Transcript
ADAMS: -- talk with you this evening about the local church. Some years ago, we visited an uncle of mine in the Middle West and he took us to church on Sunday. His pastor was just returned from a European trip and he had been in Russia. He had arrived in Moscow one evening on a train from Berlin. And when he went to dinner,
he became ill. And the Russians thought that he might not last the night and so they put him on a train and shipped him back to Berlin. And the Sunday that we arrived, he was speaking in the church service on his impressions of Russia. What intrigued me even more was that he was going to give another lecture on Wednesday evening and one the following Sunday. I'm at least
not quite in that position when I talk with you about the local church. I grew up in one. So far as I can remember, I've been in one every Sunday that I haven't been sick for more years than I would care to remark. I have known one as a student pastor and three in a period of 28 years as a pastor. I think I'm more in the position of the man who had spent
several years touring the world and arrived back and was asked immediately to talk about it. And he said, "If you give me a year to soak up what's happened, maybe I can tell you something." But as I stand here, having come to the seminary out of the parish in September and to anticipate a question that might very well come up later, I am only here because I believe and have been constrained to believe that this is
way in which I can do the most for the local parish in the next two years. I may be wrong about this, but I'm going to see. But I share the sentiment of that exile in Babylon who said or was remembered by someone who wrote it down to have said, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning."
And I'm sure as Karl Barth is sure that he was not talking about some idealized company of people but about a group of real people. And when I talk about the local church, I'm talking about a group of people that meet on a corner somewhere in a little building or a big one. Now the man of the dispersion in Babylon was hundreds of miles from Jerusalem. And I don't need to tell you that he knew what Jerusalem looked like about that time. It was a heap of
of rubble bleaching in the sun. And he also knew Babylon. He and his friends had really been treated rather well, in spite of his complaints. They had a decent place to live and they were reasonably comfortable. And Babylon was a very nice place to live. There were lush fields and rivers teeming with fish and waterfowl and herds and
flocks and imports from all over the world. Babylon itself must have been a fabulous place, as you all know. After you walk through those grim walls, 85-feet thick, you could walk for an hour in any direction and scarcely ever exhaust the marvels of the place. And procession street, with its white limestone pavement and the red breccia sidewalks veined in white, and the lions advancing
on you in enamel on the beautiful walls that were pierced here and there with bronze gates for the side streets. And then at the end of the great concourse, huge towers going up, covered with magnificent enamels of bulls and dragons done in yellow and white on a beautiful blue background. And then the palaces behind the wall springing up everywhere, topped in magnificence by the palace of the great king,
with those ferns and flowers cascading over like a waterfall of color. And then beyond that, the great temple of Marduk, 20 times the size of the temple at Jerusalem when it was at its greatest and most beautiful. Its great sev-- eight great steps, each of them four stories high moving up to that gold-encrusted summit. And on procession street in the midst of all this splendor, a vast panoply of
magnificence as people from every part of the world came and went, going in and out of the libraries where the tablets were kept, patronizing the great stores. The sounds of splashing fountains and the cries of hawkers for every sort of ware. This man from Jerusalem must have known that compared to a place like this, Jerusalem was nothing. Why, then, did he say that he
must not forget it? I think you know and I know because as he looked around, he saw only empty faces. He saw only people who were desperately lonely. He knew that everyone around him was hungry for God and didn't know it and didn't know where to turn. And he knew, he knew where God could be found. The One who made everything, the one who loved him and loved these other people if they but knew it.
And as he looked about him and thought of Jerusalem and he thought what he could become and what his children could become if he forgot Jerusalem, he made this great vow. And I join him in it. I think of this scene of procession street whenever I go up to New York and find myself at Fifth Avenue at Radio City. And then, invariably,
I see people slipping in and out of Saint Patrick's, going into Saint Thomas's, going around the side street into the chapel at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, or over in the Broadway section going into that little chapel where, in one evening in the half-hour before show time, I saw two dozen people come in to pray. Amidst all this splendor, some people know that the church has something to offer them. And I think they know
that nothing can give them what the church has -- God. It doesn't have it as a possession, but it has it as a gift from Him to give to the world. First time that we entered Albany, it was 19 years ago, to begin our pastorate there, it was turning toward dusk and we came over the brow of a hill and started down toward the Hudson River, across the way from the city. And
State Street was flung up the hill with its lights burning, great signs flashing, and the capitol and the great state office building behind it was a lovely sight. We came up through the city and at least came to the old First Presbyterian Church, where we were going to serve. Rather drab, unpretentious building standing on a corner, and passed it to the most splendid residence, I suppose, we've every inhabited, a penthouse apartment that the
church had for a matter of a few weeks until they could find us a place. They'd gotten it from someone who had just died. But I've always been glad that I lived there, because as we lived out -- looked out the windows of this place, we could see the mountains all the way around Albany. And although very soon we were living on the ground, we had an impression that we never forgot. As the mountains were round about Jerusalem and the God was round about his people, so these beautiful mountain were all around
the city. And most people never knew it. They lived and walked and moved there and never knew this was going on. And I thought of this often. I thought of it as I faced a congregation in that First Presbyterian Church and saw the faces of people open and waiting for God. This is a beautiful sight, as you all know, one of the most wonderful things that a minister ever sees. Terrifying, but wonderful.
Bus drivers, they see people when they're fumbling for their change and in a hurry. Actors see them when they want to be entertained. Salespeople see them when they're trying for a bargain. But you and I look into their faces when they're waiting for God. And we see them, too, in those moments in the hospital, those times when they're making great decisions in the quiet
of their home or in our studies. We see them reaching out for God and it always seemed to me that ever after I came to know a city this way, as a pastor, there were mountains all around speaking of God. High moments in human lives that I couldn't forget. And when five years later in the dusk I just happened to come over that same hill and saw those lights, I saw the beautiful buildings.
But standing up much taller, much more impressive and important to me, were the people, the church. In the offices, in the homes, in the factories, in the shops, there as the church and it stood quite tall because God moved into its life and through it into the lives of others. Now I'd like to talk even more about this, but
before I do, I'll have to admit that like the man in Babylon, I know, as you know, that Jerusalem has some shortcomings. And it isn't always able to communicate God the way it should. It isn't able willing to be the kind of instrument it should. And I think that for a few moments in honesty, we have to look at this problem, or a
series of problems. I'd like to suggest that the church's basic problem is that it's composed of people. Some folks think there're too many people. [They're?] the very ones who about 20 years ago were telling us that there weren't enough. Some folks think that there aren't enough now. But I think everybody agrees that the church has the problem that it's full of people and people always have problems.
One of their problems is that they have to live under some sort of economic arrangement. The first Christian church had to deal with a society in which there was slavery and it must have been extremely difficult to arrange the hours of service and to work out some of the things they wanted to do. They had to deal with the problem that most of the meat they got had been slaughtered by priests of other deities. And our fathers dealt with the fact that cows had to be milked at a certain hour
and that crops had to be gotten in at a certain time. Now our problems are different. There's shift work. This plays [hob?] with family life. Any of you who's ever sat very long in a study knows what it does in the way of temptation for individuals and the way it is eating away at many people in our time. You know what it does to the church. There's the problem of the commuter who lives an hour and sometimes two hours
away from his work so that one pastor in this part of the world I know has to -- the only way he can see his men is to ride with them on the train into town. And he told me with some feeling recently that the only way he can have a session meeting is to catch them on the train or on the ferry and then legalize it after service on Sunday morning. The men won't come to church in the evenings at all. Now this isn't much fun. There's also the problem that this amazing mechanical civilization we've developed has given
us a great deal more leisure than ever before for most of us. But it has reduced the amount of leisure available to the most talented among us, the most gifted to the point where the leaders that are most needed in industry and business, in the community life and in the church, haven't a moment to spare and live [haggard?] lives, a good many of them. Then there's the problem of mobility with our people moving all over.
And it's a very rare church that doesn't have a 10 percent turnover every year. And this isn't only a problem for the church, it's a problem for these people that live in the church. And I don't need to talk about it. And then there's the other one of urban concentration, which is causing so much difficulty in our time. The crowding that results with the endless move out, with the stratification of society that's swallowing this move, so it's getting to the point where you can almost gauge a man's
income to the dollar by seeing which particular community he lives in. And you can tell something about his education and background and everything else. And it's infernally dull. And this makes for dull churches that are all the same and there are some real problems here. Now Christian men are concerned about this. I talked to an industrialist in my former city of Rochester about this shift work. It was macerating people a good deal more than Joseph
Sittler's "Maceration of the Minister." It was chopping them up fine. And I said to him, "Can't we do something about this?" He said, "Well, I've given a great deal of thought to this and there are two ways of doing it. We could double the capitalization of our company, provided that the people receiving the dividends would be willing to drop from two percent to one percent and provided we could get the capital. Or we could all agree to take a standard of living that was just half what it is today."
And he said, "I don't think we're going to persuade anybody to do that." And then he smiled and he said, "If you're thinking of a planned economy, I can tell you the story of the planned economies all over the world. They're doing the same thing." There doesn't seem to be anyway out of this. Well, [he?] had to milk cows early, too. So the local church seems to have certain options. It can become a little group within this complex, withdrawn into itself and trying to create a new
order. And we have this in communities as old as the Amana community and the Bruderhof in Germany. We have it in more recent ones like the Koinonia, a community -- a farm down in Georgia. We have it in a number of places, probably a dozen of these experiments that are well known. The second thing the church can do is to say we will go on with our regular work as we have in the past and --
but we will set up within our life small groups that will try by discipline to wean themselves away from the worst abuses of the culture of which we are a part and at least give some sort of witness of discipline. And groups pushing in this direction and helping small groups within the church have been movements like Iona and Kirkridge and movements of this sort with which you're familiar. The third thing the church can do is to say we'll live with it. And we will
try somehow as the situation develops to adjust to the circumstances and we will try to change the worst abuses. And in this process, we'll try to develop new ways of dealing with the problem. The whole emergence of counseling has been a heavy adaptation to this pressure-ridden society. And the small group movement which has come into the churches with great impact and effect
and the emphasis on the family-centered Christian education and the lay education movement. These are some of the things that have been done by churches that have decided they've just got to deal with this economic problem. Now the second area that causes the church a lot of trouble as I see it from a pastor's angle is the simple matter of human differences, the bewildering variety of people that the church much deal with. In the first place, if you're in most churches today, I
think half the people in your church, at least, did not come from the denomination which you serve. And when the people leave your church, a good half of them will join churches of other denominations. Unless you're in a particular section of the country where denominationalism is unusually strong, this is pretty much the story. So the denominational indifference is growing apace. And we have the rather fascinating situation of men going to ecumenical conferences staunchly defending the position
that isn't held by even one-half of their constituents. And the constituents just don't -- couldn't care less. There's a growing tension between denominational preoccupation and a sense of Christian unity at the grassroots. And the people negotiating for union have got to move faster if they're going to keep up with it. And most pastors know this. There's also the tremendous strain on
faith in the uniqueness of Christianity which has arisen from the pluralism of our society, which is a constant pressure on the church. Every day, people are in contact with very nice Roman Catholics and fine Jews and sometimes with a good many fine Mormons and people of other traditions within the American community and now Buddhists. They have literature of every sort. The more indifferent among them notice
this and say we don't see much difference. The more subtle are reading Paul Tillich and Niebuhr and saying, "What is the difference?" And you find yourself confronted with an indifference to our -- the unique elements of Christianity unless somehow you've been able to convey a real sense of God's grace in that church. And along with this, the vast world of books has been exploding. You, Kurt, pointed out in the last Theology Today
that since 1940, there's been a 448 percent increase in the number of books published. Four hundred forty-eight percent increase in 20 years. And people are reading these books. All our fears that they wouldn't read when television came have gone for nothing. They're reading more than ever before. And no man can ever keep up with what's going on. You can't possibly know what all these people are reading and the new angles from which they'll come. And theology
has always been an answer to the questions that are raised as people think about life and bring these questions to the man who believes. But how difficult it is becoming for the pastor who is faced with people who are reading in a hundred different fields, and sometimes a thousand different fields. And he simply can't do it alone. And then there's the reverse of this, the little verbal interest of vast portions of the population. This was borne in on me by two couples'
groups that met two successive evenings in Rochester. We had a dozen of these groups meeting and they were discussing program for the year ahead. And one group chose a completely cerebral approach to their faith. They had to have very carefully worked out verbal programs for the year. The other group, there wasn't anybody in it that could abide the idea of any kind of a discussion. It just turned their stomach. They wanted to do something.
And they had no interest in words whatever. And so our programs in the Protestant Church often bore people to death because they aren't verbally oriented. The Protestant Church had its first success with the rising middle class that wanted to be educated if it wasn't. And so it got the idea that talk would do more than it will. The local church -- and this is a parentheses -- has one advantage in this respect over the rest of the religious
institutions of our time. And that is that anybody involved in the local church has got to be involved in the rhythm of talk and work, of words and work. And the pastor turns from his study and writing to helping stuff a bag that's going to take clothing overseas or visiting in a hospital or going to a jail or visiting in a home or dealing with some complex problem that's arisen in someone's home. And
there's a constant rhythm and change. And this is true of the membership of the church. They go from their jobs in the secular world to times of worship and back again and there's a good rhythm. But there's a terrible danger that I've become aware of as I've lived here this year that in something other than the local church, the religious sphere can become a world of talk and there isn't enough rhythm. Now fortunately, the particular assignment is likely to keep me from ever
having this problem because I'm working with the boys as they come and go and I'm determined that they won't have the problem. But it's a serious problem. And we've got a situation where some people are forced into a position where they have to be constantly saying something new and sensational because words get tiresome. And the words go round and round. And so you have these sudden emergences of all sorts of dramatic ideas in the religious sphere that are mostly sharp analysis
that is almost paralysis and leaves us waiting to see what comes next. And what comes -- what will come next is a new spate of words. And last night, Dr. [Helm?], who is a very good friend, expressed surprise and amazement at the mystery that the anti-church jag has moved so rapidly through the colleges. Well, there's no mystery about it at all. If he'd follow the coattails of the fellow who was ahead of him, he'd find out how it got started. This sort of thing moves
because people have to talk. And there needs to be a rhythm that must be going on in the life of the church. And I suspect that there isn't enough of it. But this is an excursus. To return to the local church and the problem of verbalism, Wynn and Fairchild, in their book on the Christian family in the church, have what is a very exciting and very disturbing observation,
that they found that even people who had been in the church for 20 years listening to good solid preaching or under the careful tutelage of church schools, these people couldn't express one single, solid Christian theological idea. They didn't even have a good grip on the idea of grace. The only people they found who could express themselves about the Christian faith were people who had been teaching it. And this ought to suggest something to us. It ought to make us think. So what
I'm suggesting is that we've got some real problems here if we go on thinking that we can solve our problems in the same way. Along with this problem of diversity among human beings, there is another problem, the problem of inclusiveness. You -- when you determinedly bring people together, as our basic convictions about Christ compel us to do, into the church who are very different, there's no guarantee at all they're going to like each other.
There's no guarantee that they're going to work together easily. If you've had any experience at this, you know that this is an understatement. If you're going to bring together people of very different sorts, there's the danger that some of them are going to feel they'll be patronized and some of them are going to try to do some patronizing. And when it gets to the youth group, this can become a nightmare. As young people come in out of all sorts of different courtship and marriage backgrounds and you wonder what is going to happen next.
It isn't simple. And yet this is the way of creation. This is what we've got to do if we're going to bring all sorts of people together and we believe that under the auspices of Christ we can secure community. If we can't there, we're really in trouble. So the local church must do some furious thinking about the problem of community. Where it already is occurring, there's a pressure on the church for church union and for local cooperation through councils
and in new expressions of common Christianity. There is an absolute necessity for hard theological thinking and the pastor can't do this alone. He's got to involve a lot of other men and women in it if we're going to meet the challenge of this increased learning in our time. And there's the problem of careful administrative thinking about the mixtures that are going on so that we're reading to meet them before crises break out on every side. And along with this,
where there's very little mixture -- and this applies to more than half the churches, probably three-quarters of them -- we've got to find ways to get it. Now [Gib Whitter's?] idea of slicing cities into pies with a center of worship down here at the point and house churches scattered across doesn't appeal to very many of us. But it's an idea. And that's more than a good many of us have come up with. And there's the Presbyterial solution that says, well, let's put all our unity there. But this is a refuge for the
timid. It's a good way out of the problem. You don't have to face them right where you are. You can stay with the people who are just like you. Or there's Dave Watermulder's solution, which he's tried over at Oak Park and now is trying at Bryn Mawr, where you take whole groups of people out of the suburbs and get them to go in and contribute their time and their money and their effort in other parts of the city. Or there's the colonization plan whereby some people actually change their memberships and move into churches so that there can be
some leadership there and some help. And there are some people actually moving in the communities in order to do this. There are a very few people in this country who are trying to work out some solutions to these problems. But too many of us are going cheerfully along, hoping it will all come out all right in spite of the pressure of this diversity. Now these two are rather new things in our time because of the nature of our time. There's a third problem that the local
church faces is idolatry and this it's always faced and so we don't need to talk much about it. The memorial tablets in our church proclaim it at times. The cult of the institution is very clear in America. I was in contact with a church recently that was giving $20 for current expense and a dollar for benevolence and their most achievement was a stainless steel kitchen. And there's the cult of the minister in our situation.
One is often hearing about a minister, well, you can't get hold of him often, but he's always there when you're in trouble. I submit that this may be the very wrong time for him to be there. It puts the reliance in the wrong place. He doesn't prepare people so that they know how to reach God. They know how to reach him. And there's the cult of what is that Doctor West was talking to us about. The local church has to think about this and it's got to find some way to do something about it. The church is the place where people go for
security. And naturally, they don't like change there. This is why it's so hard to effect change in a local church. I remember a girl that walked out of the choir every time the choirmaster introduced a contemporary anthem. And in Albany, that was pretty often because he did it about every other week. And -- but what was the matter? She was extremely uneasy because she was very insecure. And until she found grace and was able to accept her insecurity in
this -- in God's grace and goodness, she couldn't accept change. And this is what's going on in a great many of our churches. We haven't been able to get through with the message of God's love and his grace. And therefore, we've got great problems when we come to try to get change. We're really in a difficult situation. The minister, also, is in a difficult spot because he has to represent God's love in many situations, but he'd better understand himself well enough and to know his own needs so he doesn't go around eating people like a
spider. And the institution has to be maintained, but we could do in America with a little more make do, I think. Adjusting the situations. How many pastors are sensitive to the desperate problems that the people are having in their homes, in their financial way, as they ought to be? And how many of them can see this as clearly as they can see that beautiful edifice on the corner, as they can see the needs that
they're most aware of? We need to make a critical evaluation of the things around us. And then, of course, the other difficulty that the church faces is a lukewarm spirit. The third chapter of Revelation has a good deal to say about this. And the first thing it says is that the church is in danger of losing its love. I don't know how it is with you, but as I look at our churches, I think this is one of our most serious and
difficult problems. There aren't too many people who would characterize the church in terms of 1 Corinthians 13 or Matthew 25 as they look at the church and see what it's really like. And yet this is what people are caught by, this is what they need. This is the thing that needs to be done for them. For a number of years, I had a Bible class at a place called Kodak Park. And there were a great many
people there who were in research. And these were noonday classes. And one day, one of my friends heard a man who was quite a famous research person in a line that was going through the cafeteria. And his friend said to him, "What are you doing in the cafeteria? I thought you ate in the service dining room." Well, he said, "I'm going over here to this Bible class." And his friend said, "What are you doing in a Bible class?" Well, he said, "I'm going over there to hear a man tell me that God loves me. He believes it and I'd like to."
Now I think this is precisely what was the matter with the 21 physicists that Dr. Hamilton was talking to us about the other night. They'd like to believe that God loves them, but there isn't very much evidence of it in the -- even in the church. And they would like to have it. And that physicist was coming there because somebody cared enough to try to get him to think about this and was interested in him. The second thing that's the problem here in this area of lukewarmness is slack discipline.
And since nobody else is here very much besides ministers, I think we have to look at the fact that some of the slackness in the church in the area of discipline starts with us, with our extremely slack devotional lives, with our careless time budgets. A group of us in a retreat were working on a time budget not long ago and one of the men admitted that he really hadn't an idea how his time had ebbed away until he began to put it all down on paper and look at it and try to organize his life. And I've
spent about 18 years as a ministerial relations chairman one place or the other and I don't know how many scores of ministers I've talked with. But I know that the same thing is true in the area of their financial arrangements. They just don't plan ahead. Now if they don't, it's no wonder that the people in the churches don't. And you and I have something to answer for at this point. We've allowed some slackness of discipline to creep into our own lives. Almost all of us can present an excellent plan for preaching, for example. We know
that we ought to lay things out for a year or for three months at a time. We know how to we ought to outlines and write and then outline again and prepare the material for delivery so that it's clear and sharp and crisp. But -- we know this, but how many of us have the discipline to do it? And the third problem in this area is the lack of power in the church. And this, again, means that church people seem so much like non-Christians that nobody can quite figure out what we mean when we
talk about the Holy Spirit. And when we face the race issue or when we face the problem -- a problem in the office, we're too much like the other people. The local church, then, has its problems and too few of us are experimenting with creative solutions to these problems today. I think part of the reason for it is that we shy away from administrative thinking and it's only administrative thinking that needs to be done about [these?] in the light of the Bible.
We need to sit down with the Bible and think straight and clear about these problems that are confronting the church in our time and wee whether there isn't some new way to go at it so that we can adjust to the economic pressures or change them, adjust to the vast differences that we must face in our time, adjust to these other temptations that befront us. But I would like to point out that the local church, while it has its problems, has its
strengths. And that these strengths are, first of all, in its foundation. Christ loves the church and gave Himself for it and nothing is going to snatch it out of His hand. The people He has redeemed love Him and they're going to belong to Him. And He's put a rock under the church and He doesn't intend that it's going to flounder. The power of the church flows from
Christ and that's a power that raised Him from the dead and the gates of hell can't prevail against Him. The church lives to proclaim the good news and it lives by the good news, so it always has to have the reading and the preaching of the Word. It has to be raising up young men to do this. And I wonder if we've been giving enough thought to that at the local level, finding the best men, helping them to prepare to hear what God may be saying to
them. The church has the strength of its foundation, Jesus Christ. And the church has the strength of its nature. It's a fellowship of human beings responding in love to what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and the way He's brought us together by His Spirit so that we can live with Him in love as a family forever. And this means that it consists of all kinds of people. But this
immediately means that part of the pastor's task has to be the administrative task of the pastor, the shepherd. We've got to stop kicking about the fact that if all these people are going to do things together, somebody has to coordinate it and we'd better start learning how to do it more effectively. But the third thing to be said about the church's strength is its destiny. The church has a destiny. It's a destiny that was outlined to Abraham and has been repeated to the church ever since
through all its forms in its -- all its difficulties. It's to be blessed and to be a blessing. It is, in short, through the grace of God to witness to Him in the world. And this is happening. This is the thing on which I would have preferred to spend the entire time. And there isn't too much left, but I want to give you a few instances. Each of you could fill in some others, but I don't think we do enough of this. In the first church I
knew, where I grew up as a youngster, there was a carpenter. That carpenter's life was changed by Christ. It changed the way he did his work. He changed the way he lived at home. He changed his personal habits. He'd been an unpleasant man and something happened to him and everybody knew that he had been changed.
There was in that church a half-blind piano tuner. You would have said he had about the smallest gifts of anybody you ever met. He couldn't get much education. But he took an interest in a group of boys from an inner-city community and he transformed their lives with the Boys Club. And he brought other people in to help him. And you know that Christ had gotten hold of that man
very soon after you had met him. There were two women in that church. They were hosiery workers. In those days when I was quite young, they weren't earning very much. And if they'd been like the people who lived on either side of them in a little row house in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, if they'd been like the others, it would have been a pretty narrow life they lived. Well, if you went into their house, their rugs were more threadbare than they were in the homes
on either side. And there were fewer things that were choice and lovely. But there were maps. And those women lived in the whole world. And they had a mission that reached around the earth. And a tremendous proportion of all that they earned went into changing life for other people. And you knew that Christ had gotten hold of them. The second church which I knew is the church I knew in my latter
youth. It had in it a man who owned a good deal of property. And when the crash came, he continued without collecting rents wherever he knew people were in trouble, putting coal in their cellars and sending checks around to keep them going until he used all his property and lost everything he had. Why did he do that? It was a crazy thing to do. He did it because the love of Christ compelled him. There just wasn't any argument about it. That's why he
he did it. In that same church, there was a woman who plunged into a mission among underprivileged people and completely changed the lives of little children who, when she first took hold of them, didn't even know what a bathroom was, didn't even know what love was, had known nothing but knocks and scars from the time that they were born. And this gradually moved into their homes and changed them. Why was all this going
on? Because the love of God had moved through that church into this life. The third church I knew, it was a little church down along the seashore and I knew it for two years while I was here as a student. I worked there. One of the men in that church was very elderly when I knew him. He had retired from a very successful business in Philadelphia and then went through the wringer when the crash came and lost everything that he had financially. But he hadn't lost his faith.
He was a school janitor when I knew him and he went cheerfully about his chores, 10 years older than most anybody you'd think of in that capacity, writing poetry of praise in the little room that he had off the cleaning room in the school whenever he had a moment. And giving his hours to the work of the church when he didn't have to go up and down the beach to gather firewood to keep warm. Full of life and love and a wonderful father in Israel to a young man who
was trying to find his way as a pastor. Christ was in his life and God had found him. There was another woman in that same city, little town, it was. Her husband was drowned in an accident. He worked on the sea. Her son was a hydrocephalic boy whose head was two or three times normal size and he never, though he was in his thirties when I knew him, he never had reached
much beyond about eight or 10 years of age in his viewpoint on life. She had her mother and father as almost dead weights to take care of. I never in the years I knew her heard a complaint from her. And whenever anybody in that whole community needed help, she was the one they turned to. She had a job in the community that supported her and kept the rest of them going and she kept right on doing God's work because Christ was in her
heart and had changed her life. I wish there were time to tell you of some others in that church, but I'm going to talk about the first church I served in Philadelphia. There was a man there. He was an advertising manager for a quite successful firm. My last ride with him was from his home to a hospital. He knew he was dying of cancer. He had been a father to the fellows that worked in his territory. And what did he talk about the whole trip to the hospital?
He talked about the man who was following us in the car, that he'd been trying to help to open his heart and life to God because the man had desperate problems and he said, "He needs God and Christ can help him." And he was telling me what he hoped I'd do if he didn't live long enough to do it. And he wasn't even thinking about himself. He died a few days later. In that same community, there was a doctor. He was a very busy doctor.
But he had caught something of the love of God and Christ had moved into his life through the church. He found a great many mothers in the hospital where he gave his time to take care of young mothers and babies that didn't have enough milk for their children. And so he prodded the businessmen of the community until they set up a milk fund. Then he found some boys were getting into trouble in the community and he prodded businessmen until there were Boys Clubs springing up in three different parts of the community.
He found that the community hadn't taken seriously enough its social problems and he prodded me and some other people into doing something about that. He was a magnificent prodder. He had very limited time, but he knew how to get things done. And he did it why? Because Christ was in his heart and he had met God in Christ. There was another man in that community. One of his sons has since
been here at the seminary. He has two other fine boys. He was almost blind. Came down one morning, picked up his newspaper, and couldn't see the heading. Just like that. He'd been perfectly well the day before. He lost his fine position and he struggled up, first peddling one thing after the other until finally he had a little store and then he had three and finally he had three giant markets in the Philadelphia area. And then one day, someone took advantage of his blindness,
got him to sign a lease for an area that was going to be closed up completely for several years and he lost everything in the course of a struggle that went on for years. He told me one day, years later, that almost the week that I first met him he had walked out of his home with $14 in his pocket and a wife and three boys to support. He had paid the rent of $35 and $14 was all he had in the world. He took it downtown
and bought merchandise with it, carried it on his shoulder, and sold it, bought some more, and kept on. And every Sunday during that period -- if I'd known it, I suppose the church wouldn't have taken it -- but every Sunday during that period, he gave a tithe of what the Lord had given him that week. And he went right on. That man's life in itself would be enough as a witness to touch the heart of anyone who really knew him.
And I've only told you one-third of his story. He is still a magnificent Christian. He teaches a class of boys and I tell you those boys know that God loves them. I think of the third -- the fifth church, the one in Albany. I just want to tell you about a couple of people there. On could go on like this all night, as you could, about the people you've known. But this man came back from the war and he said, "I did all my charity work
before I went away. And now I've given three years of my life and I'm through. I'm going to live for myself from now on." But the church caught him. People who loved God caught him and he got drawn back into the life of the church. He had a family business and gradually he began to see that the way he was handling this wasn't right. And so he decided to make his employees his partners. And gradually, he moved
them into the business. When he was -- came to the time when he himself wanted to retire, he solve his portion of the business to the employees and went on. But most of it, by that time, was held by the employees. There was another man there, a very unusual person. I wish I could tell you more about him. But he caught a vision of international students who were left astray in the city. Little city of Albany, not too many international
students, but he and his wife gave up their home and opened a house where these people could be entertained. And he changed the lives of so many people. He and his wife were invited to Ghana when the president was installed down there some years ago because one of the high officials had been a guest in his home. Why did he do this? It was because of the love of Christ. He had seen God somehow and this had changed his life. Now when I come to the last church
where I've been the last 12 years, the list is too long. But I would like to tell you about a bus driver who up to a very short time ago was calling regularly on the board president of a company you'd know by name if I named it. And welcome every time he went, because the bus driver had a simple and profound and contagious faith. And this man wanted it. Or I could tell you about a lawyer who gave up fine practice to plunge into politics and get his hands
dirty because he thought this was the right things to do and Christ had motivated him to do this. I could tell you how he risked his position again and again to do the things that he thought were right and how he would sit down with his pastor and bat this out and say I've got to do it. It's not going to be popular. And he would go ahead. I'd like to tell you about the insurance man who spent evening after evening with an alcoholic, not a prospect but a man who,
as a matter of fact, had been an alcoholic for something like 20 years and smashed everything in his home a half a dozen times and was, as far as the community and his own family were concerned, was utterly worthless. But this man stuck with him. And there's been a change in that life because God has moved through. I'd like to tell you about a young chemist who got all excited about the fact that in the whole area around that city there was no migrant work.
And with a young pastor, he got to work and the first year they gook 80 people out of the church, out to do that work on weekends. And now the Council of Churches has taken it up, but he's still working at it. And all around that area, there's a big migrant work because one young chemist cared. And he cared because Christ as in his heart. And he witnessed to the power of Christ. Tell you about one high school teacher and his wife who got interested in the children on the streets of New York and thought they ought to have some
fresh air. Last year, he and his wife were in charge of a project that brought 800 of them from New York to Rochester. She rode the cars back and forth. And why did they do this? They did it because God had gotten into their hearts and lives and they had to do something for Christ and this is what they did. Well, the local church is the group through whom God makes Himself known in the community. It can be a blessed
and blessing community. I'm with the man in Babylon, as I imagine you are. I don't know what's coming next. But I sense one thing, that I want my strength on the corner church. There are a lot of needs in the world and we're getting better organized to meet them all the time. But the most desperate need of the secular man, and is there really any other kind, is God.
God comes to us in the midst of His family, in that little group of people that gather on the corner. They're not as imaginative as they ought to be and they haven't been as creative as they could be. And they haven't always responded to God's love as they should. But they've done some wonderful things and I, for one, am glad that I've been associated with them over a period of years and I think God has still some very wonderful
things to do through them. And I salute you because you're in the most strategic position, I think, in the whole wide world as the pastor of one of those churches.