September marks two years as your Pastor, Northminster. Two years!
Since I can only speak for myself, I will gladly insert a modifying adjective and dub them Two Happy Years. Two is hardly a long enough list to celebrate Northminster's blessings, so to celebrate these double years I leaned on the tutelage of the Drs. Emory & Genny Whitaker, who labored long to teach this mathematical neophyte the necessary formula for conversion. Alas, such calculus is much too complicated to explain here! But it turns out that 2 years = 24 months. Phew. Who knew?
Twenty-four: Now there's a number I can work with to convey what it is I have come to love about the Wonderful Wheat (not chaff!) Who Worship Wonderfully on Wimbish Way. Ready? Here we go. In no particular order.
#24 I love our stained glass windows in our sanctuary walls. I love the interesting story of how they came to Macon, but I especially love the way, on clear days, the morning sunlight streams through the left-side panes and spills all over the congregation like we were really Holy Spirit Pentecostals. Beautiful.
#23 When we worship in the sanctuary (remember that?), I love that it takes 5 minutes to Pass the Peace in the middle of our service. The aisles fill up like halftime at a Georgia football game, when everyone stampedes for concessions and bathrooms. Handshaking and hugging and spirited greetings that could go on and on and on if we let it: What a blessed problem. It shall return!
#22 Homemade cheese straws. God I love being back in the South.
#21 I love the fact that one of our elders can announce that we want to raise $3000 to support a staff member we care about, only to have $6000 come in within days. And when the call goes out to send cards to another staff person we love, hospitalized, he winds up with a stack too big for one hand. Those moments tell me everything worth knowing about a congregation's heart.
#20 I love that our Organist (a fellow Hawkins, no less!) not only has the musical skills necessary to coax each note right off the page of the hymnal, bringing them all to life with such color and texture ... but also that she actually believes, as many used to, that music in worship is prayer more than performance, an offering more than an ornament. Wonderful talent cradled in a living faith: That's a combination in a Music Director no congregation should take for granted. I love that you don't.
#19 Dessert auctions. (Ahem ... Yes ... Of course ... Money raised for our youth to go Montreat. Yes yes ... wonderful. Thank for that.) But did I mention: Dessert auctions.
#18 I love that you are the kind of church that stuck with missionaries in Bangladesh for 30 years. Loving them, paying them, praying for them, writing to them, welcoming them to Macon again and again. I love that you put your mission money where your mission mouth was. So much mission is flash-in-the-pan. Thanks for going the distance with your friends. I'm excited to see who will be our next partner overseas.
#17 I love our sanctuary. The first time I walked in, during a visit with your Pastor Nominating Committee, the room took my breath away. I was caught off guard, not because it is a Notre Dame Cathedral or a Divine Downtown Dinosaur, but because there is so much room to breath and light to behold. The brightness, the tallness, the spaciousness and simple dignity of it all: It is neither ornamental nor pedestrian, not gaudy but also not everyday. It is clearly a room built to house the people of God, doing what they do best: bathing in sacraments and feasting on scripture and singing their prayer. I love it. Also, there's plenty of room at the pulpit for my flailing arm movements. A plus!
#16 I love that 15 minutes after worship is over, there is still a group of persons standing around chewing the fat. I have visited too many congregations where the fellowship is bone-dry. Not fun. Seems to me it is harder for followers of Jesus to "love thy neighbor" when they don't even really like the person at the other end of the pew. Hearing friends love on one another, one week at a time? Fun. Does a pastor's heart good. Think about all those neighbors out there who know not that gift, on Sunday or any day.
#15 Trumpets. Trombones. Saxophone. Flute. Handbells. Violin. I love that so many among us bring their talents to help us worship and pray well. I like to imagine all those notes, like incense, wafting up into the peak of our ceiling, and on up to a grateful God. Thanks to all of you who bring your fragrant offerings on such a regular basis. We are better for your music. God loves it, too.
#14 I love that at Northminster there is no wall of Pastor Pictures ... which is really a way of saying how much I love the fact that we have a wall of People Pictures, members and friends of this flock. I love what I do and have no need to deprecate the importance of pastoral ministry, but it is my experience that we Protestants map too much of our congregations' history around the tenure of our pastors. Preachers come and preachers go; each one of us has our season. Better, I think, as children of the Reformation, to celebrate the "Priesthood of All Believers." Several dozen little smiling directory photos hanging neatly on a wall near the main entrance of a building devoted to the "shelter and nurture of the people of God" says to me, and hopefully to our guests: "Here we are. We are not perfect. But we are Christ's body. Real. Not fake. In the flesh; not Slick and Stock. We are we. We are church. Welcome."
#13 I like that our Sexton sometimes sits in on Bible studies; contributes updates on the saints during Prayer Meetings; and will help you unload your canned donations from your car on a Sunday morning, always with a smile. He also knows your name and will ask about your grandchildren. If a church gets lucky every now and then, they wind up with partners in ministry who also happen to be employees.
#12 Not that there is any such competition, but if there was: I would put our Northminster teenagers up against those of any church of any time and any stripe and any place. We have in this flock right now some of the kindest, funniest, glad-to-help, smartest, lowest drama, most all-around-talented kids I have ever known. They rock. I love being their pastor. I miss them! Stupid COVID.
#11 I love that three-quarters of the congregation stands up when the occasional call comes for ordained elders to rise. Some may see it as a negative, that perhaps the sanctity of ordination has been diluted in the concoction of such liberality. But knowing you now, I rather see such a majority as a positive. Ever been in a church -- or any organization, really -- where only a handful of persons always call the shots, whether they are in charge or not? Not fun. I love that as far back as the beginning, Rev. Hasty wired into the DNA of Northminster an ethic of shared leadership, involvement, and open decision-making. No record is ever perfect, I know; but the trajectory has been clear. At Northminster, persons take their turn in leadership and then they take a break and make room for others. We already have a Lord in our teacher Jesus; we don't need any other little lords hanging around too long in meetings. That is the Presbyterian way. Thanks for making it your way, too.
#10 I like that our building doesn't smell like 1978. I'm not kidding. In my presbytery work days, I would often step into the door of Presbyterian churches and be confronted with the sights (and smells) of a church trapped in the past, welded to the "good old days." Maybe there was once good air in the room, but the mission ever since has been to make the church a museum. But not at 565 Wimbish. Okay, maybe our long cinder block hallways can sometimes feel a little bit like a public school building of yore, but thanks for not worshipping the bygone years. I like that many of you may know that our better days may be behind us (numerically speaking) but that there is no reason why our best days may not still lie ahead (missionally speaking). Thanks for not being chained to your past, even while I am grateful that you know from where you've come.
#9 I love that when we dream up a fresh way to connect with our actual neighborhood here on Wimbish -- for example, last October -- our folks step up with such enthusiasm: youth decorate their family cars, adults pass out pounds of candy, Boyd dresses up like Dracula, and Virginia a witch. "Is that YOU, Mrs. Cowsert?" asked a little girl half her height. Why yes it is! I love that no one seems to mind that all those kids trample over all that green grass. For what else is Jesus' front lawn for if not for them?
#8 No one in the Greater Middle Georgia Region of Ecclesiastical Entities makes better Protestant Party Punch than the Lovely Liquid Ladies of Northminster Presbyterian Church. That stuff is an elixir for the soul. I vote that we not wait for funerals to mix up another batch. Pour me another!
#7 I love that so many of you know my daughter's name, which is really to say: I love that so many of you know so many of our young adult's names. Thanks for being the kind of congregation that pokes your head in the door on Sunday morning and asks a kid how her week at school went down. For her, and for many, that kind of community makes all the difference in the relevance of a Jesus-faith. Thanks for including kids in the church we are today, not trying to clone them for the church we once were, after we are gone.
#6 I have never served a congregation with so many card sharks. Thanks for not making a winning knowledge of Bridge a stipulation for my annual Terms of Call. I'd be out on the street! But I do love how so many of you make so much Community out of your card groups and gatherings.
#5 I love that we have a church secretary whose manifold gifts are so well-rounded, the session thought it appropriate and helpful to change her title to "Ministry Assistant" ... "secretary" being too limiting a term for such a blessed combination of people and technical and practical gifts. Indeed she does: assist us all in our ministry in and through this congregation. And every week, without fail, she helps me find the stapler, again. Thanks be to God.
#4 Thanks for hanging plenty of white boards on the wall so I can do my crazy Dry Erase Marker Bible Graffiti. I say a Bible study hasn't really happened if it doesn't look like some thugs came through and spray-painted chaos all over the board. I love to teach scripture and theology; it is the labor I most missed during five years of presbytery work. And I love that so many of you love to learn, to engage, to listen to one another and to scripture. Join me this fall as we try some online learning together. Heck, we might even get a camera focussed on a white board or two! Or three. Four. I need at least four.
#3 Have I mentioned the Key Lime Pie from the dessert auction? You people are not helping my A1C.
#2 Thank you for the wonderful Pastor Study space at the church. I love it. You don't have to wait until life returns to "normal" to stop by and sit a spell. Bring a mask and let's talk life, faith, your grandchildren, blessings, burdens, Macon weather, train travel, or moderate Reformed theology in the vein of Karl Barth. You pick! Shoot me a text and we'll "gather together to ask the Lord's blessing."
#1 I love how so many of you in your retirement years look upon that season as a time for more ministry in the community rather than only a time for more creature comforts, more "me" time. I would love to know a total weekly count of community volunteer hours from Northminster members. It would be a big number. God be praised. During my interview two years ago, a member of the PNC apologized for needing to run an errand on our way to the next gathering. When that errand turned out to be picking up fresh bread to drop off at a downtown homeless ministry, I knew I had found my next church.
And found it I have. Happy two years, Northminster. God willing, I will get to walk with you in this Presbyterian pilgrimage for many more. You. Are. Loved. Cheese straws and all. RWH
