When Beth Undercuffler’s phone rang on a wintry morning in 2018, she knew the call likely had to do with the blizzard raging outside. A member of Hanover Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware, she’s also a volunteer coordinator for Family Promise of Northern New Castle County. They were just wrapping up their host week. The severe weather had led to a state of emergency, keeping the Family Promise van off the roads and preventing families from returning to the Day Center where they typically go to receive case management and other support services during the day. But the dangerous road conditions didn’t stop Undercuffler, who jumped in her car and was at the grocery store by 6 a.m. In addition to needing to quickly plan meals for the next 48 hours, Undercuffler, a grandmother, knew that snow days require special supplies. “What kid wants to be snowed in and not have special snacks?” she said. “Someone has to do it for the kids!” Undercuffler put a call out to other … [Read more...]
Flesh in the Word: A Presbyterian Outlook for our time
“At some time after I came to this work I recalled a prayer that I made every night without fail when I was a teenager. I was not aware that every teenager has a deep passion to be liked by everybody and to have friends. But I prayed with deep earnestness, ‘O Lord, help me never to make an enemy and never to lose a friend.’ I finally realized that it was not a good prayer, that if I held deep commitments and witnessed to what is fair and just, some enemies might be made and some friends might be lost.” – Aubrey Brown Aubrey Brown. Editor of the Presbyterian Outlook. Making enemies. Losing friends. Or, at least willing to do so. When the cause was righteous, when the need was just, when the truth was required, when transformation was paramount. It was, in Aubrey Brown’s mind, the purpose of an independent church press to make truth visible, to use human words to reflect as much as possible the meaning of divine intent, to communicate through the vacillating flesh of human speech the … [Read more...]
Navigating between “Amen” and “No” — The dilemma and promise of the Presbyterian Outlook
Sometime in the early 1980s, when I was a recent graduate of Union Presbyterian Seminary, I had a conversation with an uncle. It was in the context of a family funeral, when we were all together. He has gone to glory now, but he – like my dad, and my brother and so many generations of ancestors before me – was a Presbyterian minister. We got to talking about the church, and he told me of an occasion that happened at a General Assembly when he was a commissioner from his presbytery in South Carolina. It was in 1968 at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), which was held in Montreat, North Carolina. Those years were fraught with social issues like civil rights and Vietnam and the role of women in leadership, and even though such fraughtness is not unusual at Presbyterian General Assemblies, this particular assembly, said my uncle, fairly crackled at every moment with the tensions of the late 1960s. My uncle shared with me a story of such tension … [Read more...]
Being the best church we can be in an ever-changing world
In wishing the Presbyterian Outlook a happy 200th celebration, I have to first say I cannot remember a time when the Outlook’s most recent issue was not on the coffee table in my home — both as a child growing up in Richmond, Virginia, and now, some 75 years later, at our home in Black Mountain, North Carolina. My parents were not church professionals, although later on my mother worked as a church secretary. Thankfully, our family was active in a Presbyterian (PCUS) congregation whose session included in its budget an Outlook subscription sent to every member. It was not a radical church but a church that cared deeply about witness and justice and compassion. It recognized the Outlook as being a venue that encourages the faithful not to just give lip service. It offered solid theological and social perspectives on various issues confronting the church, both as an institution and as members of a congregation. As early as my early elementary school years, I remember how my … [Read more...]
Fiction in faith formation: Stories that act as mirrors
After King David committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged for her husband to be killed, God sent the prophet Nathan to David. He said to the king: “There were two men in a certain city, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. … Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.” Then David, feeling tremendous anger toward the man, said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.” Nathan said to David, “You are the man!” The prophet did not condemn David with a quotation from the Ten Commandments, accusing him of breaking the rules against murder and adultery. Instead, he told him a story which acted as a mirror, helping David to see himself clearly (2 Samuel … [Read more...]
Reading as spiritual practice
When my first-grader began school this fall, I was reminded again and again during those first weeks of the school year of the importance of reading with my child every night. More than math and more than facts that she has learned in science, reading is the skill that her school wants us to reinforce at home. Reading. We are supposed to read 20 minutes each evening, and we are given charts and graphs that demonstrate how this accumulates over time. Akin to charts about saving for retirement and compound interest, they show us how many words our child is exposed to if we read for 20 minutes each day vs. 10 minutes each day. All of this is designed to motivate us into doing that reading now, striking fear in our hearts that our child will be woefully behind her peers in terms of language if she does not get enough exposure. And this is true enough. My middle schooler is required to read each day, and she has a reading log that she must fill out each week to demonstrate that she has … [Read more...]
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