with some anger and distress. That happened, too. What I didn’t expect was … [Read more...]

When we look back at World War I 100 years after its start, it’s easy to see that public opinion was wrong in its optimism that the fighting that began in early summer would end by Christmas and all would be right with the world. As I made a recent visit to the terrific National World War I Museum in Kansas City, I was struck by the inaccuracy of that prediction. But it made me wonder what public opinion is getting wrong today. Let’s look at the conventional wisdom about mainline Protestant churches such as our PC(USA) denomination. In sum, it’s this: The future is dismal. The church is dying. Young people especially are becoming religiously unaffiliated. The empty churches of Europe are a harbinger of what will happen in the U.S. Churches that want to survive will have to downplay theology and emphasize “moral therapeutic deism,” a term introduced in a 2005 study about American youth and religion and later popularized by Kenda Creasy Dean of Princeton Theological … [Read more...]

WASHINGTON D.C. – It was late on a recent Friday afternoon when I slipped into New York Avenue Presbyterian Church here to check out something I was alerted to by a fellow member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, meeting here in annual conference. The woman at the reception desk said the Lincoln Parlor, containing an early emancipation document that Abraham Lincoln signed on July 14, 1862, was closed — but because it was just my wife and me, she’d allow us to have a look. So we entered the parlor with its red and gold wallpaper and its large wooden dining room table with 10 chairs at its center and found a display about the Emancipation Proclamation on a wall. The document there is one Lincoln drafted a week before he presented the proclamation to his cabinet. In the formal language of the period, the document begins, “Herewith is the draft of a Bill to compensate any State which may abolish slavery within its limits, the passage of which, substantially as … [Read more...]

I think of Margaret E. Towner as the Presbyterian Jackie Robinson. In 1956, she broke the gender line to become the first woman ordained as a pastor in our denomination. She’s now 89 and still active in church work, including serving on a committee of Peace River Presbytery in Florida. Some weeks ago I called her to talk about ordination of women because I was working on a piece for The National Catholic Reporter about the 40th anniversary of the July 29, 1974, ordination of the first female priests in the Episcopal Church. And I wanted to remind my Catholic readers that we Presbyterians beat the Episcopalians by about two decades. Marg, of course, knew all about that so-called “irregular” ordination of the “Philadelphia 11” two years before the church formally changed its rules to allow for female priests. In fact, her mother, whom Margaret describes as “an ecumaniac,” attended that service because she was friends with one of the 11. With almost 60 years of history of … [Read more...]

For four straights Sundays, my congregation brought in two excellent seminary professors to talk to us first about why we should care about Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and then about how to read the Bible the way seminary professors do. My thought in inviting David May of Central Baptist Theological Seminary and Mike Graves of St. Paul School of Theology was that sometimes our own people aren’t very articulate about their own faith and need a bit of help. This biblical and theological illiteracy can make ecumenical and interfaith dialogue difficult or fairly worthless. The result is what Rabbi Brad Hirshfield calls “interfaithless dialogue.” Sort of the blind leading the blind or maybe the bland leading the bland. Faith communities continue to try to improve the religious literacy of their own people, but those efforts aren’t always successful — sometimes because people are, instead, paying more attention to “Dancing With the Stars” or something equally … [Read more...]