Presbytery of the Cascades

Thank you and some parting thoughts

2010-06-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

My term as moderator of the Presbytery of the Cascades ended last Saturday at the conclusion of the presbytery's meeting in Bend. Ric Neese, the pastor of Chapel-By-The-Sea in Lincoln City (Nelscott for those of my age), was elected as the new moderator; I now go on to serve a year as chair of the Presbytery council. I want to thank the presbytery for giving me the opportunity to serve as moderator, which among other things included the opportunity to post my thoughts on this blog. Although I did not stimulate the conversation that I had hoped to produce, a number of people have told me that they found my comments interesting and helpful; it also gave me a chance that lay people seldom have, to do a little preaching on my own. In this, my final posting, I want to make a couple of points that come out of the recent presbytery meeting.

The most extensive floor discussion at the presbytery concerned Common Table, a new church development in Bend that is taking a different tack from what most of us are used to seeing. Together with two other main line churches in that city, it will operate a restaurant with the hope of attracting people in the 18 to 35 age group, a group that seems to be missing in many of our churches. The focus will be on engaging people in conversation, beginning with where they are and helping them see how the Christian message is relevant to their situations. I would suggest that that is only part of what we need to do to bring this age group back to the church. Many people of that age are deeply interested in issues of justice and equity, and we need to show them how those things are not simply part of the Christian message but are at the heart of it. As I've indicated in previous posts, the Kingdom of God is about the transformation of societies and political structures, not simply individual issues, important as they are. I think that the major competition for this age group for my own church is not the conservative churches that cause us such concern but, rather, the vibrant and socially active Unitarian church a few blocks down the street. We need to show younger adults that our churches can be both fully Christian and just as socially involved as that church.

Probably the saddest part of the recent meeting was the decision of Circuit Rider Books to suspend operations. For many years that organization has provided a good mix of reading material, both for our denomination and other main line denominations. With its death it will become a little more difficult to browse through a good selection of thoughtful and scholarly books. There are, however, on-line alternatives available; I recommend two. First, the Presbyterian Marketplace:

http://store.pcusa.org/#panel-6

Secondly, a related resource of educational materials:

http://www.TheThoughtfulChristian.com

With that I say goodbye, and thanks again for the past year as your moderator.

"On High May Dwell With Thee"

2010-06-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Church's One Foundation is one of the great hymns of the church. It celebrates the church as the community that Jesus created, whose members include the living and the dead, that finds its sustenance in one source, that survives struggles and contentions, and that is focused on one great hope. The hymn reaches its triumphant climax in the last verse (which is actually a combination of the best parts of the original last two verses):

Yet she on earth hath union, with God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won.
Oh happy ones and holy! Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.

The triumph, thus is the restoration of the communion between God and humans that was God's original intention, that, as the story of the Garden of Eden indicates, humans lost by their rebellion, and that Jesus came to restore. The hymn contains overtones of the prophetic call for a just community, of Jesus' special attention to the meek and lowly rather than the rich and powerful, and, above all, of the promise at the end of Revelation of a perfect city in which all nations live in harmony with each other and where the dwelling place of God is with humans. The hymn sums up that promised community at the very end, in the hope that we "on high may dwell with thee."

Yet for reasons that I do not understand, the current Presbyterian Hymnal has replaced that essential phrase with the words "may live eternally," which changes the focus from the restoration of community with God and turns it into the hope of individuals to live beyond their individual deaths. Unlike other modifications in the Hymnal, that change is not necessary to avoid gender-specific or archaic language. The change is not simply unnecessary, it alters the entire focus of the hymn for the worse. In light of traditional teachings about Hell (a subject that seems to have disappeared entirely from our thought--but that's another topic), I'm not sure why eternal life out of communion with God is necessarily a good thing. More significantly, the change seems to reflect the narrow individualism that sees the sole purpose of the church as the salvation of souls and that denies any social dimension to the Christian message. As I well remember, many of those who opposed the church's involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s argued that collective action to resist injustice was unChristian. Rather, they said the only way to change society was to save enough souls, and that would, somehow, automatically lead to the destruction of unjust institutions and ways of living. So far as I could see, either at the time or in retrospect, the main purpose of that argument was to allow people to remain comfortable while they continued to receive the benefits of injustice.

In contrast to this narrow focus, of course, is the prophetic tradition of a just society, which was at the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, concept of the Beloved Community of love and justice, a community that went far beyond simple racial equality to full love and reconciliation among all peoples. Our Confession of 1967 is based on similar concepts. And, despite some of our more individualistic myths, those concepts have also played a major role in the best portions of American history.

Yet today we seem as a nation to be losing this sense of community. It appears that those in their late teens and twenties have little sense of empathy with others and little or no understanding that they are part of a community all of whose members are related to one another:

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/the-me-generation/

At the same time, the so-called "Tea Party" movement seems to be based on a myth of the sovereign individual who has no need of government or other community institutions:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/

The most important thing that we can do as a church may be to maintain our hope for God's desired community and thereby to help our society to regain the common purpose that it seems to have lost. We can express that goal by ignoring the change that the Hymnal made in this great hymn; let us sing our hope that ultimately we "on high may dwell with thee."

The Church and the Legal System

2010-05-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

As Christians we know that our ultimate loyalty is to God. Yet we also live in a nation that requires us to follow its own rules. While the relationship between those two things has caused problems for the church since its earliest days, two recent legal cases suggest some of the current problems. The first case shows how the nation's attempt to use a Christian symbol can deprive that symbol of its Christian meaning. The second shows how the legal system can attempt to impose its own rules and values on the church.

In Salazar v. Buono the Veterans of Foreign Wars had erected a cross on public land in the 1930s as a memorial to World War I veterans. After the lower courts held that that use of a religious symbol on public land violated the First Amendment, Congress approved a land trade to transfer the land to the VFW. In order to uphold the transfer, the United States Supreme Court had to treat the cross as a purely secular symbol, devoid of all religious significance. Stanley Fish describes some of the problems that that approach created:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/when-is-a-cross-a-cross

As Fish points out, the heart of the problem is that we live in a secular and pluralistic society that both protects the freedom to exercise religious belief and prohibits the government from establishing its own religion. The only way that such a society can use a religious symbol for its own purposes is to deny that it is religious. From a Christian perspective, what happened in this case is that the nation took control of the most important symbol of our faith, depriving it of everything that makes it significant to Christians. What began as the property of Christians became the property of the secular society.

The empty cross is the preeminent symbol of the most fundamental, and at the same time most audacious, claim of our faith: that Jesus who died lives again, is present with us, and is our Lord and God. From the earliest days of the church the cross has been the great barrier that divided those who joined from those who did not. As Paul said, it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (I Corinthians 1:23-24) The cross is not a symbol of sacrifice in general; it is a symbol of a specific sacrifice, one that occurred once and for all and that was for the benefit of all nations and all peoples, not of any particular nation or people. When this or any other nation uses the cross for a war memorial or for another secular purpose (placing a cross over the grave of a soldier who was a Christian is obviously proper), it tames the cross, depriving it of its challenge and its power. From a Christian perspective, the Supreme Court's decision was wrong because it the distorted the nature of a fundamental Christian symbol.

The second case is closer to home. In Hope Presbyterian Church of Rogue River v. Presbytery of the Cascades, the minister and members of a congregation of this presbytery left the denomination and attempted to take the church's property with them. They did so although the Book of Order--to which the minister and elders of the congregation had sworn obedience--expressly provides that every particular church holds its property in trust for the church as a whole. When the presbytery established an Administrative Commission to deal with the situation, the minister and members obtained an injunction from an Oregon court that prohibited the Commission from doing its job. In issuing the injunction the trial court expressly refused to take the congregation's obligations under the Book of Order into consideration. That is, the court failed to treat the congregation as a particular church that was part of a larger church. The Presbytery has appealed the case, and the oral arguments on the appeal give us some hope that the appellate court will reverse the trial court's decision and let the Administrative Commission function. Whatever happens on appeal, however, this case reminds us that there is always the possibility of a conflict between our understanding of the nature of a church and what the secular legal system will permit. We can never expect the world readily to accept our ultimate loyalty to God rather than to it.

Literalism and its problems

2010-04-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

In my experience a major difficulty in sharing our story with many people is the image that certain Christians have created about how Christians look at the Bible. Unlike the period before 1980 or so, in recent decades Biblical literalists have had almost unchallenged access to public consciousness, with the result that large numbers of educated people--and Presbyterians have traditionally drawn heavily from educated people--are simply unwilling to listen to a Christian talk about his or her faith. To those people we believe that God created the universe and everything in it in 4004 B.C.E., that thereafter God killed all humans except Noah and his family in a flood, and that God is inherently blood-thirsty, vindictive, and capricious. If that is what we believe, why should they listen to us?

Of course that isn't what most Christians believe. Our faith is based on the Bible and the stories it tells of God's interaction with this world, as read in the light of the Holy Spirit and within the community of faith. It is the story of God's offer of salvation to a sinful world. Our faith is not based on the literal words in which the writers of the Bible described their experiences but on the God who is both behind those experiences and beyond anything that humans could fully express. Literalism, however, is what militant atheists want others to think that we believe, for it is then easier to attack Christianity. Thus literalism serves the atheists' cause. This is a point that Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic who writes a column and blog for the New York Times, made well in a recent blog posting.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/fundamentalists-and-the-atheists-who-love-them/

As Douthat says, there seems to be a strange symbiosis between Biblical literalists and militant atheists: each insists that the only way to read the Bible is simple-minded literalism. I will assume that the literalists take that position because they don't know any better or are afraid that their faith will otherwise disappear. Along with Douthat, however, I strongly suspect that at least the leading atheists find it easier to knock down a straw person than to engage with religious belief in a serious way.

If we are to get what we believe across to our highly secular region, we must learn to express the richness and complexity of the Bible and the ways to understand it in a fashion that educated people can understand and appreciate. That means, among other things, avoiding simple-minded literalism. As we know, the Bible is a collection of many different kinds of writings, composed at different times over close to a millennium, and edited in complex ways into its present condition. Our confessions provide guidance for understanding it that is quite different from literalism. Douthat quotes both a Catholic catechism and our own Westminister Confession of Faith to make that point. I think that the Second Helvetic Confession is even clearer than the portion of the Westminster Confession that Douthat quotes:

[W]e hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves (from the nature of the language in which they were written, likewise, according to the circumstances in which they were set down, and expounded in the light of like and unlike passages and of many and clearer passages) and which agree with the rule of faith and love, and contributes much to the glory of God and man's salvation. (Book of Confessions 5.010) (Emphasis added)

More recently, in the Confession of 1967, we recognized the effect of the scholarship of the last two and a half centuries on Biblical interpretation:

The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God's work of reconciliation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that he will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture. (Book of Confessions 9.29) (Emphasis added)

The Bible is the foundation of a living faith that we must understand and interpret for our time; it is not a set of propositions to which we must give assent no matter how they conflict with each other and with more recent developments. Our call is to share that living faith as best we can despite the obstacles that literalists and atheists put in our way.

C67

2010-03-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

The national staff of the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently announced that it will recommend that the 2016 General Assembly meet in Portland. Our presbytery's council sought this recommendation in order to recognize and celebrate the 49th anniversary of the formal adoption, in Portland, of the Confession of 1967 (C67) by the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, one of our predecessor denominations. Because General Assemblies now meet every two years rather than annually, it would not be possible to have the recognition in 2017, the 50th anniversary.

This announcement led me to revisit C67, which was adopted while I was in graduate school and which, since then, has been the best statement of the church's understanding of itself and of its role in the world. There are two aspects to C67: first, it was the catalyst for a fundamental change in the role that confessions play in our denomination; second, it provided a theology and view of the church that sends the church into the world on a mission of justice and reconciliation. In doing so it relied heavily on the thinking of Karl Barth, the leading Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, who famously said that a preacher should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

Before the adoption of C67, our church's primary statement of faith was the Westminster Confession of 1647. That confession's 300 year old statements constituted church law. Although the Westminster Confession remains a powerful expression of some basic Reformed beliefs, at least by the end of the nineteenth century its rigid and propositional approach failed fully to express the church's thinking. Before C67 the church had attempted to adapt the Westminster Confession to the present by interpreting and amending it. The process that led to C67 began with a desire for further amendments. Rather than rework an old confession, however, the church decided to place the church's confessions in a new context. It recognized that it was not possible to express the Reformed faith once and for all; rather, the church sought guidance in some of the many confessions that came before and added a new one--C67--to express its present understanding. Instead of one confession to act as law, we now had a Book of Confessions to guide us in our mission.

For me, as a historian, this is a crucial change. By looking at the confessions as statements made for their specific times and situations I can understand them in context and apply their insights to the different context in which I live. The people who wrote them did not necessarily deal with the same problems that face us, and they did not have the same scholarly and scientific resources that we have. What they did have was a faith appropriate for their days that is an essential part of the tradition through which we can best understand what God calls us to do in our days.

This leads to the second point, the contributions that C67 made. First, of course, the name itself indicates that the church intended it as a confession for a specific time, not for all time. Second, and more importantly, is C67's fundamental focus on God's reconciling purpose and the church's role in showing that reconciliation to the world. Unlike earlier confessions, C67 is not primarily a theological statement but, rather, a description of the church's mission at a particular time. It recognizes that the church is a human institution that is shaped by its culture, and it recognizes that the institutional form of the church is always provisional. It then describes how the church can speak to its time, showing that reconciliation between God and creation, and among humans, requires the church to seek peace among nations, to attack poverty, and to bring responsible freedom to relations between the sexes. These remain basic issues for the church, although some of our emphases today might be somewhat different. For example, we would give greater stress to the point that reconciliation is impossible without justice, and we would probably modify the discussion of relations between the sexes. What continues to be valid about C67, however, is that the church's mission requires going into the world, challenging its structures of power, and evaluating the institutions of society by the standards of God's eternal purpose. Those are things that C67 brings us in a way that none of our other confessions does, and for that reason alone C67 is something that we should keep before us in everything that we do.

A History Lesson

2010-02-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

I began my professional career as a historian, and, although the job market for historians in the mid-1970s sent me to law school, I have managed to keep up with developments in my field. Two of the most exciting areas in recent decades have been the increasingly sophisticated study of slavery and slave society and the rediscovery of the importance of religion in American life. A recent book, Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, touches on both of these subjects in a way that raises questions about how the church relates to injustices in society.

Ford's book is a study of how white Southerners thought about slavery from the 1780s to the 1830s. During this period Southerners moved from looking on slavery as an unfortunate evil that would someday disappear (although no one could quite say how) to seeing it as a positive good that was both essential for the masters and beneficial to the slaves. Christians played an essential role in that transformation. The story is complicated, but a simple summary is sufficient for the points that I want to make. In the late eighteenth century southern evangelical Christians, particularly Methodists and Baptists but also a few Presbyterians, were in the forefront of criticizing slavery. Many evangelical churches had substantial numbers of black members, slave and free, with the black portion of the congregation often led by blacks. The churches recognized the spiritual equality of all members, who often addressed each other as brothers and sisters without regard to race. There were also black congregations, and the laws that required that white ministers lead them were not always strictly enforced. This was not racial equality, but there was a willingness to accept at least some black initiative in church matters.

The southern evangelical criticism of slavery was always much stronger among the clergy than the laity, and for that among other reasons it did not survive changes in Southern society. For a number of reasons, including the increased profitability of slavery and terrors raised by real and imagined slave revolts, after 1800 white Southern society came to fear anything that suggested slave or free black autonomy. Laws placed restrictions on slaves and, to a lesser extent, free blacks, including restricting or prohibiting them from meeting on their own, even with white leadership, and prohibiting teaching them to read and write. White church leaders resisted some of those laws, but primarily they refocused their efforts. They stopped criticizing slavery and instead sought ways to work within it to achieve their primary goal, the salvation of souls; freedom for the slaves had always been a secondary goal. They developed a mission to the slaves whose purpose went beyond converting slaves to Christianity and focused on making them better slaves--more obedient, harder working, willing to accept their position in life without protest. In the process these Christians--the most prominent of whom was a Presbyterian minister and slaveholder--led an ideological transformation in which slavery supposedly was no longer based on coercion and power but, instead, was a benevolent paternalism. In this new understanding, the master was the head of a family whose subordinate members included his wife, his children, and his slaves. He took care of the slaves and saw to their welfare, including their spiritual welfare; in return they gave him loyalty, respect, and lifetime service. Because, according to this view, black slaves were racially inferior to whites, this arrangement allowed both whites and slaves to achieve their greatest potential; no longer did southerners need to apologize for slavery or claim to hope that it would eventually disappear. White society as a whole eventually accepted the new ideology and used it to defend itself against the increasing attacks on slavery from outside the South. Some masters even tried to make the ideology reflect reality. In short, what began as a Christian attack on slavery because their status as humans in need of conversion implied that slavery was wrong turned into a Christian justification for slavery that a slave's conversion would not change.

I think that this short history suggests the temptations that face the church when it seeks to confront a deeply entrenched evil. When it attacks evil directly it will often run into overwhelming opposition from those who have power. It will then turn to less threatening alternatives in the hope of at least ameliorating the evil. The risk in doing so is that the church will forget that it is dealing with something that is evil and will see the amelioration as achieving all the goals of the Gospel. It will adapt to society's acceptance of the evil and simply try to soften the rough edges. Thus, when the early hopes for eliminating slavery proved illusory, it was reasonable for Christians to decide at least to bring the slaves the knowledge of Jesus to sustain them in their travails. The problem was that in doing so they capitulated to their society's slavery-based economic system and its fundamental racism. Rather than providing the slaves hope for ultimate freedom (a hope that the slaves quite properly found for themselves in the story of the Exodus), white Christians both taught them to be content with their lot and provided a new and supposedly Christian justification for their enslavement. They lost sight of the ultimate goal but convinced themselves that in doing so they were serving both God and the slaves.

The history of the church over the centuries contains other examples of adapting the Gospel to the current power structure. One is the church's tradition of giving help to the poor while supporting economic and political systems that keep the poor in poverty. Another is the development of just war theory in a way that, rather than keeping the ultimate goal of peace in the forefront of our thinking but to provide a veneer of support for whatever those in power decide to do. Indeed, the Crusading spirit shows the church entirely losing sight of the Gospel of peace and instead actively promoting warfare.

The church exists in an imperfect world, where God's kingdom is not yet established. Its choices will always be between imperfect alternatives. What this history lesson shows is the danger that comes from forgetting that those choices are imperfect. When the church loses sight of God's perfect kingdom and treats its limited choices as themselves perfect, it can become the servant of the evil that it seeks to oppose.

Where Have All the Prophets Gone?

2010-01-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that in recent years the church has been losing much of its connection with the prophets of ancient Israel. When I grew up they were deeply ingrained in the church's life. The old Christian Faith and Life Sunday School curriculum devoted one year out of every three to the Old Testament, with a substantial focus on the prophets. We read from the prophets during church services, and sermons often discussed their teachings. One result was that I learned to evaluate the contemporary world in the context of the prophetic call for a just society, and I learned that standing up to the powers that be when they fail to live up to that standard is an essential part of being a Christian. Amos, with his passionate call for justice and denunciation of those who had resources and power but acted unjustly, was (and is) one of my heroes.

My experience in recent years, both in my own congregation and in others that I have attended, is that the prophetic voice no longer plays the role that it once did. Even on those relatively rare occasions when the common lectionary finds room for a reading from a prophet, and when that reading is included in the service, what the prophet has to say is seldom part of the sermon. The only exception comes during advent, when we read certain portions of Isaiah because, whatever their original context and meaning, Christians have come to see them as foretelling the coming of the Messiah. Even then, there is seldom any effort to place those readings into the context of the rest of the prophet's message or even to use them to understand the message that Jesus brought.

I find this trend disturbing for at least two reasons. First, without listening to the prophets we may miss God's call to create a just and loving community in our own times. The Christianity that we hear today, and that has resonated with Americans for a long time, is too often a Christianity directed toward individuals, focused on individual salvation and individual action. The prophets remind us that God called the people of Israel not as individuals but as a community and that He called on them to live as a community of justice. Specifically, the prophets remind us that God judged Israel by how it treated the weak and the poor, not by how luxuriously its wealthier members lived. That is a message that we need to hear at a time when the gospel of wealth--of individual wealth divorced from the welfare of the community as a whole--is growing in our society.

The second reason that I find the loss of the prophets disturbing is that it impoverishes our understanding of Jesus and His ministry. Jesus expressly attached His ministry to the prophetic tradition, and that is part of how the early church understood Him. If we do not understand the prophets, we do not understand Jesus. Beyond that, the prophets supplement Jesus' own teachings. In part because of their expectation that the Kingdom of God would come to earth in the near future, and in part because the power of the Roman Empire limited their ability to affect governmental policy, Jesus and the early church did not expressly develop a full social gospel. Reading what Jesus said in light of the prophetic emphasis on the just covenant community shows, however, that they did do so implicitly. For example, many people try to reduce the impact of the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 by arguing that it applies only to individual charity; reading the parable in the light of the prophets makes it clear that it is also a statement about the requirements for a just society.

I hope that we will return to the prophets, so that we may again hear their challenge to us as a church and as a society to do justice and to love mercy as well as to walk humbly with our God.

Social media for the church

2009-12-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend before Thanksgiving in Louisville, at an annual conference that the denomination holds for all presbytery and synod moderators. Most moderators attended, so there was an opportunity to meet others and share something about our various circumstances. We also had an opportunity to visit and tour the denomination's headquarters and meet some of the staff, which I had not previously had a chance to do.

The primary theme of the conference was the impact of technology and social networking sites on the church. This is something about which I knew little and, frankly, in which I had little interest. I don't really feel the need to follow someone's Twitter tweets in order to learn what he or she had for breakfast or what the commute to work was like. I also doubt that I will ever develop a Facebook page (indeed, I've discovered that somebody else with my name already has one). I was probably born an old fogy; I disliked rock music in the 50s, when I was a teenager and it was new, and that dislike has never changed. My wife is often amazed at the popular singers from our youth of whom I've never heard (on the other hand, I'm often surprised at the folk/protest singers from the 60s of whom she hasn't heard). I write with a fountain pen and at times use a Beta VCR and a Dual turntable. In Polonius' phrasing, I'm much more likely to be the last to lay the old aside than to be the first by whom the new is tried.

What I learned from the conference is that I can't let my personal preferences (or, if you prefer, backwardness) keep me from recognizing the role that Twitter, Facebook, and the other popular social networking sites (and the equally popular Blackberries, smartphones, and similar technology) play for many people today, especially those in their 20s and 30s. These are the ways that they communicate, and the church has to find a way to participate in that communication. Bruce Reyes-Chow, the General Assembly moderator who planned this conference (he wasn't able to attend because of a death in his family) is the pastor of a church in San Francisco that uses many of these techniques and, partly as a result, draws heavily from people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Its website is well worth studying for examples that our churches might follow:

http://www.missionbaycc.org/

One thing that I also discovered in a Google search is that there are many positive reviews of the church on the San Francisco edition of Yelp.com (a site of which I had never heard). Those reviews apparently led some people to the church.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/mission-bay-community-church-san-francisco

When I looked at the Yelp.com Portland site I found very few reviews of any church and none of a Presbyterian church, although the site lists most or all of the Presbyterian churches in the Portland area. Churches with reviews come at the head of the list of churches. Are we missing out on something here?

The conference described many uses of social networking; the following are just a few. Youth pastors can follow their teens' Twitter feeds, both learning what the teens are thinking and, at times, recognizing needs for pastoral help long before they would otherwise learn of them. Parishioners can tweet comments on a sermon that then appear on a screen next to the pastor, in a way an updated version of the traditional African-American vocal congregational response; among other things, this gives the pastor a chance to respond immediately to how the congregation is receiving the sermon. A Facebook page can be a way to send e-mails to all those who follow it. A church or pastor who follows on-line conversations in the community can find ways to hook into those conversations and present Christian thinking about the subject under discussion. That seems particularly useful in our heavily secular area, where Christian (or any religious) thinking doesn't come automatically to many people. A church can post its activities on Facebook or YouTube, where others may find them (of course, being careful to protect privacy, especially of children).

For a church to use these resources would require careful strategic thinking and a willingness to get involved in things that for many of us may seem strange or even unsettling. However, revitalizing our churches is likely to require them to be willing to look for the strange and unsettling; the familiar and comfortable ways aren't doing the job. I hope that at least some will look into these social media further. I conclude with two of Bruce Reyes-Chow's discussions of social media and the church and a site that provides suggested guidelines for using them.

http://www.reyes-chow.com/2009/08/church-social-media.html

http://www.reyes-chow.com/2009/03/top-10-ways-technology-can-kill-the-church.html

http://churchcrunch.com/12-tips-for-developing-a-social-networking-policy-and-usage-guidelines-for-your-church/

The Vision Thing

2009-11-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

Two presentations at the recent Presbytery meeting focused on church renewal. Both presentations used similar material, and each emphasized that for a church to develop and maintain its vitality it must have a vision that drives everything that it does. It is not enough to have programs or to develop relationships among members; those programs and relationships must serve a purpose, and the church must know what that purpose is. Our churches do many things--among others, they provide for the public worship of God, education for adults and children, and opportunities for fellowship, they support those who experience difficult times, and they serve their communities and the world. Each of these things is important in itself, but the church needs a unifying vision of its ultimate purpose in order to know how they relate to each other. Without a vision, every separate thing that we do stands on its own, and the whole cannot survive.

Many organizations, of course, sense the need for a vision in order to understand what they are doing; in business circles it has become a cliche. The difference for us is that we do not need to create a vision of our own; we need to discover the vision that we have been given. Each church, in its own way, needs to understand, accept, and act on the vision that Jesus has given us. That vision, in short, is to be Christ's body on earth and, with His help, to work for the coming of the Kingdom of God. This may not be our first thought as we think about our churches' purposes, but it should be. As Harold Kurtz pointed out a year ago, in reflecting on the results of an exercise on "Who Jesus Is" at the November 2008, Presbytery meeting,

we have neglected the central teaching of Jesus—the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus used our word for “church” three times in the Gospels and the Kingdom over one hundred times. In what we read and hear in Christian circles that is almost reversed—the “church” used one hundred times and the Kingdom three! The Kingdom needs to come to every aspect of our communities and of the world. That is the prayer Jesus taught us. Jesus has given us an overwhelming agenda but we have focused too much on the internal church operation and our personal lives. Jesus was concerned about those but in the context of His major agenda--bringing the Kingdom to this world. This distortion began centuries ago and became focused in the Holy Roman Empire. We are still living under that shadow and don’t realize it. That Empire co-opted the Church for its nationalistic interests and the church of the western world still puts nationalism above the Kingdom.

http://www.cascadespresbytery.org/Who_Jesus_Is.pdf at 18-19

As Jesus and the prophets have shown, and as our rituals proclaim, God's Kingdom is one of love, peace, and justice. That is the vision that we need to apply to everything that we do. Jesus has told us in some detail how we are to live with each other in other in peace and in love, including how we are to attempt to resolve the inevitable disputes that will arise among fallible humans. He has also made clear that the purpose for our doing so is not ourselves alone but so that we may be a light to the world. We take care of each other in good times and bad not for internal institutional reasons but because by doing so we give the world an example of the Kingdom in action. We educate ourselves and our children so that we may learn what God wants us to do in the world and be prepared to do it. We reach out into the world because that is where we find needs that we can alleviate--and where we find injustices that we must challenge. In short, our churches do not exist for the purpose of maintaining their institutional structures but in order that we may use those structures to show the Kingdom to the world and to bring it closer to fruition. Without a vision of the Kingdom and our place in it, our churches cannot understand what they should be doing. If our churches do not understand what they should be doing, they cannot prepare to do it. Vision is not only essential, it must be the vision that we have received, not one that we create on our own.

Transcendence in a scientific world

2009-10-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

In my previous posts I discussed popular distortions of Christianity that create barriers that make it difficult for us to communicate our faith to many people. There is another pervasive aspect of modern culture that has the same effect, not by distorting our faith but by leaving no room for it. We are all aware of how our society has become increasingly secular over the last 200 years, but the problem I want to discuss is more specific: it is the loss of the sense of the transcendent--the sense of the sacred, the sense of awe, the sense that there are forces outside of and greater than the physical world that we inhabit. That sense, it seems to me, is the foundation of any religious experience; without it there is nothing for Christianity or any other religion to do that secular forces cannot do as well.

I have always experienced the transcendent most forcefully while close to the natural world, hiking and camping in places where I feel in close contact with creation itself. With the author of Psalm 8, I look at the heavens and am overwhelmed with the immensity and beauty of what God has done. Yet I also know what the Psalmist could not have known--that there is a solid scientific explanation of how our universe and its inhabitants developed into what we see today. The mountain crags that thrill me, after all, are the results of uplift and erosion that have occurred over millions of years and are still occurring, and their very stones consist of vast numbers of infinitesimally small electrical charges organized in complex but explicable ways. This ability to explain the physical world scientifically can destroy all sense of transcendence.

I have a friend, a militant scientific atheist, who as a college student attended a memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr., immediately after his assassination. During the service he felt a sense that his life would be well spent if he personally remained obscure but, as a result, King's goals of justice were achieved. The sense came to him almost as a call. Since then he has explained that feeling as simply the strange workings of his brain; I would say that for a short period he let himself be open to the transcendent but that his defense mechanisms were strong enough to overcome it. I suspect that many people have had similar experiences and have similarly learned to ignore them.

How then, can we explain a sense of the transcendent to a scientific world? I find the answer in the story of Moses and the burning bush. When God sought to call Moses, He appeared to him in a bush that burned but was not consumed--that is, a bush that could burn eternally. God let Moses know that the place where that bush burned was sacred ground; through it Moses was in touch with eternity, not the time and space in which he lived and in which we live. The bush was outside Moses' existence and our existence, just as God is outside Moses' existence and our existence. The God of the bush does not exist as we think of existence--and as the currently popular militant atheists want us to think of it--because God created existence itself. God is eternal; this universe, no matter how long it has existed or may exist, is transitory. God was God before the universe existed and will be God after it is no more. There can be no scientific proof or disproof of God's existence because what science studies is the world that God created, not that world's creator.

When God comes to us it is as the eternal breaking into our time and space, not as another being in time and space. For Christians that eternity broke into time and space most completely in the form of Jesus the Christ--Jesus, a man who had all the limitations of human existence but whom we also identify with the Christ, one aspect of the triune God. The sense of transcendence that I experience in the natural world, and that others may experience in very different ways, is the sense that makes us sensitive to those times when the eternal attempts to break into our lives. We need to cherish it in ourselves and others. Most importantly, we need to learn how to develop it--a connection with the eternal God, not some vague mushy spirituality--in those with whom we come in contact and who might join with us in our churches.

Another barrier: Christian morality

2009-09-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

In my experience another significant barrier to communicating with non-Christians about our faith and its meaning for the modern world is the popular belief that when Christians refer to morality they are really concerned with only a few sexual issues. Non-Christians often do not think that Christians have anything to say about poverty, environmental degradation, or war and peace.

When I was younger people knew better. At that time the media, and through it the general public, was full of examples of the breadth of Christian moral thinking and action. Christians such as Martin Luther King, Jr., were often in the news--and were highly controversial--because of their fight for civil rights and efforts against poverty and because of their opposition to war. Others, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, had a profound influence on the thinking of opinion leaders. Whether one agreed with them or not, few people would have been surprised by the assertion that justice was at the heart of Christian faith and morality.

Today, however, the broader culture has forgotten Niebuhr and has tamed King, so that all we know about him is a small, feel-good portion of one speech. Instead, for the past thirty years those who most loudly claimed to speak for Christian values have limited themselves to denouncing abortion and homosexuality and promoting a highly patriarchal view of the family. That is all that many non-Christians can bring to mind today when they think about Christian morality.

Yet throughout these years we Presbyterians have continued to feed the needy through our churches and the One Great Hour of Sharing, have continued to support peacemaking through our actions and offerings, and have continued to call for a just society through the thoughtful statements of the General Assembly and other actions, including, locally, our participation in Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. We have a variety of perspectives on the hot-button sexual issues, and we certainly have had and still have our difficulties over them, but unlike the stereotypes we have not forgotten the rest of the Gospel. Our understanding of the Bible and our confessions leads us to focus on all aspects of human relationships, seeking always that they reflect God's love and God's justice. We know that Jesus spent much more time talking about our use of our money and our relationships with each other than about sex, and that He told us that we will be judged primarily by how we treat the poor and the outcast, the least of His brethren. We remember that at the very beginning of His ministry He adopted the prophetic tradition, with its call for public policies and private actions that promote justice for the oppressed, as his own.

My question is similar to the one in my previous post: in a secular society that in recent years has heard only a distorted version of Christian morality, how do we get across the full nature of the Christian understanding of personal and social morality, including its call for justice for all. The experience of my congregation suggests that, when we are able to do that, we will find new members coming to join us.

For further consideration, I include links to "A Social Creed for the Twenty-First Century," which the General Assembly adopted in 2008, and to the website for Sojourners, an evangelical organization that promotes social justice.

http://www.pcusa.org/acswp/pdf/ga218summary.pdf

http://www.sojo.net

The moderator of the Presbytery of the Cascades shares his thoughts

2009-07-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

Introducing Robert Bulkley - the new moderator for 2009-2010.

Let me begin these thoughts by expressing my appreciation for the opportunity to be the moderator of this presbytery. I have been involved in various presbytery activities for over twenty years and have gained a great deal of respect for its members, churches, and staff. It is an honor to be chosen to preside for the next year.

In this blog I intend to raise some issues that are facing the presbytery in the hope of stimulating a useful discussion. I will start with an aspect of what I think is the primary issue facing the presbytery: the steady decline in the membership of most of its churches. I will not deal with such issues as church organization, music, or methods for reaching people; the presbytery is already working on those things and at this point I don't have anything to add. Rather, I want to focus on barriers that popular misunderstandings of Christianity place on our ability to bring people into conversation with us.

If my personal experience is any guide, the most significant barrier may be the popular misunderstanding that Christians must accept the creation stories of the early chapters of Genesis as literally true, thereby denying biological evolution and the big bang theory, among other scientific concepts. That misunderstanding leads to the necessary corollary that Christians must deny not only many of the fundamental discoveries of modern science but the scientific method itself as a way of learning about the physical world. Many thoughtful people--encouraged by proselytzing atheists like Richard Dawkins who have no understand of the Bible--reject the Christian message with no further inquiry because it appears to require them to check their brains at the door.

Of course we know that our church finds scientific discoveries to be fully compatible with a proper understanding of the creation stories. The old northern church essentially resolved the issue during the 1930s, while the old southern church took a little longer; the PCUSA website has a copy of its 1969 statement on the subject:

http://www.pcusa.org/theologyandworship/science/evolution.htm

I've also found two helpful websites created by Christian scientists; the first appears to be directed primarily to mainline Christians, while the second is directed primarily to evangelical Christians:

http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evol_sun.htm
http://www.biologos.org/

The question that I would ask is how we can best get across to the non-Christian culture that, while the Biblical creation stories are fundamental to our understanding of God's relationship to the world and of God's relationship to humanity, at the same time we do not see any conflict between that understanding and the scientific study of the physical world. That seems to me to be a particularly difficult task in the highly secular society in which this presbytery exists, where a few loud voices may be the only contact with Christianity that many people have. I look forward to your thoughts.

Posted by Robert Bulkley

A Last Word

2009-06-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

This is my last blog in the moderator's spot. I want to thank all those folks who have attended our meetings of the Presbytery of the Cascades over the past year, and give my best wishes to Robert Bulkley, who was elected our moderator at the meeting on Saturday. It was my privilege to serve, and to feel the warm fellowship and good wishes of our gathered people of God.

It is difficult to negotiate a meeting of nearly 120 congregations, representing over 22,500 members. We are a diverse bunch. And we have those times when some folks feel the way to build up Christ's Church is to tear down and defeat other faithful members, many of whom are volunteers and just trying to serve Christ as best we can. As moderator, I had the luxury of approaching meetings from the perspective of process, trusting God's will to win out, rather than taking on the promotion of positions. But then, was it luxury or grace? Perhaps we should all try a more moderatorial position in all of church life: respecting the faith of others, honoring the established processes of our Presbyterian heritage and the collective wisdom they convey, trusting the power of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and reveal truth in order to goodness. If we ever think political maneuvering or our own tactics will bring about God's realm, or even hasten it, we are dishonoring Christ's call to humility. We are called to love, privileged to serve, and blessed when we can appreciate, those people who see things differently than we do.

Or, in the words of a bumper sticker I saw on the way to the meeting, “Bark less; wag more.”

I continue to pray for our Presbytery staff and the people they represent, pray for our denomination that we may be ever more faithful and bold in proclamation of the Gospel, pray for this world that needs to hear the Gospel in the unique voice that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) offers. Let anyone with ears, listen. Let those who do not, find eventual blessing, as God's own will inevitably be found.

Posted by Chris Grewe, moderator 2008-2009

To Our Very Good Health

2009-06-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

As we prepare to gather once again in Christ’s Name in the Presbytery of the Cascades, I am again aware of the power of prayer. We incline our hearts with petitions to God; it is a deeply personal thing. We open our hearts to hear God; it is a hopeful thing. We join our hearts in mutual caring; it is a community thing. On Sunday at Savage Memorial, we were talking about health care, and asking, is our church a center of health in people’s lives? That is our hope.

In the Presbytery, we are in the spirit of Christ’s body when we gather in healthy, hopeful, up-lifting ways. That does not mean we should not be realistic. It does mean we can and should work together, and care for one another’s health, and celebrate each other’s diverse gifts and witness. In fact, we can only do that – together.

In prayers for Shalom ~

Standin' in the Need

2009-05-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

I have been holding our church, the PC (U.S.A.), in particular prayers recently. I have asked for prayers before our Presbytery meetings, and I pray daily for Savage Memorial and Cascades Presbytery, too.
Today, I would ask about your prayers. What are your hearts bringing before God in relation to Christ's church, particularly the Presbyterian Church?

I pray that we would be faithful, to be the people God would have us be, and, as a church, to do the work God would have us do. I pray, not for work equal to our energies, but for the energy in the Holy Spirit to do what God wills. I pray for the people I know, working in faith, and all the people they represent, and the great cloud of folks I do not know. I pray for myself, that I would appreciate the privilege of participating in the miraculous, wonder-filled, creative work of God in the world. O, what a foretaste of glory divine!

What is your prayer?

Lift Up Your Voice

2009-04-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Palm leaves and flowers on every way appear...
Break thou the bread of life, dear Lord, to me...
Mine, mine was the transgression, but thine the deadly pain...
The wonders of redeeming love, and my unworthiness...
Lift high the Cross, the love of Christ proclaim...
Sing we to our God above, praise eternal as God's love...
For Christ the Lord is risen, our joy that hath no end.

Through this Holy Week, may God bless you in the beauty of our shared faith.

How Long, O Lord

2009-03-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

How Long Ago?
I did not blog after the last Presbytery meeting in Salem. Perhaps I was feeling time and perspective were good things to weigh-in. (Plus, we took some Lenten time off, headed to the Oregon Coast, and worshiped at the beautiful Pioneer Presbyterian Church on the Clatsop Plains in Warrenton. What wonderful, well-respected history, and what warm and welcoming worshipers!)

So, I do feel the Presbytery meeting went well. There were some tough spots, to be sure, and places where I might have moderated more or less, or jumped in differently or more quickly, but over-all, I hope everyone felt respected and their positions heard. We need to be able to continue to hear from one another.

I did come away with the distinct opinion that, now as much as ever, we need each other. When we became Presbyterians, however long ago that was, we did not agree on everything. We probably never will. But in all our errors and diversity, we do reflect the need and diversity of the world. And we are strengthened in our diversity. We can learn from each other, even about ourselves; we are reminded that we are not perfect, that we all need humility, that the ideals of peace and significant mission and our servant call in Christ Jesus, often beyond our comprehension, is more important than the disagreements we can comprehend.

I told our kids in worship last week that, when we give, particularly to One Great Hour of Sharing, we enter into relationship with other people. And God delights in those relationships.
I think that holds true, too, when we give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Spirit, Fall Afresh

2009-03-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -- Albert Schweitzer

As you read this, I hope you have been praying for our presbytery and the up-coming meeting in Salem. If you haven't, start now! Yes, presbytery meetings can be a time to re-kindle the spirit about which Schweitzer spoke. We pray that God's Holy Spirit may rest upon us, guiding and empowering us together. We pray that the love of Jesus Christ will unite us, and that we can demonstrate that love to the world, and to each other. We pray that God's Church, in the Presbytery of the Cascades, the PC(U.S.A.), and in your congregation, will be given worthy work to do, that we can participate in God's amazing creative power, and that we may see the Church as a place of hope for a world that today so profoundly needs hope.
Amen?

Inauguration - What Did You Feel?

2009-01-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

I watched with pride the inauguration of Barack Obama today. I would be interested to hear how you felt about it, and in particular, the prayers by Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery. Many people have said that, as a secular country, it was not a place for religion of any kind. As you might guess, I disagree.

Keeping the new president in my prayers, I remain
Moderately Yours

Why There Is Not Nothing

2008-12-18T10:41:00.000-08:00

The atheist posterboard display in the capitol building in Washington (our Washington, not D.C.) got me to thinking. Many folks were incensed about having such a statement slamming religion at the "most wonderful time of the year" for Christians. Mostly, I feel sad for atheists. Sure, I wish they would not feel the need to express their brand of faith, or lack thereof, in this season, but I understand the attention value. I wish they would promote their own position without slamming religion, all religion, as "but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

O.K., there's no need to be rude. They say they offered the display because they wanted a "place at the table." Perhaps they need better table manners.

But I feel sad for atheists because they will always have a "God-shaped hole" (thank you, Thomas Troeger) in their lives. And that leaves it to us to make them envious of our faith. I do not necessarily want to rub the secular Christmas trappings and wrappings in their noses. They can call it "saturnalia" and get presents and run up credit card debt, too. But a personal God who knows our trials and joys is an inexpressible gift. If we can come together in this season engendering some hope and peace, love and joy in our hearts, I would hope atheists do not have a problem with that.

A classic question in the face of atheism comes from some vein of German theologians; it asks, ‘why is there not nothing?' I believe our answer tells our concept of the nature of God and Christ. There is more to life than simply what we can see and explain. In this season, I think Christians get to have more up-lifting answers than questions. And, it can be hoped, the faith we share overshadows our differences.

I wish you the blessings of family and faith community in this Advent and Christmastide.

Moderators' Conference

2008-11-24T16:03:00.000-08:00

Have just gotten home from the Moderators' Conference in Louisville. Started with training in Parliamentary Procedure, led by Gradye Parsons and Joyce Lieberman. Very helpful. The bulk of the time was led by the office of Middle Governing Bodies. We began with worship in the Chapel of the Presbyterian Center, led by a Unity Choir of folks who work at the Center, and we ended with worship led by the vice-moderator of the General Assembly, Byron Wade. (The moderator was with his family after the tragic murder of his brother-in-law in California.) Closing worship also featured a praise band with a Kentucky twang – banjo, fiddle, drums and some percussion piece that looked like a crate with a hand-print on it! By my count, there were about 100 presbytery and synod moderator-types registered, and maybe 25 others. The youngest participant was about 6 months old, a future moderator from Blackhawk Presbytery.

It was all very up-lifting and a vivid reminder that we are not alone. The conclusion of the angel's message to the shepherds – Be not afraid – is the Christmas message of Emanuel. We are not alone; God is with us all. I really appreciate this time and experience on your behalf.

Presbytery Meeting Epilogue

2008-11-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

So, I felt quite good about the spirit of the Presbytery meeting in Portland this weekend. True, we dismissed two congregations to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, but unlike the closing of churches, these folks will continue in ministry (and in history), and, it is to be hoped, in participation in a wider church that is more genuine for them. Anytime Christians can be more positive in their relationship with the wider Church, I believe the blessings will abound.

The other lingering impression I am left with (thus lingering) is that we have the gifts that God has given us, not gifts that God has not given to us. We might wish for more or different people in the church; more or different finances or sized churches; more or different talents. That is not what we have. And we can and should celebrate what we do have, because they are gifts from God. The stewardship questions is, now what are we going to do? How do we treat those talents, dollars, people, today and into tomorrow?

The spirit I felt at the Presbytery meeting was one of respect, gratitude and genuine, if often quiet, joy. We appreciate where we are. And we trust that where we are going, together, is where God wants us to be.

And When My Race Is O'er

2008-10-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

The story is told about Winston Churchill, who was waiting on a platform outdoors to make a political speech. Crowds had packed the streets to hear him, and the chairwoman of the proceedings leaned over to him and said, "Doesn't it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to see all those people out there who came just to see you?"
Churchill replied, "It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way, I always remember that if, instead of making a political speech I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big."

Humility is a wonderful virtue, and particularly at this time of year, for politicians. As we cast our votes, and encourage our fellow church members to cast theirs, I hope that humility is a watchword for all. I believe one reason that churches should never endorse individual candidates from the pulpit is that no person, not even Churchill, was or is immune to corruption. I am amazed at the scrutiny that our politicians have to endure. In one sense, that is good, because anyone could succumb to the kind of temptations Sen. Ted Stevens allegedly indulged. Yet in another sense, who would put themselves and their families through all that?

Let us all be humble and kind next week in victory, thankful for those who chose to run and lost, loyal and supportive of those opponents who prevailed, and prayerful that the winners will be righteous and respectful of all their constituents.

Remembering Isaiah Jones

2008-10-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

My Friend Isaiah Jones

How many people could share that sentiment? How many of us felt the loss of that unique harmony stilled when we heard of the death of The Rev. Dr. Isaiah Jones on September 21, after 68 short but full years?

I met Isaiah during his 14 year call as campus minister to Oregon State University, where he directed the Inner Strength Gospel Choir. But I got to know him after he left Cascades Presbytery, and we served together on the Alumni Council of San Francisco Theological Seminary. When we would plan worship when Isaiah was on the Council, our first question was always, will there be a piano in the room? Isaiah's music added heart to worship and drew people together as those resonant strains of vibrant hymns are wont to do.

Hearing him offer "Fill My Cup," you knew you could never get it right in just the same way, yet you wanted to sing it all the time nonetheless.

I think Isaiah's music was just one component of a spirit that genuinely connected with people. His gravelly voice and warm smile were full of hospitality and joy. Young people responded to his vision and leadership. When he called you "brother," it was not just a convention or pleasantry; it was a genuine expression of that connection in the human family. I like to think ministry and the Church added a new dimension to God's call in his life that his glorious music alone could not fulfill.

His body may have given out, but his spirit and those connections ring on. All our cups are fuller because of the life of The Rev. Isaiah Jones.

I am new at this blogging thing, but it seemed like Isaiah's passing warranted notice and welcomed comment from others touched by his life and music.

A memorial will be held in Corvallis at First Presbyterian on Sunday, October 19, at 3 pm. More info is available at pcusa.org and on our Presbytery's website. We invite your responses and remembrances in this Moderator's blog spot.