May 18, 1991
Morgan Park Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Centennial Celebration
John M. Buchanan

I am delighted to be here. It is always a
privilege to be 4 guest at someone else's family
occasion, and Sue and I are honored to be with you
and to be able to convey the very best wishes of
the congregation of Fourth Presbyterian Church.

There are at Teast two very valuable current
connections between Morgan Park Presbyterian Church
and Fourth Presbyterian Church.

Johnny Tolbert (an Elder and leader in this
congregation Jis the Director of the Elam Davies
Social Service Center and a valuable colleague
and...

Jon Krogh, who worked at Fourth Presbyterian
Church in a variety of ways as a student, directed

the Tutoring Program, Taid groundwork for expansion

of the concept - Jots of affection for Jon and a
cont inuing relationship of respect and mutuality.
I'm glad he's here!

It is an important occasion, one hundred
years - a big birthday,

Birthdays are fun in our household, a time
for festivities and gifts and also a time always to
tell the story. We're sti] doing it. telling each
youngster how it was when they were born.

And part of what inevitably happens when you
do that is that everybody begins to see the larger
story, the story of a bigger extended family, of
which this individual story is 4 part.

And that, as I understand my assignment, is
what Jon wants me to do tonight. He was precise...
well not exactly: his instructions ran to about
four pages. But he was very precise about duration
— speak about fifteen-twenty minutes.

So the larger story of which the story of the
Morgan Park Presbyterian Church of Chicago,
Illinois, U.S.A., in the 20th century, is 4 part.

Close your eyes.. and listen to these names:
Abraham Lincoin, Graver Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson,
Owisht Eisenhower, William Jenning Bryan, Norman
Thomas, John Foster Dulles; John Wanamaker, Andrew
Mellon, George Westinghouse, Thomas Watson,
Frederick Weyerhauser, Louis Severance, Cyrus and
Nettie McCormick... McGuffey, whose readers define
an era in education, Poet Marianne Moore, Karl
Menninger, publishers Gilbert Hovey (National
Geographic), Henry R. Luce (Time), DeWitt
Wallace (Readers Digest); Justices William 0.
Douglas and Tom Clark; Generals Stonewall Jackson
and George MacClellan: J. Howard Pew and John Glenn
and Arnold Palmer and John Dancy and Mr. Rogers and
Dean Rusk and Catherine Marshal} and Orel
hershiser... all of them intentional Presbyterians,
Tike salt of the earth, Jeaven in the loaf and on
occasion, light in the darkness.

In May 21, 1789, thirty-four Presbyterians
met in Philadelphia and decided that they were a

national organization... the Presbyterian Church.

They represented 420 congregations scattered
throughout the new nation and its frontier.
Together they were the largest, best educated, most
orderly church in the new world. They had a strong
sense that they were a part of the new era in world
history which was coming to pass with the birth of
the American Republic. and so they dated the
documents from that meeting, not May 1789, but “In
the thirteenth year of the Independence of the
United States of America.” They had been there
from the beginning. Two Presbyterian churches.
established in 1640, were alreaty nearly 150 years
old in 1789.

Qur story begins in the 16th Century when an
exiled French Tawyer, a partisan of the
Reformation, stopped overnight in Geneva,
switzerland, and was persuaded to remain and
reorganize the churches and the city. His name was
John Calvin and his radical notion of church, state
and the individual included the absolute

sovereignty of God and therefore the limited

sovereignty of every other authority. Calvin said
two things about the individual: one - we are
sinners, against which no one has ever successfully .
argued, and second - that in spite of sin, the
conscience of the individual is sacred. People
need and should have rights ~ and also education.
Finally, Calvin believed in the intersection of
faith and life in the world, in the city streets,
marketplace and body politic. Because he
understood human nature so honestly, Calvin
distrusted af] authority and thought that the best
guarantee against the abuse of authority was
education and a political system of checks and
balances.

One of his most ardent disciples was a
scotsman, John Knox, who took Calvin's ideas back
to Ectinburgh. And as Calvinists always do, he
challenged the autocracy and the whole political
establishment, including Mary Queen of Scots; and
ultimately built those radical Presbyterian ideas

into the soul of the nation and the Church of
Scotland which is Presbyterian.

They came earty to the New World... 1620.
The Puritans were English Calvinists, dissenters
from church and state. The Scots and Scotch-Irish
from Northern Ireland came at the same time and
established the Kirks on Long Island. New York,
Pennsylvania, Delaware. They brought with them
their distrust of authority, but also their notion
of God's sovereignty and individual rights, their
commitment to education and their intention to put
. their religion to work in the public sphere, not
simply in their sparse, lean and very cold
churches. They were strong partisans of the
American Revolution. They recognized the spirit of
Calvin in the rhetoric of the Declaration of
Independence. Over in London the whole thing
sounded Tike a Presbyterian rebeltion... Gne of
our ivinisters rushed into his. church and ripped
pages out of the hymnbooks to use as musket wadding
and said "Give ‘em Watts. boys,” referring to Isaac

Watts, hymnwriter,

The group that met in Phiidelphia in 1789
understood that 7t was time to think anew. The
presiding officer was John Witherspaon, President
of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. To show
his support of the order which was emerging,
Witherspoon and several of the others had stopped
wearing their wigs in 1776. Thirteen years earlier
he had signed his name to the Declaration of
Independence, just two blocks down the street, the
only clergyman to do so.

Witherspoon preached the sermon, then
presided as the Assembly elected one of its own as
Moderator, John Rodgers. Historians sometimes like
to note the similarities between Presbyterian
Church structure and the Federal Government. In
fact two years earlier, in the same city, meetings
were held just two blocks apart in which the
concepts were hammered out which resulted in the
Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the structure
of the National Presbyterian Church. The central

issue for both groups was the matter of authority:

who gets it, how it is to be exercised and how
~Timited or controlled. Both chose a strong central
authority, but limtted by checks and balances and
Jocal autonomy: neither a monarchy, king nor
bishops, which they had enough of, nor a pure
democracy - but something in between, a Republic.
And then the Presbyterians went to work.
They appointed a few missionaries to organize
churches on the frontier: they commissioned
several representatives to open discussions with
other Christian churches, they had a fierce
argument about a hymnal, they discussed the schools
and colleges they had founded and they composed a
letter to the President of the United States,
George Washington. Calvinists that they were, they
presumed not only to speak to their congregations,
they spoke for the church to the world, always very
risky business. "We ought not to forget our
consequence in the Republic." they said. It is one

of our traditions.

Presbyterian values have been like seasoning
in the Targer context of American culture. We have
never been as prominent numerically as we were jn
1789, there are three million of us in 11,600
congregations, but we have always been a critical minority,
a lively source of flavor for the rest of the
culture: (the source of my concern!)

-Education, for instance. It had its source
in our early notion that Tay people should not have
toe depend on anyone to tell them what was in the
Bible, so it was imperative that people read and
understand. Calvinists dominated both private and
Public education, founding two-thirds of all the
colleges and universities prior te the Civil War:
Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, by New England
Congregationalists, and by the Presbyterians
themselves: Princeton, Lafayette, Hampcen-Sydney,
Washington and Lee, Stillman, Lewis and Clarke,
Davidson, Maryville, Wooster, Lake Forest, Wabash,
Hanover, Monmouth, Muskingum, Macalester... Many

state universities were started by Presbyterians:

Urriversity of Delaware, University of Tennessee,
Miami University, University of Michigan.

—The deliberative process as a fairly
dependable way to establish consensus and thereby
the basis for responsible people to live together.
Presbyterian Ethicist, Don Shriver, said ina
discussion of the abortion debate, and the other
ethical dilemmas lurking jn the near future such as
genetic engineering, that we must recover the
tradition of careful deliberation and compromise -
instead of the currently fashionable approach of
confrontation followed by shouting at one another
through bull horns, utterly unwilling to grant that
the other side's position may have some merit.

~The intersection of religion and life, there
from the beginning. It is expressed ina
centuries’ old pattern of doing good in the world —
which by some odd Togic is spurned today so that
"do-gooder" is a criticism rather than a
compliment... Presbyterian hospitals, nursing

homes, residences for the elderly, 28 Presbyterian

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homes for children in trouble. We are “do-
gooders."

~And of course, that matter of "God alone as —
Lord of the conscience";... It has often made us
dissenters. Calvin and Knox were dissenters; they
did not live easily with the establishment. One of
our earliest preachers was thrown in jat1 for
preaching in New York without a license and we've
been doing it ever since. Elijah Parish Lovejoy
was a Presbyterian editor of a St. Louis newspaper,
burned out by a pro-slavery mob and later ki7jed by
another mob in Alton, I]linois for his anti-slavery
editorializing. Henry Van Dyke risked his prestige
and reputation by vaicing a lonely protest against
the Spanish-American War. Bill Coffin did the same
during Viet Nam. No Presbyterian my age or older
was not asked at least once during the sixties if
he/she would ever engage in civil disobedience and
often lost career opportunities, because in
conscience no son or daughter of John Calvin can

ever say "no" to that.

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-And because we know about sin ~- including
our Own - a tong standing value hes been
toleration, openness. We are willing to admit our
mistakes, a refusal to take ourselves too
seriously, because we know in our hearts that God
alone is sovereign. Even at our most belligerent
We never Claimed to be the only church, the only
answer to the truth, or the only way to worship or
express the faith.

I submit that the world needs those values
Which have been born and nurtured by the
Presbyterian family.

We Presbyterians are down 25%, the United
Church of Christ 20%, the Episcopalians 28%; even
the Methodists are down 18%, Our best minds are
exploring the change. The
Lily Foundation is funding a major study of the
decline of mainvine religions.

We have lost members — a miition in twenty
years; but there are two facts about us which are

important to acknowledge. The first is that since

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1960 Presbyterians have not been having enough
babies. Some of us have done our duty, but
currently we aren't coming close to replenishing
the supply of Presbyterians by birth, nor does it
seem likely that we will or should. That isn't
true for everyone in the Christian family. Not
making new Presbyeterians, lowering the birth rate
and limiting population is an honored Presbyterian
value.

The other fact is that we are old. We've
been around a long time. Our churches are old, in
old neighborhoods. And that, by some ironic twist
of logic, is not only not celebrated, but condemned
as failure. There are many declining Presbyterian
churches in urban areas, They have given their
lives to the spiritual nurture of their
neighborhoods which have changed very dramatically.
They are stil] there, with declining numbers, aging
congregation and leaking roofs. It is not fair to
compare that church with Willow Creek,

That dear aging Presbyterian congregation

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was there, faithfully caring for its members and
its neighborhood, for decades; Presbyterian
churches were there centuries before the new, fast-
growing churches were even born and it is part
of our values to remain there. The 80 aging
parishioners in downtown are important.
They are ours. They should have a church. So we
will remain there and in the changing, declining
neighborheeds, faithfully in ministry, creating
programs to deal with a variety of human needs that
simply don't exist anywhere else. And it will
drain our resources to do it. May I suggest that
instead of criticizing, instead of regarding
declining urban neighborhood churches as failures,
we should be cheering for them, thanking God for
them, anc regarding them as great successes - if
the criteria of success is something other than big
numbers, big budgets, big buildings.

May we be reminded of one of
the most difficult lessons for anyone who loves

this wonderful entrepreneurial culture of ours,

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namely that the church of Jesus Christ is not
Called to be successful, but to be faithful,
whether or not that means successful: may we be
reminded that sometimes failing, by the culture's
standards, means succeeding by our Lord's
standards, that our Lord himself was crucified, not
elected Chancellor of Jerusalem; that the whole
point seems to be redemption through suffering,
strength through weakness; and that when God's
People start allowing the world to set the agenda
and to define what success means we have fallen
‘into a very serious trap of idolatry; for which
the prophets of Israel had a very graphic
description: "whoring after Babylon,” they called
it.

In the meantime jt is tempting to ook to the
past only. Presbyterian journalist, Vic Jameson warns that,
"It ‘is safe to say that every generation since Adam
has: looked back wistfutly at the good old days."
{Presbyterian Survey, June 1988] The fifties, for

instance, before Civil Rights and Angela Davis and

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the turmoil and stress of the sixties. But God
calls us to Took ahead — not behind.

There is within the Gospel of Jesus Christ a
permanent discomfort with the status quo, the
establishment, the "tradition," even religious
tradition, It is part of the genius of
Presbyterianism, even while it is celebrating its
own traditions, to know that, and therefore, to
lean into the future with hope, which I propose
should be the theme finally of this celebration -
the future ~ the next century ~ the continuing
story of the church God continues to write.

You have important work to do. You have a
continuing witness to make about God's presence in
the world simply by maintaining your church,
keeping it up and alive and visible — a reminder
every day of another kingdom.

You have important work to do in keeping
alive notions which are not always popular, but are
always critical to the life of society - notions of

caring and compassion and justice.

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We have a Tot going for us... this big story
of Presbyterianism which itself is one smal] part
of a much larger story of God's people and their
Pilgrimage through history.

We have going for us those values handed down
from one genertion to the next - education -
tolerance — public responsibility.

And we have going for us the promise of God
and be with us - to give you - you in this family
of faith. in this time and this place ~ the
resources you heed to be faithful disciples in a
faithful church.

Congratulations people of Morgan Park
Presbyterian Church and God speed as you begin your

second cerrtury.

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