Love Notes

by Bill Love

I was attending a continuing education event conducted by the Alban Institute. We began by introducing ourselves around the circle. There were about thirty of us.

About a quarter of the way around the circle, one young pastor told us he was the associate pastor of a Presbyterian church in Indianapolis which had just celebrated their 35th anniversary. He went into some detail about their celebration. The congregation I was serving at the time had celebrated their bicentennial the year before. I thought, That’s nothing, and thought about what I would say about our bicentennial celebration.

On the Sunday nearest the founding date of the congregation, we were honored to have the Moderator of the General Assembly preach for us. That year it was Dr. Isabel Rogers. We had a closed circuit TV hookup so that the overflow from the sanctuary could view the proceedings from the fellowship hall. And of course, we videotaped the service for posterity.

The video cameras were set up in the balcony. Those voices of those sitting closest to them could be picked up on the microphones on the cameras. As one who doesn’t like my voice to be heard above anyone else’s singing, I felt those at risk of being recorded deserved a warning. They could then decide for themselves whether or not to have their singing on the tape.

In the advisory, I also joked that Izzy and I were going to use the tape as our audition tape for the recent opening at PTL, when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had rather publicly left. (PTL was located only a few miles from the town where the church was.)

It was a grand and glorious day in which we celebrated 200 years of continuous and faithful existence.

Before the introductions made their way around the circle to me, giving me the opportunity to make a fool of myself, one of the participants said, I am Roderick Campbell, pastor of Mearns parish, Glasgow, Scotland, where we have worshiped God in that place since and named a singledigit century and in that building since and named a century barely in the double-digits.

Suddenly, 200 years didn’t seem quite so impressive. We were only a fairly recent part of a stream that stretches back far beyond our existence or the existence of the United States. Even the Church of Scotland, which I sometimes refer to as the Mothership, only goes back about 6 centuries.

One of my seminary classmates had transferred from another seminary. He told me that, at that seminary, he had been talking with one of his Old Testament professors and asked him, Why do you believe? The professor said, I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I believe because they believed.

There came a time when the faith became my faith, not the faith of my parents or forebears, but the faith came to me initially because they believed and all those before them believed. The church I was serving didn’t invent the faith. It had just been its custodian for 200 years in that place.

And I decided not to mention our bicentennial.