Aown

Eugene Carson Blake, the Pastor

by John M. Buchanan

LAST APRIL! WASIN ONE OFTHE BUILDINGS
which flank the street just outside the Plaza
of St. Peter, in Rome, on the third floor, inthe
offices of the Pontifical Secretariat for Chris-
tian Unity. My mind and emotions were
alternating between “What in the world am
| doing here?” and “t wish my father and
mother could see me now!” and a fairly
moving sense of the historicity of the whole
experience. What | was doing there was
representing the 208th General Assembly of
the Presbyterian Church (U,5.A.), which had

‘elected me its moderator, paying an ecu-

menical visit to the Vatican. Our party con-
sisted of my wife, Sue, Eugene Turner from
the Office of the General Assembly, our
chief ecumenical officer, Duncan Hanson,
our Coordinator for Mission in Europe,
Debbie Vial from our Peacemaking office,
and myself. The next day we would be
special guests at a papal audience and did,
in fact, bring the greetings of the Presbyte-
rian Church (U.S.A,) to Pope John Paul 1.
This day we were guests of the Pontifical
Secretariat for Christian Unity and we were
invited to exchange ideas with the director,
Cardinal Cassidy, the vice director, Monsi-
gnor DuPray, and the secretary, Father John
Radono, an American.

Aswewere usher doirtye hallway to
the conference room p Fow of photo-

graphs of important ecumenical moments at

the Vatican, John Radono pointed to one of
the pictures and said, “That’s one of our
favorites.” Of course. There he was, Geneva
gown and tabs, walking ina procession with
Pope Paul VI, flashing that winsome and
familiar smile, the stated clerk of the United
Presbyterian Church, Eugene Carson Blake.

I never met Eugene Carson Blake. In fact
i somehow managed to be ordained without
really understanding what) had just become
part of and didn’t know we had a stated
clerk, ora Genera! Assembly for that matter.
But it wasn’t long, the time being the early
sixties, until 1 became deeply and proudly
aware of my church. And it was Blake who
did it. 1 often reflect on the fact that | was
never more in love with my church than |
was in the days when Presbyterians were
stepping up and assuming leadership in the
civil rights movement. Itwas when | became
a Presbyterian truly, by choice and convic-
tion. Although 1 had been born, baptized,
confirmed, and now ordained one, | truly
became a Presbyterian when my church
started to take strong public stands for racial
justice. And | was never more proud than |
was on the day I saw the newspaper picture
of a Presbyterian minister in clerical collar
and straw hat being arrested at an amuse-
ment park outside Baltimore.

My people were not amused. My Repub-
fican father was appalled and held me per-

Mr, Buchanan is pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicagg, Illinois.

2

journal of Presbyterian History 76:4 (Winter 1998)

GALLEY PROOF

2

sonally accountable. Blake’s arrest was a
defining moment: it gave me—and others—
the opportunity to talk about what it meant
to be publicly faithful to Jesus Christ, and
paying the price of faithfulness, and how
Presbyterians have always shown up in pub-
lic when issues of justice and morality were
being discussed and confronted.

I thought Blake was God—or at least a
very close colleague. If we had a pope or
presiding bishop, he was it for me. | felt the
same way about his successors. | was in awe
of William P. Thompson, and still am; saw
him on an elevator in Phijadelphia one time
in 1976 and was so nervous | could barely
speak. And as | came to know and appreci-
ate fim Andrews, [lost a little of the nervous-
ness and began to see how critical this office
is for us and to be grateful for the kind of
dedication, integrity, and leadership offered
by him, Bill Thompson, and now Clifton
Kirkpatrick. One of my most cherished
memories will be presiding as moderator
over the election of a new clerk and watch-
ing and occasionally being present as Cliff
learned the job and claimed and started to
do it in the distinguished manner of his
predecessors, but with his own winsomely
gentle strength.

Eugene Carson Blake was clearly the
Tight leader at the right time for the Presby-
terian Church and although | am not neutral
on the subject, part of his preparation and
part of the extraordinary gifts he brought to
the job came from his extensive experience
as pastor. A friend of mine, Kenneth Smith,
president of Chicago Theological Seminary,
tells about being invited to leave his pastor-
ate and become a seminary president. He
went to talk to one of his close friends,
Hannah Gray, who was the president and
chancellor of the University of Chicago. He
told Dr. Gray that he was just a pastor and
didn’t know how to run a seminary and she
said, “Ken, if you can run a congregation,
you can run anything,” I’ve come toa similar
conclusion. Ifyou can lead a vigorous, tively,

Journal of Presbyterian History

and complex church, you can lead any-
thing.

Blake’s background prepared him
uniquely for pastoral ministry. His biogra-
pher, R. Douglas Brackenridge, warns, “Bi-
ographers foolish enough to claim that they
have unlocked the door of human personal-
ity and motivation are, unfortunately, also
often foolish enough to believe that what
they write down is always correct.”! 1 am
indebted to Professor Brackenridge for most
of what | learned about Blake, in his fine
biography, Prophet With Portfolio, and also
his extensive interview notes which are on
file with the Presbyterian Historical Society
in Phifadelphia.

Blake was born in 1906 into an inten-
tionally Christian home. His parents be-
longed to the West Presbyterian Church in
St. Louis, and their Presbyterianism was pi-
etistic and fundamentalist. Gene Blake was
energetic and worked hard at whatever he
did, including academics and athletics. He
was blessed to have two parents who Joved
him and who imparted, along with their
piety and fundamentalism, a gracious open-
ness to other peopie, particularly their Jew-
ish neighbors. His people were people of
some means. His father, O. P. Blake, was a
steel salesman and did well enough to be a
dotlar-a-year man for the government dur-
ing the First World War. 1 discovered that
Blake had a Chicago connection when his
father worked at Inland Steel headquarters
in Chicago, 1919-21. His family lived in
Winnetka and Blake attended what was and
still is one of the best and most creative
public secondary schools in the country,
New Trier High School.

Blake finished secondary school at
Lawrenceville and followed his brother
Howard to Princeton University where he
played varsity football, starting at guard asa
senior. He worked hard and earned honor-
able mention on several All East teams in a
day when Ivy League football was among
the best in the land. All his fife Blake was

relentlessly honest about his oven abilities
and committed to getting the estat himself,

At Princeton he was a good student, gradu-

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at ot

GALLEY PROOF

Blake as Pastor

ating cum faude, but did not earn a Phi Beta
Kappa key, which his brother Howard had.
The football experience was hard work as
anyone who has ever competed at a varsity
level knows. He said of himself “I’ve never
been an instant success anywhere, but lam
competitive and persistent”—in my estimate
two qualities more important in the long run
than instant success.”

Princeton broadened Blake and opened
up new intellectual and spiritual vistas, He
horrified his parents by announcing in 1928
that he was voting for Al Smith. Theodore
Meyer Greene, a young assistant professor
of philosophy, inspired Blake to study art, art
criticism, and esthetics. And it was at
Princeton that he first encountered a mind
and spirit which would play a major role in
his later formation, Reinhold Niebuhr, a
chapel preacher. Blake was caught up in the
early stages of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rear-
mament, became disenchanted, and madea
major decision—namely that his religious
energy would be invested in the church. He
said, “From then on 1 decided to be an
organization man—that is to work through
the regular machinery of the organized
church. 1 recognized the importance of vol-
untary groups but decided to concentrate on
supporting and changing existing ecclesias-
tical structures.”?

His personal spiritual journey came to a
crossroads at a Christian conference at
Northfield and he resolved to trust God and
not allow intellectual questions, which con-
tinued all his life, to interfere with that trust.
After graduating from Princeton he accepted
a three year appointment to teach at Forman
College in Lahore, India—now Pakistan. He
learned about Christian missionary activ-
ity—its heroic faithfulness, but also its occa-
sional! negative impact, its cultural and ideo-
logical captivity, and occasional imperialism.

His three-year term was cut short by
love, as he returned to the United States to
marry Valina, Then came a year at New
College, Edinburgh and a growing sense of
call of ministry. It was an interesting time.
Princeton was embroiled in the fundamen-
talist- modernist struggle. New College taught

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3

Blake that warm-hearted Evangelicalism
could combine with the historical/critical
apron te Bible. His fundamentalism
avolved into a kind of conservative ortho-
doxy theologically and biblically, with an
openness to. the world and a commitment to
the gospel’s engagement with the culture.
After a year at New College, Blake returned
to Princeton, entered seminary, and gradu-
ated in 1932, unsatisfied with either liberal-
ism or fundamentalism.

Ordained as an “evangelist,” his first call
was at the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas
in Manhattan, one of a consistory of six
Reformed churches, the oldest Protestant
church in America with a continuous exist-
ence. The Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas
was located at Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth
Street in 1628, on the site of what is now
Rockefeller Center. Blake was fortunate to
work with a distinguished pastor, Dr.
Malcolm James MacLeod, who taught young
Blake how to do it—how to preach. Besides
insisting that Blake write a complete manu-
script, MacLeod himself was a good preacher
and Blake learned by listening (which, par-
enthetically, | have concluded is the only
way anyone learns to preach}. MacLeod
taught him how to be a counselor—a lis-
tener—tong before anyone was talking about
pastoral theology as.an academic discipline.
MacLeod put Blake to work with young
people, a theme that emerges in each of
Blake’s pastorates. And he issued classic
advice which Blake appropriated at every
step of his career: “Be able to call on some
of the best homes on Fifth Avenue and also
to walk up a five floor tenement and always
to conduct yourself as a minister of Christ.”

It was the Great Depression and Blake
saw it first hand: peapte coming to St. Nicho-
las! for food; shops and stores closing; bread
lines; quiet desperation, And he learned the
important lesson that poverty is demeaning,
complex, and dehumanizing. Itwas a theme
that would emerge later. Brackenridge says,
“Blake realized that the problems of poverty
were more complex than hot lunch pro-
grams. The experiences of the Great Depres-
sion permanently affected Blake and needs

GALLEY PROOF

4

of poor people and efforts to overcome
poverty would subsequently always be an
important part of his professional and per-
sonal life.”

In 1935 the young assistant pastor was
called as senior pastor of the First Presbyte-
rian Church of Albany, a congregation of
1200 members, and again he encountered a
distinguished mentor, his predecessor, Wil-
liam Herman Hopkins, Hopkins broke ail
the rules—at least as we understood them.
He sat in the first pew every Sunday as Blake
preached, That doesn’t often work very well
but Blake made it work, visited Hopkins
regularly, consulted, asked his advice, and
the two became good friends. When | read
that { reflected on how difficult we seem to
have made that situation, with our expecta-
tions that our predecessor will either die
immediately or go far away, which for many
is a kind of dying, instead of the positive,
assertive claiming of the predecessor as ad-
visor, consultant, and friend in ministry.

Blake the pastor began to emerge dis-
tinctly in Albany. He would later say that he
never thought of himself as a good pastor,
that he couldn’t focus on peopie’s personal
problems because he was always thinking of
something else. But he made 500 calls his
first year in Albany, something I’ve never
done, and on Fridays he and Valina were at
home from 4 to 6 for visitors from the con-
pregation,

He also started to preach prophetically,
addressing issues of local and national so-
cial and political relevance. This preacher
knows from sometimes painful experience
that you cannot preach prophetically and
keep your job, unless you are also a pretty
good pastor. Preachers who style themselves
as contemporary Amoses often forget that
Amos didn’t have a congregation to tend to
and a session to moderate. In his first year at
Albany, on the Sunday before election day,
Blake attacked jocal political corruption and
told his congregation that they were respon-
sible for it by condoning or ignoring it. Some
were not happy.

He also ended the old system of pew
rentals in opposition to his board of trustees,

Journal of Presbyterian History

who were concerned that there was no other
way to raise money to pay the church’s bills.
Blake listened to their concern, then simply
asked every family to donate the exact
amount of money they had been charged for
their own pew, and met with a near unani-
mous response. I’m sensitive to this issue
because Fourth Presbyterian Church, long
after every other church discontinued the
practice, was still charging pew rent, reserv-
ing pews for renters and making visitors wait
outside until five minutes before the service
in 1960. My predecessor, Elam Davies, ended
the practice, contrary to the wishes of the
trustees, with much the same result. Again
my sense is that prophetic leadership, as
well as prophetic preaching, is much more
possible and effective when the one in-
volved is a trusted pastor.

Blake's interest in youth expressed itself
again creatively at free-wheeling Sunday
night “chats” with young people which were
unusual at the time and highly popular. The
president of Williams College heard Blake
preach, observed his work with young
people, and invited him to teach a course in
ethics and theology at the college, which
Blake did for three years. That experience,
too, | believe, shaped the pastoral focus of
his ministry for the rest of his Hfe.

Also at Williams, looking for a suitable
text to use in a Course on Ethics and Theol-
agy, Blake became reacquainted with the
theologian wham he had heard preach at
the Princeton University Chapel years be-
fore, Reinhold Niebuhr. Blake chose
Niebuhr’s An Interpretation of Christian Eth-
ics, outlined the book paragraph by para-
graph for his classroom lectures, and in the
process became a Niebuhrian. | did not
know that about Blake and I’m glad | now
do. It was Niebuhr, | assume, who gave
Blake the deep and defining conviction that
the gospel has and must always have, politi-
cal, social, economic relevance,

Blake liked Niebuhr’s critique of both
liberalism and fundamentalism and his em-
brace of orthodox Christian doctrine, in-
cluding the authority of scripture, without
embracing fundamentalism. Once and for

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GALLEY PROOF

Blake as Pastor

all Blake moved away from the conserva-
tive, fundamentalist beliefs of his own child-
hood and youth. He said, “I woke one morn-
ing and discovered that the front had
moved."

Niebuhr’s brilliant explanation of sir as
pride produced in Blake a balanced sense of
his ownselfin situations and positions which
would be increasingly public and therefore
susceptible to an inflated sense of self-im-
portance. Blake wrote, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s
oft reiterated thesis that a man who is nearest
to God is in the greatest danger of the great-
estsin, isan almost perfect aid tothe preacher
who is early lost in admiration for his own
theology, politics, and sermons, Next to a
good sense of humor and prayer, a good
dose of Niebuhr is the best thing | know to
alleviate a preacher's swollen self-esteem.”*

It was Niebuhr, Brackenridge suggests,
who kept Blake from becoming a career
chaplain to the wealthy. “By circumstance,
Eugene Carson Blake could easily have been
nothing more than a [pastor] to the rich and
to the comfortable.” He came from a com-
fortable home, attending an elite private
school and then Princeton at a time when
Princeton was a very different school in
terms of economic and racial diversity than
itistoday. His three churches were large and
wealthy and could have nurtured in him an
understandable insularity and elitism. Some-
thing like the reverse happened because of
Reinhold Niebuhr and the Holy Spirit.

Blake was sensitive to labor issues, again,
at a time when that was not an easy position
for ministers to assume. He backed up his
pulpit pronouncements with visible votun-
teer work in the community. He paid his
dues in terms of Community Chest and ser-
vice clubs—and although his fellow
Rotarians or Kiwanians probably did not
agree with his convictions, they respected
the devoted pastor and committed citizen
and so gave him a hearing.

First Church Albany grew under Blake’s
leadership and in 1940 he accepted the call
of the Pasaciena Presbyterian Church, one of
the outstanding congregations in the Presby-
terian Church, Once again Blake followed a

&

5

distinguished ministry. Robert Freeman was
the Pasadena pastor for 33 years, and once
again Blake avoided the professional pitfalls
that today cause many to conclude that it
cannot be done and should not be tried by
anyone of sound mind.

The Pasadena Church was large, 3,500
members with what at the time was a huge
budget, $150,000, wonderful buildings, a
radio station and summer camp, a reputa-
tion for “progressive orthodoxy,” and also
some extremely wealthy and extremely con-
servative members, At Pasadena, Blake came
of age as a preacher, scholar, and adminis-
trator and began to become more involved
in the affairs of the Presbytery of Los Ange-
les, which turned to him more and more for
leadership. He was on the Judicial Comeis-
sion of the presbytery, which investigated
and rebuked a pastor for performing the
wedding of Lana Turner and millionaire
sportsman Henry J. Topping, without wait-
ing the prescribed one year after divorce as
then required by Presbyterian law. Pasa-
dena Presbyterian Church began to grow
immediately, from 3,500 to 4,500, third
fargest in the Presbyterian Church, with new
buildings, programs, and an unheard of six
ministers on the staff. The Presbyterian Tri-
bune gave Pasadena its number one rating
on the basis of Sunday school, membership,
ratio of benevolences, and total giving.

And once again, although he never
though of himself as a pastor, Blake clearly
was 4 great one. Ministers of large congrega-
tions have to learn a different way of being
pastors and must let go of old, deeply in-
stilled patterns and expectations. Blake did
it by clearly communicating his accessibility
and then backing it up by being accessible.
He wrote in the parish newsletter:

| am available to all of you, day or night, in
emergency. As a general rule, it is necessary for
me to keep my morning clear for writing ser-
mons, speeches, arlicles and the like, and for
reading. But by appointment, | am always glad to
see as many members of the church who want to
see me, if for no other reason than that they

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GALLEY PROOF

&

would like to become acquainted. |, too, wanlto
become acquainted. You do me and the church
a disservice if you let itbe agreed among you that
iam too busy to be seen’?

lf we ever created a manual on how to be the
pastor of a big Presbyterian church, that
paragraph should be in it for all to heed.

Blake called inthe hospitals, visited shut-
ins, visited personally with every elder nomi-
nee, and once again paid attention to young
people. | know now how difficult that was,
how easy to relegate it to other staff in the
name of busyness or priorities. Blake wentto
the church’s summer camp, played base-
ball, swam. When some of his young peaple
sewed face on his swimming trunks, Blake
wore them. He visited the children in the
church school regularly and with his staff
established a persona! relationship of genu-
ine friendship which created a climate of
mutuality and trust in which high expecta-
tions can be maintained and honored,

His social concerns began to shape the
big Pasadena Church. He started a club for
World War II servicemen which grew into a
dormitory for 300 every weekend. The
Women’s Society, a traditional Bible study
group, took on responsibility for feeding
migrant farm workers, and Blake expanded
the horizons of the church’s radio station to
include classical music and local political
issues as well as church programs.

| noted how thoroughly Blake did his
homework, His style might not be politically
correct in today’s environment when lead-
ership often means taking a back seat, keep-
ing your mouth shut, and enabling the laity
to be responsible. Blake planned every meet-
ing he attended, prepared the agenda, knew
what he wanted to see happen, arranged for
the members he wanted to be appointed and
the officers he wanted to be elected.

And he kept paying attention to his
preaching, which continued to address so-
cial concerns—increasingly race—and anew
ideology which disturbed him deeply, the
identification of nationalism and patriotism

journal of Presbyterian History

with the gospel, particularly as that ideology
was espoused in the zealous anti-commu-
nism of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Blake’s
critique of the overheated patriotism which
came to be known as “McCarthyism” was
grounded in sound, biblical Reformed
preaching. Our ultimate allegiance is to
God, not human institutions, particularly
governments. He condemned loyalty oaths.
Those positions, so important in our tradi-
tion, often sound suspect if not subversive to
the super-patriot of the right—or the left.

When | visited Cuba fast year 1 spoke
with Presbyterian pastors and asked if they
had encountered government opposition or
persecution. One of them, a leader in Cuba,
told me he had been detained for question-
ing recently. “There is a person from the
government Ministry of Religion in my sanc-
tuary every Sunday,” he said, “with a tape
recorder to record everything | say. | was
brought in for questioning because on Ref-
ormation Sunday | said that we Calvinists
believe our allegiance is ultimately to our
Lord and his Kingdom and not to any human
institution, or government. My government
wanted to know what I meant by that,” he
explained.

Blake was criticized when he took on
local real estate interests which were offer-
ing substandard and racially segregated hous-
ing; some members walked out during his
sermon. But he was a pastor. He backed his
sermon, not only with scripture and tradi-
tion but also a common humanity and affec-
tion for his people which they knew and felt.
Blake did not condemn the sinful perpetra-
tors of injustice and oppression but swept
everyone, including himself, into the pic-
ture. Whata difference that makes—instead
of being singled out for condemnation, to be
invited into a community which is consider-
ing a mutual problem.

Blake stayed with the Bible. When asked
about his sermon preparation he said it was
“steel, a flint and a spark. The steel of the
word strikes the flint of human need and the
spark is the idea that flies.” At the center of
his preaching and his pastoral practice was
the jordship of Jesus Christ. He never lost the

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GALLEY PROOF

Blake as Pastor

evangelical focus of his childhood. Chris-
tian faith was not merely intellectual assent
to certain propositions or creeds, but a per-
sonal commitment to and relationship with
Jesus Christ. Blake wrote, “The primary task
of the church is ta bring people to Ged in
jesus Christ."

An interesting encounter with the presi-
dent of Fuller Seminary, John Ockenja, a
Presbyterian pastor from Pittsburgh, which
began with Blake opposing Ockenja’s la-
boring within the boundaries of Los Angeles
Presbytery and the presbytery refusing to
ordain Fuller graduates, ended with Blake
and Ockenja meeting together and develop-
ing a respectful friendship, and not long
after, Fuller was using the Pasadena Presby-
terian Church’s sanctuary and classrooms
for seminary activities. Blake played an in-
creasingly important role in denominational
affairs in those days including giving pivotal
leadership to the development and publica-
tion of the Faith and Life Curriculum, so far
as | know the first and last denominational
curriculum to be widely—almost wuniver-
sally—applauded and, more importanily,
purchased by Presbyterian churches.

At the age of 45, Blake was at the top of
his career as a pastor. He could, of course,
have stayed in Pasadena and deepened and
broadened his extraordinary ministry. He
could have moved to another large congre-
gation, In his years of pastoral ministry he
expressed, | believe, the highest and best of
the Reformed tradition’s model of ministry:
acareful scholar, devout student ofthe Bible,
passionate.and prophetic preacher, and, in
spite of the fact that he never thought of
himself in this way, a caring and accessible
pastor. He wrote, uncharacteristically re-
flectively:

| find myself standing a little beyond the middle
of life. | stand in the place of the heat of the day
when often the defeats of youth and the ap-
preaching twilight of age make men lose their
sense of direclion in life and the feeling of its
importance and begin to lock for the easy adjust-
ment to the. flux of things. Yet | stand where
perhaps best of all one can be objective about the
great hopes of youth and the weariness of age.
Between beginnings and ends, birth and death.?

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7

And so when the call came to serve the
Presbyterian Church as its stated clerk, Eu-
gene Carson Blake answered the call and
served the church and led the church through
what turned out to be one of the most critical
and tumultuous times in its history. The
purview of my assignment could end here,
except for the fact that Blake continued to be
a pastor in a vastly larger arena, both as
stated clerk and finally as general secretary
of the World Council of Churches. in fact,
Blake viewed the office of stated clerk as a
means of expanding his pastoral ministry.
He continued to preach prophetically—
speaking to and for the denomination.
Preachers know that part of a prophetic
ministry is not simply thundering away atthe
church. Plenty do it. It’s not difficult to do. it
can make the preacher feel righteous. It
rarely does much beyond angering the lis-
teners. Part of being prophetic is finding the
words that the church, at its best, wants to
say, to preach for the church in the world.
Blake did it brilliantly. He also had a Re-
formed sense of the pastor's role to live in
and interface with the world for the church,
That, too, he did instinctively.

In both the Office of the General Assem-
bly and the offices of the World Council of
Churches, Eugene Carson Blake exhibited
the pastoral instinct which characterized his
ministry in the three parishes he served. He
paid attention to people. He relied, always,
on his predecessors, turning potential rivais
and adversaries into friends, colleagues,
supporters, and he managed to avoid per-
sonally insulting his opponents even in the
midst of deep disagreement and strenuous
debate.

In conclusion, | should like to advance
the following gleanings from Blake’s pasto-
ral ministry, areas where he contributed
substantially to the life of our church and our
rale as ministers and servants, as topics for
further exploration and discussion.

1, His commitment to the Presbyterian
Church as the means to express his faith in
jesus Christ and sense of call to ministry.
During his days at Princeton University,
Blake became involved in the First Century

GALLEY PROOF

8

Christian Fellowship, a very popular student
movement conceived by Frank Buchman,
which would become Moral Rearmament.
The fellowship organized “house parties,”
small groups for Bible study, confession and
testimony, mutual encouragement, and seek-
ing “guidance” from the Holy Spirit. Blake
liked the non-sectarian, non-denominational
approach of the organization and partici-
pated regularly in house parties. His disen-
chantment began when it seemed Frank
Buchman’s opinions and goals regularly
coincided with the Holy Spirit’s guidance.
That disenchantment, of course, is related to
one of the great strengths of our church: its
suspicion of unchecked political power and
its reliance on the community, the govern-
ing bodies of the church, to be a balance to
individual power and authority, and the
most appropriate arena to make faithful de-
cisions. And so Blake became a self-styled
“organization man, working in and through
the church.”

Blake’s investment of his life in the Pres-
byterian Church as a pastor is worth consid-
ering. In atime characterized by what some-
one recently called institutionalized
anti-institutionalism, and when the demise
of the denomination as we know it is simply
and easily assumed in many quarters, and
when the quality, and character, not to men-
tion the length, of our meetings is routinely
lamented by many who refuse to be ac-
countably involved in the life of the body,
Blake's witness is clear. If this thing goes
down, it may well be the Holy Spirit working
in us ta create a new church for a new day.
It may also be that we adopted the anti-
institutionalized individualism of the late
twentieth century, gave up on the old one,
and decided to stay home.

2. Blake’s ministry began and proceeded
through a time of enormous social and cul-
tural change. Shortly after his ordination in
1932, a retired minister said to him, “I’m
glad it’s you who is beginning your ministry.
Things are changing so much | couldn't face
being a pastor now.”?? Blake lived through
the Great Depression, World War II, post-
war economic and demographic change,

Journal of Presbyterian History

McCarthyism, Korea, civil rights and Viet-
nam, We live in a time characterized by the
most rapid social and cultural change in the
history of humankind. Ten-year-old global
maps are hopelessly out of date. The Soviet
Union is gone. Russian troops serve under
American commanders in Bosnia. The Pope
was in Cuba celebrating Mass and Fidel
Castro was in the congregation. Twenty-five
percent of the words we routinely use did
not exist twenty-five years ago, A “crack
salesman’ used to be a very effective sales
representative for IBM. Futurist Leonard
Sweet calls it a “Phase Transition,” a major
shifting of the cultural tectonic plates with a
greater potential impact than the invention
ofthe printing press and moveable type. The
question, of course, is how to be a faithful
church of Jesus Christ in the brand new
world we are facing, and how to induce our
lively tradition to respond creatively to the
new world without losing its integrity.

Blake was clear that his faith centered in
his trust in Jesus Christ and his commitment
to the basic mission of the church as bearing
witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ and
bringing people to God in Christ. And then
he trusted the church, his own Presbyterian
Church, as the best vehicle for his vocation
in all the changes ahead.

3. Blake learned what he needed to
know as a pastor in three churches that
challenged him to grow, and in each case
part of his growth came as a result of an
intentional relationship with a strong prede-
cessor. In fact, that pattern repeated itself
when Blake succeeded W. A. Visser ’t Hooft,
an accomplished linguist and distinguished
scholar who had helped to found the World
Council of Churches in 1948. Blake avoided
the twin mistakes of trying to emulate his
predecessor or contradicting him by seeking
Visser ’t Hooft’s advice and counsel, giving
him an office and secretary at World Coun-
cil of Churches headquarters, and meeting
with him regularly."

Among the conclusions | have made
after my own thirty-five years of ministry are:
We learn most of what we need to know as
ministers by watching others who know

a

©

GALLEY PROOF

Blake as Pastor

how to “do it’—preaching, pastoral care,
management, personnel. There are, of course
skills to learn from reading books and listen-
ing to lectures, but | learned by watching,
listening, intentionally apprenticing myself
to my mentors who didn‘t know they were
my mentors. This is not news, pedagogi-
cally, of course, But what would education
for ministry fook like ifit acknowledged and
organized something around this reality? A
postgraduate internship? A time of inten-
tional mentoring in collaboration with class-
room education?

And: We waste talent and institutional
energy and oppress oid people by the now-
universal assumption that a retired pastor
cannot be seen anywhere near his/her old
church, The retired pastor must either die or
disappear, move far away, sever all ties. So
severe is this succession dynamic that we
must invest our very best leadership, energy,
and resources in a 12- to 18-month process
of finding a new leader. Incredible! No other
enterprise in the world could or would even
think of doing such a thing.

4, A consistent theme in Blake’s pastoral
ministry is his focus on children and youth.
He began by working with young people at
St. Nicholas and in each succeeding situa-
tion emphasized the importance of Chris-
tian education and youth work and partici-
pated in it. Former parishioners in Pasadena
remembered his between-services visits to
elementary classrooms, in Geneva gown
and hood, sitting on the floor in a circle of
children, Hundreds of high-school students
came to his free-wheeling “chats” on Sun-
day evening in Albany. College students
were challenged by his sharp intellect and
open mind.

There are signs of a resurgent youth
movement in the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.). We should be doing everything we
can think of to encourage and nurture it.
Likewise, there is new interest in church-
related higher education and campus minis-
try emerging from our colleges and gavern-
ing bodies. We have been institutionally
ignoring both for thirty years and wondering
why we seem to have Jost our credibility

&

9

with young people. Whatever it takes, we
need to follow Blake’s instinctive priorities
and reinvest ourselves in youth work and
college/university ministries.

5, Blake managed to keep in creative and
faithful tension his sense of call to prophetic
ministry and the daily demands of pastoral
ministry. In Albany he did it by making five
hundred pastoral calls in a year. Later he did
itby intentional, visible accessibility. “When
you need me, I’ll be there for you.” In spite
of his modest disclaimer, my sense is that his
personal warmth and advertised accessibil-
ity addressed his peopfe’s needs at a deep
level.

Prophetic preaching, activity, leading,
not backed by pastoral relationship, may
feel brave and faithful to the prophet. But
Amos didn’t have a congregation. Blake
knew that and modeled the tension which
emerges in an honest, courageous public
ministry. [four aspiration isto induce people
to change the way they think, the pastor
must, in some way, stand where the people
are standing and speak for them as well as to
them. In an interview with Dr. Brackenridge,
Blake remembered an experience as pastor
which reveals the way he intentionally main-
tained the tension in his own life. “In Pasa-
dena when someone, after worship would
say ‘that was @ Courageous sermon, pastor,’
1 would stop and think ‘Whose feet am |
stepping on today?”

Eugene Carson Blake led the Presbyte-
rian Church in the U.S.A. and the World
Council of Churches with energy and imagi-
nation and with his whole heart and mind
and strength. He was a leader for his time
and my conclusion is that his effectiveness
rested on his straightforward commitmentto
Jesus Christ, his trust in the structures and
processes of the church as the place to live
out that commitment, and his faithful ser-
vice as a pastor in three congregations.

NOTES

'R. Douglas Brackenridge, Eugene Carson
Blake, Prophet With Portfolio (New York:
Seabury Press, 1978) viii.

GALLEY PROOF

10 journal of Presbyterian History

"Ibid., 18.
‘bid., 21.
‘ibid., 38.
5Ibid., 32.
*Ibid., 39.
"thid., 42,
SIbid., 50.
*tbid., 55.
‘thid., 32.
Nbid., 151.

THE LEGACY OF EUGENE CARSON BLAKE
IMPLICATIONS FOR CHURCH LEADERSHIP\
FOR THE 215' CENTURY
BLAKE, THE PASTOR

FEBRUARY 9, 1998
JOHN M. BUCHANAN

Last April I was in one of the buildings which flank the street just outside the Plaza of St.
Peter, in Rome, on the third floor, in the offices of the Pontifical Secretariat for Christian Unity.
My mind and emotions alternating between “What in the world am I doing here?” and “I wish
my father and mother could see me now!”, and a fairly moving sense of the historicity of the
whole experience.

What I was doing there was representing the 208” General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) which had elected me its Moderator, paying an ecumenical visit to the Vatican.
Our party consisted of my wife, Sue, Eugene Turner, from the office of the General Assembly -
our chief ecumenical officer, Duncan Hanson, our Coordinator for Mission in Europe, Debbie
Vial from our Peacemaking office, and myself. The next day we would be special guests at a
Papal audience and did, in fact, bring the greetings of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to Pope
John Paul IL. This day we were guests of the Pontifical Secretariat for Christian Unity and we
were invited to exchange ideas with the Director, Cardinal Cassidy, the Vice Director ,
Monsignor DuPray and the Secretary, Father John Radono, an American.

As we were ushered down the hallway to the conference room past a row of photographs
of important ecumenical moments at the Vatican, John Radono pointed to one of the pictures and
said “That’s one of our favorites.” Of course. There he was, Geneva gown and tabs, walking in
a procession with Pope Paul VI, flashing that winsome and familiar smile, the Stated Clerk of the
United Presbyterian Church, Eugene Carson Blake.

{ never met Eugene Carson Blake. In fact 1 somehow managed to be ordained without
really understanding what I had just become part of and didn’t know we had a Stated Clerk, or a
General Assembly for that matter. But it wasn’t long, the time being the early sixties, until ]
became deeply and proudiy aware of my church. And it was Blake that did it. I often reflect on
the fact that 1 was never more in love with my church than [ was in the days when Presbyterians
were stepping up and assuming leadership in the civil 1 ghts movement. It was when I became a
Presbyterian truly, by choice and conviction. Although I had been born, baptized, confirmed and
now ordained one, I truly became a Presbyterian when my church started to take strong public
stands for racial justice. And I was never more proud than I was on the day 1 saw the newspaper
picture of a Presbyterian minister, an official in my church, in clerical collar and straw hat, being
arrested at an amusement park outside Baltimore.

My people were not amused. My Republican father was appalled and held me personally
accountable, Blake’s arrest was a defining moment: it gave me - and others - the opportunity
and the responsibility to talk about what it meant to be publicly faithful to Jesus Christ, and

1

paying the price of faithfulness, and how Presbyterians have always shown up in public when
issues of justice and morality were being discussed and confronted.

I thought Blake was God - or at least a very close colleague. If we had a Pope or
presiding bishop, he was it for me. | felt the same way about his successors. I was in awe of
William P. Thompson, and still am; saw him on an elevator in Philadelphia in 1976 and was so
nervous I could barely speak. And as I came to know and appreciate Jim Andrews, I lost a little
of the nervousness and began to see how critical this office is for us and to be grateful for the
kind of dedication, integrity and leadership offered by Jim, Bill and now Clifton Kirkpatrick.

One of my most cherished memories will be presiding as Moderator over the election of a
new Clerk and watching and occasionally being present as Cliff learned the job and claimed it
and started to do it in the distinguished manner of his predecessors, but with his own winsomely
gentle strength.

Eugene Carson Blake was clearly the right leader at the right time for the Presbyterian
Church and although I am not neutral on the subject, part of his preparation and part of the
extraordinary gifts he brought to the job came from his extensive experience as a pastor. A
friend of mine. Kenneth Smith, President of Chicago Theological Seminary, tells about being
invited to leave his pastorate and become a Seminary President. He went to talk to one of his
close friends, Hannah Gray, who was the President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago.
He told Dr. Gray that he was just a pastor and didn’t know how to run a seminary and she said,
“Ken, if you can run a congregation, you can run anything.”

I've come to a similar conclusion. If you can lead a vigorous, lively and complex church,
you can lead anything.

Blake’s background prepared him uniquely for pastoral ministry. His biographer, R.
Douglas Brackenridge, warns: “Biographers foolish enough to claim that they have unlocked the
door of human personality and motivation are, unfortunately, also often foolish enough to believe
that what they write down is always correct.” [p. viii]

Lam indebted to Professor Brackenridge for most of what I jearned about Blake, in his
fine biography Prophet With Portfolio, and also his extensive interview notes which are on file
with the Presbyterian Historical Society.

Blake was born in 1906 into an intentionally Christian home. His parents belonged to the
West Presbyterian Church, in St. Louis, and their Presbyterianism was pietistic and
fundamentalist. Gene Blake was energetic, worked hard at whatever he did - academics and.
athletics. He was blessed to have two parents who loved him and who tmparted, along with their
piety and fundamentalism, a gracious openness to other people, particularly their Jewish
neighbors.

His parents were people of some means. His father, O.P. Blake, was a steel salesman and
did well enough to be a dollar-a-year man for the government during the First World War.

2

I discovered that Blake had a Chicago connection when his father worked at Inland Steel
headquarters in Chicago, 191 9-21. His family lived in Winnetka and Blake attended what was
and still is one of the best and most creative public secondary schools in the country, New Trier
High School.

Blake finished secondary school at Lawrenceville and followed his brother Howard to
Princeton University where he played varsity football, starting at guard as a Senior. He worked
hard and earned honorable mention on several All East teams in a day when Ivy League football
was among the best in the land.

Alt his life Blake was relentlessly honest about his own abilities and committed to getting
the best out of himself. At Princeton he was a good student, graduating Cum Laude, but did not
earn a Phi Beta Kappa key, which his brother Howard had.

The football experience was hard work as anyone who has ever competed at a varsity
level knows. He said of himself: “I’ve never been an instant success anywhere, but Lam
competitive and persistent” - in my estimate two qualities more important in the long run than
instant success. [p.18]

Princeton broadened Blake and opened up new intellectual and spiritual vistas. He
horrified his parents by announcing in 1928 that he was voting for Al Smith. A young Assistant
Professor of Philosophy, inspired Blake to study art, art criticism and esthetics. And it was at
Princeton that he first encountered a mind and spirit which would play a major role in his later
formation, Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a chapel preacher.

Blake was caught up in the early stages of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament —
became disenchanted and made a major decision - namely that his religious energy would be
invested in the church. He said “From then on I decided to be an organization man - that is to
work through the regular machinery of the organized church. I recognized the importance of
voluntary groups but decided to concentrate on supporting and changing existing ecclesiastical
structures.” [p.21]

His personal spiritual journey came to a crossroads at a Christian conference at Northfield
and he resolved to trust God and not allow intellectual questions - which continued all his life -
to interfere with that trust.

After graduating from Princeton he accepted a three year appointment to teach at Forman
College in Lahore, India - now Pakistan. He learned about Christian missionary activity - its
heroic faithfulness - but also its occasional negative impact, its cultural and ideological captivity
and occasional imperialism.

His three year term was cut short by love - as he returned to the United States to marry
Valina. Then came a year at New College Edinburgh and a growing sense of call to ministry. It

was an interesting time. Princeton was embroiled in the fundamentalist - modernist struggle.

*
2

New College taught Blake that warm-hearted evangelicalism could combine with the
historical/critical approach to the Bible. His fundamentalism evolved into a kind of conservative
orthodoxy - theologically and biblically, with an openness to the world and a commitment to the
Gospel’s engagement with the culture.

After a year at New College, Blake returned to Princeton, entered seminary, graduated in
1932 - unsatisfied with either liberalism or fundamentalism.

Ordained as an “Evangelist,” his first call was at the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in
Manhattan, one of'a consistory of six Reformed Churches, the oldest Protestant Church in
America with a continuous existence. The Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas was located at 5"
Avenue and 48" in 1628, on the site of what is now Rockefeller Center.

Blake was fortunate to work with a distinguished pastor, Dr. Malcolm James MacLeod,
who taught young Blake how to do it... How to preach - besides insisting that Blake write a
complete manuscript, MacLeod himself was a good preacher and Blake learned by listening
(which, parenthetically, | have concluded is the only way anyone learns to preach).

MacLeod taught him how to be a counselor ~ a listener - long before anybody was talking
about pastoral theology as an academic discipline.

MacLeod put Blake to work with young people - a theme that emerges in each of Blake’s
pastorates.

And he issued classic advice which Blake appropriated at every step of his career:
“Be able to call on some of the best homes on
Fifth Avenue and also to walk up a five floor tenement and always to conduct yourself as a
minister of Jesus Christ.”

It was the Great Depression and Blake saw it first hand: people coming to St. Nicholas’
for food: shops and stores closing, bread lines, quiet desperation. And he learned the important
lesson that poverty is demeaning, complex and dehumanizing. It was a theme that would emerge
later. Brackenridge says “Blake realized that the problems of poverty were more complex than
hot lunch programs. The experiences of the Great Depression permanently affected Blake and
needs of poor people and efforts to overcome poverty would subsequently always be an
important part of his professional and personal life.”

In 1935 - the young assistant pastor was called to the First Presbyterian Church of Albany
- a congregation of 1200 members and again he encountered a distinguished mentor, his
predecessor, William Herman Hopkins. Hopkins broke all the rules - at least as we understood
them. He sat in the first pew every Sunday as Blake preached. That doesn’t often work very
well but Blake made it work - visited Hopkins regularly, consulted, asked his advice and the two
became good friends. When I read that I reflected on how difficult we seem to have made that
situation - with our expectations that our predecessor will either die immediately or go far away,

which for many is a kind of dying, instead of the positive, assertive claiming of the predecessor
as advisor, consultant and friend in ministry.

Blake, the pastor, began to emerge distinctly in Albany.

He would later say that he never thought of himself as a good pastor - that he couldn’t
focus on people’s personal problems because he was always thinking of something else. But he
made 500 calls his first year in Albany: something I’ve never done and on Fridays, he and
Valina were at home - from 4 to 6 for visitors from the congregation.

He also started to preach prophetically, addressing issues of local and national social and
political relevance. This preacher knows from sometimes painful experience that you cannot
preach prophetically - and keep your job, unless you are also a pretty good pastor. Preachers
who style themselves as contemporary Amoses often forget that Amos didn’t have a
congregation to tend to and a Session to moderate.

In his first year at Aibany, on the Sunday before election day, Blake attacked local
political corruption and told his congregation that they were responsible for it by condoning or
ignoring it. Some were not happy.

He also ended the old system of pew rentals in opposition to his Board of Trustees who
were concerned that there was no other way to raise money to pay the church’s bills. Blake
listened to their concern and then simply asked every family to donate the exact amount of
money they had been charged for their own pew and met with a near unanimous response. I’m
sensitive to this issue because Fourth Presbyterian Church, long after every other church
discontinued the practice, was still charging pew rent, reserving pews for renters and making
visitors wait outside until five minutes before the service in 1960. My predecessor, Elam Davies,
ended the practice - contrary to the wishes of the Tnistees - with much the same result.

Again, my sense is that prophetic leadership, as well as prophetic preaching, is much
more possible and effective - when the one involved is a trusted pastor.

Blake’s interest in youth expressed itself again creatively at free wheeling Sunday night
“chats” with young people which were unusual at the time and highly popular.

The President of Williams College heard Blake preach and observed his work with young
people and invited him to teach a course in Ethics and Theology at the college which Blake did
for three years. That experience, too, I believe shaped the pastoral focus of his ministry for the
rest of his life.

Also, At Williams, looking for a suitable text to use in a course on Ethics and Theology,
Blake became reacquainted with the theologian who he had heard preach at the Princeton
University Chapel years before, Reinhold Niebuhr. Blake chose Niebuht’s An interpretation of
Christian Ethics, outtined the book paragraph by paragraph for his classroom lectures and in the
process became a Niebuhrian.

} did not know that about Blake and I’m glad I now do. It was Niebuhr I assume who
gave Blake the deep and defining conviction that the Gospel has - and must always have -
political, social, economic relevance.

Blake liked Niebuhr’s critique of both liberalism and fundamentalism and his embrace of
orthodox Christian doctrine, including the authority of scripture, without embracing
fundamentalism.

Once and for all Blake moved away from the conservative, fundamentalist beliefs of his
own childhood and youth. He said “I woke one morning and discovered that the front had
moved.” [p.38]

Niebuhr’s brilliant explanation of sin as pride, produced in Blake a balanced sense of his
own self in situations and positions which would be increasingly public and therefore susceptible
to an inflated sense of self-importance.

Blake wrote: “Reinhold Niebuhr’s oft reiterated thesis that a man who is nearest to God
is in the greatest danger of the greatest sin, is an almost perfect aid to the preacher who is nearly
lost in admiration for his own theology, politics, and sermons. Next to a good sense of humer
and prayer, a good dose of Niebuhr is the best thing I know to alleviate a preacher’s swollen self-
esteem.” [p.32]

It was Niebuhr, Brackenridge suggests, who kept Blake from becoming a career chaplain
to the wealthy. He came from a comfortable home, attended an elite private school and then
Princeton at a time when Princeton was a very different school in terms of economic and racial
diversity than it is today. His three churches were large and wealthy and could have nurtured in
him an understandable insularity and elitism.

Something like the reverse happened because of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Holy Spirit.

Blake was sensitive to labor issues - again, at a time when that was not an easy position
for ministers to assume. He backed up his pulpit pronouncements with visible volunteer work in
the community. He paid his dues in terms of Community Chest and Service clubs ... and
although his fellow Rotarians or Kiwanians - probably did not agree with his convictions - they
respected the devoted pastor and committed citizen and so gave him a. hearing.

First Church Albany grew under Blake’s leadership and in 1940 he accepted the call of
the Pasadena Presbyterian Church - one of the outstanding congregations in the Presbyterian
Church. Once again Blake followed a distinguished ministry. Robert Freeman was the Pasadena
pastor for 33 years, and once again Blake avoided the professional pitfalls that today cause many
to conclude that following a beloved long-term pastor cannot be done and should not be tried by
anyone of sound mind.

The Pasadena Church was large - 3,500 members with what at the time was a huge
budget - $150,000, wonderful buildings, a radio station and summer camp, a reputation for
“progressive orthodoxy” and also some extremely wealthy and extremely conservative members.

At Pasadena, Blake came of age as a preacher, scholar and administrator and began to
become more involved in the affairs of the Presbytery of Los Angles which turned to him more
and more for leadership. He was on the Judicial commission of the Presbytery which
investigated and rebuked a pastor for performing the wedding of Lana Turner and millionaire
sportsman, Henry J. Topping, without waiting the prescribed one year after divorce as then
required by Presbyterian law.

Pasadena Presbyterian Church began to grow immediately - from 3,500 to 4,500, third
largest in the Presbyterian Church with new buildings, programs and an unheard of six ministers
on the staff.

And once gain, although he never thought of himself as a pastor, Blake clearly was a
great one. Ministers of large congregations have to learn a different way of being pastors and
must let go of old, deeply instilled patterns and expectations.

Biake did it by clearly communicating his accessibility and then backing it up by being
accessible. He wrote in the parish newsletter:

“I am available to all of you, day or night, in emergency, Asa general rule, it is
necessary for me to keep my mornings clear for writing sermons, speeches, articles and the like,
and for reading. But by appointment, I am always glad to see as many members of the church
who want to see me, if for no other reason than that they would like to become acquainted. 1,
too, want to become acquainted. You do me and the church a disservice if you let it be agreed
among you that I am too busy to be seen.” [p. 42]

If we ever created a manual on how to be the pastor of a big Presbyterian Church, that
paragraph should be in it for all to heed.

Blake called in the hospitals, visited shut-ins, and visited personally with every elder
nominee and once again paid attention to young people. I know now how difficult that was:
how easy to relegate it to other staff in the name of busyness and priorities. Blake went to the
Church’s summer camp: played baseball, swam. When some of his young people sewed lace
on his swimming trunks, Blake wore them.

He visited the children in the church school regularly and with his staff established a
personal relationship of genuine friendship - which created a climate of mutuality and trust in
which high expectations can be maintained and honored.

His social concerns began to shape the big Pasadena Church. He started a club for World
War II servicemen which grew into a dormitory for 300 every week-end. The Women’s Society,
a traditional Bible study group, took on responsibility for feeding migrant farm workers and

7

Blake expanded the horizons of the church’s radio station to include classical music, local
political issues as well as church programs.

I noted how thoroughly Blake did his homework. His style might not be politically
correct in today’s environment when leadership often means taking a back seat, keeping your
mouth shut and enabling the laity to be responsible. Blake planned every meeting he attended,
prepared the agenda, knew what he wanted to see happened, arranged for the members he wanted
to be appointed and the officers he wanted to be elected.

And he kept paying attention to his preaching - which continued to address social
concerns, increasingly race, and a new ideology which disturbed him deeply, the identification of
nationalism - and patriotism - with the gospel - particularly as that ideology was espoused in the
zealous anti-communism of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Blake’s critique of the over-heated patriotism which came to be known as
“McCarthyism” was grounded in sound, biblical reformed preaching. Our ultimate allegiance is
to God, not human institutions, particularly governments. He condemned loyalty oaths. Those
positions, so important in our tradition often sound suspect if not subversive to the super-patriot
of the right - or the left.

When I visited Cuba last year I spoke with Presbyterian pastors and asked if they had
encountered government opposition or persecution. One of them - a leader in Cuba - told me he
had been detained for questioning recently. “There is a person from the. Government/Ministry of
Religion in my sanctuary every Sunday,” he said, “with a tape recorder to record everything |
say. 1 was brought in for questioning because on Reformation Sunday I said that we Calvinists
believe our allegiance is ultimately to our Lord and his Kingdom and not to any human
institution, or government. My government wanted to know what I meant by that,” he explained.

Blake was criticized when he took on local real estate interests which were offering sub-
standard and racially segregated housing - some members walked out during his sermon.

But he was a pastor. He backed his sermon, not only with scripture and tradition but also
a common humanity and affection for his people which they knew and felt. Blake did not
condemn the sinful perpetrators of injustice and oppression - but swept everyone, including
himself, into the picture. What a difference that makes - instead of being singled out for
condemnation, 1o be invited into a community which is considering a mutual problem.

Blake stayed with the Bible - when asked about his sermon preparation he said it’s “steel,
a flint and a spark. The steel of the word strikes the flint of human need and the spark is the idea
that flies.”

At the center of his preaching and his pastoral practice was the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
He never lost the evangelical focus of his childhood. Christian faith was not merely intellectual
assent to certain propositions or creeds, but a personal commitment to and relationship with Jesus
Christ. Blake wrote: “The primary task of the church is to bring people to God in Jesus Christ.”

[p.50]

An interesting encounter with the President.of Fuller Seminary, John Ockenga, a
Presbyterian pastor from Pittsburgh - which began with Blake opposing Ockenga’s laboring
within the boundaries of Los Angles Presbytery and the Presbytery refusing to ordain Fuller
graduates, ended with Blake and Ockenja meeting together, developing a respectful friendship
and not long after Fuller was using the Pasadena Presbyterian Church’s sanctuary and classrooms
for seminary activities.

Biake played an increasingly important role in denominational affairs in those days -
including giving pivotal leadership to the development and publication of the Faith and Life
Curriculum - so far as 1 know - the first and last denominational curriculum to be widely - almost
universally-- applauded and more importantly, purchased by Presbyterian Churches.

At the age of 45 Blake was at the top of his career as a pastor. He could, of course, have
stayed in Pasadena and deepened and broadened his extraordinary ministry. He could have
moved to another large congregation. In his years of pastoral ministry he expressed, I believe the
highest and best of the Reformed Tradition’s model of ministry: a careful scholar, devout
student of the Bible, passionate and prophetic preacher and, in spite of the fact that he never
thought of himself in this way, a caring and accessible pastor.

He wrote - uncharacteristically reflectively: “I find myself standing a little beyond the
middle of life. I stand in the place of the heat of the day when often the defeats of youth and the
approaching twilight of age make men lose their sense of direction in life and the feeling of its
importance and begin to look for the easy adjustment o the flux of things. Yet I-stand where
perhaps best of all one can be objective about the great hopes of youth and the weariness of age.
Between beginnings and ends, birth and death.” [p. 55]

And so when the call came to serve the Presbyterian Church as its Stated Clerk, Eugene
Carson Blake answered the call and served the church and led the church through what turned
out to be one of the most critical and tumultuous times in its history.

The purview of my assignment could end here - except for the fact that Blake continued
to be a pastor in a vastly larger arena - both as Stated Clerk and finally as General Secretary of
the World Council of Churches.

In fact, Blake viewed the office of Stated Clerk as a means of expanding his pastoral
ministry [p. 60]

He continued to preach prophetically - speaking to and for the denomination.

Preachers know that part of a prophetic ministry is not simply thundering away at the
church. Plenty do it. It’s not difficult to do. It can make the preacher fee] righteous. It rarely
does much beyond angering the listeners. Part of being prophetic is finding the words that the
church, at its best wants to say: to preach for the church in the world. Blake did it brilliantly.

He also had a reformed sense of the pastor’s role to live in and interface with the world
for the church. That, too, he did instinctively.

In both the office of the General Assembly and the offices of the Worid Council of
Churches, Eugene Carson Blake exhibited the pastoral instinct which characterized his ministry
in the thrée parishes he served. He paid attention to people - he relied, always on his
predecessors, - turning potential rivals and adversaries into friends, colleagues, supporters, and
he managed to avoid personally insulting his opponents even in the midst of deep disagreement
and strenuous debate.

In conclusion, I should like to advance the following gleanings from Blake’s pastoral
ministry; areas where he contributed substantially to the life of our church and our role as
ministers and servants, as topics for further exploration and discussion.

1. His commitment to the Presbyterian Church as the means to express his faith in
Jesus Christ and sense of call to ministry.

During his days at Princeton University Blake became involved in a very popular student
movement conceived by Frank Buchman which would become Moral Rearmament. The First
Century Christian Fellowship organized “house parties,” small groups for Bible study,
confession and testimony, and mutual encouragement and seeking “guidance” from the Holy
spirit, Blake liked the non-sectarian, non-denominational approach of the organization and
participated regularly in house parties. His disenchantment began when it seemed Frank
Buchman’s opinions and goals regularly coincided with the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

That disenchantment of course, is related to one of the great strengths of our Church: its
suspicion of unchecked political power and its reliance on the community, the governing bodies
of the church, to be a balance to individual power and authority, and the most appropriate arena
to make faithful decisions.

And so Blake became a self-styled “organization man, working in and through the
church.”

Blake’s investment of his life in the Presbyterian Church, as a pastor, is worth
considering. In a time characterized by what someone recently called institutionalized anti-
institutionalism, and when the demise of the denomination as we know it is simply and easily
assumed in many quarters, and when the quality, character, not to mention the length, of our
meetings is routinely lamented by many who refuse to be accountably involved in the life of the
body, Blake’s witness is clear. If this thing goes down it may well be the Holy Spirit working in
us to create a new church for a new day. It may also be that we adopted the anti-institutionalized
individualism of the late 20" Century, gave up on the old one and decided to stay home.

2. Blake’s ministry began and proceeded through a time of enormous social and
cultural change.

10

Shortly after his ordination in 1932 a retired minister said to him “I’m glad it’s you who
is beginning your ministry. things are changing so much J couldn't face being a pastor now.”
Blake lived through the Great Depression, World War II, post-war economic and demographic
change. McCarthyism, Korea, Civil Rights and Vietnam.

We live in a time characterized by the most rapid social and cultural change in the history
of humankind Ten year old global maps are hopelessly out-of-date. The Soviet Union is gone,
Russian troops serve under American commanders in Bosnia. The Pope is in Cuba celebrating
mass and Fidel Castro was in the congregation. Twenty-five percent of the words we routinely
use did not exist twenty-five years ago. A “crack salesman” used to very effective sales
representative for IBM. Futurist Leonard Sweet calls it a “Phase Transition,” a major shifting of
the cultural tectonic plates with a greater potential impact than the invention of the printing press
and moveable type.

The question, of course, is how to be a faithful Church of Jesus Christ in the brand new
world we are facing. And how to induce our lively tradition to respond creatively to the new
world without losing its integrity.

Blake was clear that his faith centered in his trust in Jesus Christ and his commitment to
the basic mission of the church as bearing witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and bringing
people to God in Christ. And then he trusted the church, his own Presbyterian Church, as the
best vehicle for his vocation in all the changes ahead.

We simply must learn to be more reflexive, responsive in a world that is changing so
rapidly that we risk becoming an anachronism is our own life time. And we must do it without
abandoning the faith and the theological tradition that has been handed to us by the generations
before us - starting with Blake’s.

Parenthetically - can you imagine the energy, renewal and growth that would occur if the
Roman Catholic church decided to respond faithfully to what has happened to this role and
identity and very being of women in our time?

Unfortunately we don’t have to waste time critiquing the Romans. My sense is that if we
don’t do something quick and radical and dramatic about the urban church - we, you and I will
be known as the Presbyterian Amish of our time - so committed to doing it the same way as we
always did - that we become a small, precious but very significantly marginal ecclesiastical
entity in the future. Forget future - we’re 75% of the way there in Chicago, New York City, San
Francisco and Los Angeles.

Blake seized Civil Rights, poverty as the realities to which the church needed to respond
a generation ago. Not surprisingly Reinhold Niebuhr said that it was Civil Rights that saved the
Protestant churches from irrelevance.

The crisis of our day is the slow relentless death of the urban churches. Presbylerians
Today documented it in the last tssue:

1]

Presbyterian Churches Presbyterian Members

Cities 1967 | 1997 1967 | 1997
Chicago 143 118 87,882 43,315
Cleveland 72 56 49,064 17,886
Detroit 101 91 81,891 42,017
New York 116 107 41,785 19,142
Philadelphia 182 152 103,953 47,332
San Francisco/ 35 20 13,243 4,177
Oakiand

Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the haunting experience of visiting the sites of early
Christian churches in Turkey, observing that Christianity was once a vital force with many
thriving churches. Today all that is eft in ruins. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
The same thing is happening before our very eyes in our cities.

Why? There are a lot of people who think they know and we have lots and lots of data on
racial, economic and demographic change in the cities. We have interesting and lively
experiences in urban ministry. What we don’t know much about, I would submit, is how to
create urban congregations that thrive and grow.

Please understand - we know about how to be a big, urban cathedral. We may know
more about that than anyone else, by the way. And we know how to be suburban and county
seat. We're learning, | think, how to be rural. But I don’t think we know how to be urban.

We have, first of all, lots of old buildings, badly in need of repair, built for a world that
doesn’t exist any longer. And in those buildings we have aging congregations declining in
numbers for very understandable reasons.

And we have a system that finds it virtually impossible to help those congregations this
side of the inevitable Presbytery Commission to perform last rites and arrange for the funeral and
we're not even very good at that.

The fundamental challenge of the current urban church is raising enough money to meet
the Presbytery minimum. Who answers the call, obviously, are brand new ministers whose
agenda after about a year and a half becomes getting a new call with a little more money and a
little less institutional depression.

The fact that newly ordained clergy have an annoying pattern of getting married and
having babies guarantees that they won’t be around long.

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Who else answers the call - Ministers about to retire.

Now. do forgive me. Some of the most heroic, competent and faithful colleagues ] know
are the exceptions to these rules. But we don’t make it casy.

I don’t have the answer - but like Blake I believe in the Presbyterian Church’s ability to
discover 11.

I wonder if it isn’t time to think anew and stretch the tradition.
Is the old Victorian church buiiding what it should look like?
Is the Presbytery minimum salary a helpful dynamic?

Do we need a new order of Presbyterian urban missionaries, trained, disciplined, under
vows for five years, who will as William Stringfellow advised, live with the poor and let the
Holy Spirit and the people create a new form of church?

Do we need to sell off six dying churches and create one new one with a pastor, educator,
community organizer, youth worker, housed in a store front with fiscal know-how to the Mac
Arthur Foundation or Fourth Church, or First Church Wheaton and say - for $100,000 per year -
you can help to create a new church?

Do we need to ask Bill Hybels, God forbid, to a conversation, not on church music, but
on responding to new realities instead of slowly but surely dying?

3. Blake learned what he needed to know as a pastor in three churches that
challenged him to grow, and in each case part of his growth came as a result of an intentional
relationship with a strong predecessor. In fact, that pattern repeated itself when Blake succeeded
W. A. Visser’t Hooft, an accomplished linguist and distinguished scholar who had helped to
found the World Council of Churches in 1948. Blake avoided the twin mistakes of trying to
emulate his predecessor or contradicting him, by seeking Visser’t-Hooft’s advice and counsel,
giving him an office and secretary at World Council of Churches headquarters and meeting with
him regularly. [p.151]}

Among the conclusions I have made after my own 35 years ministry is:

* We learn most of what we need to know as ministers by watching others who know how to
do it” preaching, pastoral care, management, personnel. There are, of course, skills to learn
from reading books and listening to lectures, but | learned by watching, listening,
intentionally apprenticing myself to my mentors who didn’t know they were my mentors.
This is not news, pedagogically, of course. But what would education for ministry look like
if it acknowledged and organized something around this reality? A post graduate internship?
A time of intentional mentoring in collaboration with classroom education?

13

e We waste talent, institutional energy and oppress old people by the now universal assumption
that a retired pastor cannot be seen anywhere near his/her old church, must either die or
disappear, move far away, sever all ties - and - that so severe is this succession dynamic that
we must invest our very best leadership, energy and resources in a 12 to 18 month process of
finding a new leader. Incredible! No other enterprise in the world could or would even think
of doing such a thing.

4. A consistent theme in Blake’s pastoral ministry is his focus on children and youth.

He began by working with young people at St. Nicholas and in each succeeding situation
emphasized the importance of Christian Education and Youth Work and participated in it.
Former parishioners in Pasadena remembered his between-services visits to elementary
classrooms, Geneva gown and hood, sitting on the floor in a circle of children. Hundreds of
high-school students came to his free-wheeling “chats” on Sunday evening in Albany. College
students were challenged by his sharp intellect and open mind.

There are signs a resurgent youth movement in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We
should being doing everything we can think of to encourage and nurture it. Likewise, there is
new interest in church related higher education and campus ministry emerging from our colleges
and governing bodies. We have been institutionally ignoring both for thirty years and wondering
why we seem to have lost our credibility with young people. Whatever it takes, we need to
follow Blake’s instinctive priorities and reinvest ourselves in youth work and college/university
ministries.

5. Blake managed to keep in creative and faithful tension his sense of call to
prophetic ministry and the daily demands of pastoral ministry. In Albany he did it by making
$00 pastoral calls in a year. Later he did it by intentional, visible accessibility - “when you need
me, Ill be there for you.”

In spite of his modest disclaimer my sense is that his personal warmth and advertised
accessibility addressed his people’s needs at a deep level.

Prophetic preaching, activity, leading, not backed by pastoral relationship may feel brave
and faithful to the prophet. But Amos didn’t have a congregation. Blake knew that and modeled
the tension which emerges in an honest, courageous public ministry. If our aspiration is to
induce.people to change the way they think, the pastor must, in some way, stand where the
people are standing and speak for them as well as to them.

In an interview with Professor Brackenridge, Blake remembered an experience as pastor
which reveals the way he intentionally maintained the tension in his own life. “In Pasadena
when someone, after worship would say ‘that was a courageous sermon, pastor,’ I would stop
and think ‘Whose feet am I stepping on today.’”

14

Eugene Carson Blake led the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the World Council of
Churches with energy and imagination and with his whole heart and mind and strength. He was
a leader for his time and my conclusion ts that his effectiveness rested on

e his straightforward commitment to Jesus Christ.

e his trust in the structures and processes of the church as the place to live out that
commitment.

e his faithful service as a pastor in three congregations.

iS

MEMORANDUM

DATE: January 26, 1998
TO: John Wilkinson
FROM: John Buchanan
John,

Several concerns that I want to put in front of you:

l.

As you may know, I’m working with the World and National Council of Churches on the
Eugene Carson Blake Ecumenical Endowment Program. The purpose is to raise a little
money to endow scholarships for third world theological students to come to the World
Council of Churches and also the National Council of Churches for a year of study and
intern work. I’m making a presentation at the initial conference at Princeton next
weekend. It would be a nice gesture if Fourth Church could be one of the participating
ecumenical parishes to make a donation to this program. I am also helping to create a
program that will make appeals to large membership churches to become ecumenical
parishes and to donate $3,000 either yearly or over a number of years to this program.

Do we have any conversation going about Fourth Church making a contribution to the
Hawkins-Buchanan Fund for Racial Justice? It doesn’t need to be hefty, but it would be a
nice gesture if my congregation stepped up to the plate on this.

Perhaps you and J and Kirby could talk about making a presentation to the Session/Joint Finance
Committee about using some of the year-end surplus for these two causes.

JMB:cea

ROLODEX .CRD

Lindner, John
888-212-2920 (TOLL FREE)
212-870-3260

212-870-3261 (FAX)

World Council of Churches
Ecumenical Development Initiative
475 Riverside Drive, Room 915

New York, N¥ 101315

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