THE LEGACY OF EUGENE CARSON BLAKE
IMPLICATIONS FOR CHURCH LEADERSHIP\
FOR THE 21°’ CENTURY
BLAKE, THE PASTOR

FEBRUARY 9, 1998
JOHN M. BUCHANAN

Last April | was in one of the buildings which flank the street
just outside the Plaza of St. Peter, on the third floor, in the offices of
the Pontifical Secretariat for Christian Unity. My mind and emotions

Wore —palternating between “What in the world am | 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. / i

What | 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 photographs 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 | somehow managed
to be ordained without really understanding what | 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 proudly aware of my church. And
it was Blake that did it. | often reflect on the fact that | was never
more in love with my church than I| was in the days when
Presbyterians were stepping up and assuming leadership in the civil
rights movement. It was when | became a Presbyterian truly, by
choice and conviction. Although | 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 | saw the
newspaper picture of a Presbyterian minister, 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 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 public when issues of justice and morality were being
discussed and confronted. : iw

yOne *

| thought Blake was God - or at least a very closé colleague. If
we had a Pope or presiding bishop, he was it for mé. | felt the same
way about his successors. | was in awe of William P. Thompson, and
still am; saw him on an elevator in Philadelphia and was so nervous |
could barely speak. And as | came to know and appreciate Jim
Andrews, | 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 | 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 justa
pastor and didn’t know how to run a seminary and she said, “Ken if
you can run a congregation, you can run anything.”

l’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 Te to believe that what they write down is always

correct.” [p. viii]_/ LA\\ wiles guides

| am indebted to Professor Brackenridge for most of what I
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.

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 XAcademics
and athletics. He was blessed to have two parents who loved him
and who imparted, 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.

| 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 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.

All 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 | am competitive and

persistent” - in my estima 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 | decided to be an organization man -
that is to work through the regular machinery of the organized
church. | 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 alt 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. 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 a “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 ae ie part of his professiona

and personal life.” — | a fone yoxr
Po) de T wed + \e ry
-t

In 1935 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 | read that | 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 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 anda
Session to moderate.

In his first year at Albany, 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 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 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 Coilege 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, | 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 Niebuhr’s An
Interpretation of Christian Ethics, outlined the book paragraph by
paragraph for his classroom fectures and in the process became a
Niebuhrian.

| did not know that about Blake and Pm glad | now do. [t was
Niebuhr | 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.38Y

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 toa
good sense of humor and prayer, a good dose of Niebuhr is st
thing | know to alleviate a preacher’s swollen self-esteem.” [p.32

lt 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 ra ;
(pastor to the rich) and comfortabl so ecamefromacomfortable 0 54
home, attended an elite private sch and then Princeton at a time Sail
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 is 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 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 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 te 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.(The Presbyterian Tribune gave Pasadena it’s number one
rating - on the basis of Sunday School, membership, ratio of
benevolences and total giving. >

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.

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

“lam available to all of you, day or night, in emergency, Asa
general rule, itis necessary for me to keep my mornings clear for
writing sermons, speeches, articles 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
would like to become acquainted. I, too, want to become
acquainted. You do me and the church a disservice if you let it be
agreed among you that | am too busy to be seen.” fp 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. | know now how difficult that was: how easy to

10

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 Il 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 Blake expanded the horizons of the
church’s radio station to include classical music, 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
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 anew
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.

Biake was a biblical preacher, grounded in Reformed
Theology. 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.

3

When I visited Cuba last year | 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 I say. | was brought
in for questioning because on Reformation 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 ! 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, to 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 peopie to God in Jesus Christ.? [p.50]

An interesting encounter with the President of Fuller Seminary,
John Ockenja, a Presbyterian pastor from Pittsburgh - which began
with Blake opposing Ockenja’s laboring within the boundaries of Los
Angles Presbytery and the Presbytery refusing to ordain Fuller

12

graduates, ended with Blake and Ockenja meeting together,
developing a respectful friendship and not Jong after Fuller was
using the Pasadena Presbyterian Church’s sanctuary and
classrooms for seminary activities.

Blake 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 | 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, | 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 - uncharacieristically reflectively: “I find myself
standing a little beyond the middie of life. | 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 -7
feeling of its importance and begin to look for the easy adjustment
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.” fp. 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 Jed 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.

13

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 feel 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
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 rivals and adversaries into
friends, colleagues, supporters, he managed to avoid personally
insulting his opponents even in the midst of deep disagreement and
strenuous debate.

In conclusion, | should like to advance the following gleanings
from Biake’s pastoral ministry; areas where he contributed
substantially to the life of our church and our role as ministers and
servants, and 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 invoived
in a very popular student movement conceived by Frank Buchman
which would become Moral Rearmament. First Century Christian
Fellowship organized “house parties,” smal! groups for Bible study,

14

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 itis simply and
easily assumed in many quantities, 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.

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

15

P3ZL

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 is 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.

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. [p51]

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

16

e 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?

« 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 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. Aconsistent 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

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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 500 pastoral calls in a year.
Later he did it by intentional, visible accessibility - “when you need
me, 1’il 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,’ | would stop and think ‘Whose feet am I stepping on
today.’”

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.

« 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.

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