Month: June 2024

After church on Sunday the 16th, when our volunteers gathered for training, we paused in prayer. Each person offered a hope for our VBC campers. Words like “friendship,” “welcome,” “peace,” “grace,” “joy,” “love,” and “belonging” filled Congregational Hall. The words were a prequel to what would unfold over the next six days as campers and volunteers alike were surrounded by and embodied welcome, belonging, joy, grace, love, and even an occasional second of peace.

Camp is indeed joyful and energetic, sacred and silly, beautiful and messy, all at the same time. For a week, we created a unique church. Our choir was raucous and loved to dance during the quiet parts of a song. Our sermons were delivered in costumes and shared in 2-minute videos. While our members were still learning how to tie shoes, recognize letters, and say goodbye to parents during morning drop-off, they were confident in sharing kindness, bold in trying new things, and positively exploding with creativity.

This year, camp explored how we can use the arts to help tell God’s story and share God’s love. It was only possible because of our volunteers’ love for the project. Incredible guest artists shared their gifts and passion, modeling how our creative work is faithful work. Faithful volunteers created space so campers could try their hands at everything: playing an organ, creating mosaics, directing a play, sculpting, singing, and more. Youth volunteers modeled leadership and faith to our campers. And a host of people filled in, welcomed, prepared snacks, and ensured everything was ready for God to work! Together, adults, youth, and children played, prayed, and explored. In every action, they were sharing God’s love with one another and with anyone who happened to walk through the church or drive past on Montgomery Avenue.

I hope that as you look through the pictures available on Facebook, you will have a hint of what the week looked like. But let me share this memory: I experience VBC from a unique vantage point. Leading our gathering time means I look out on a sea of campers and volunteers, watching as they roll their eyes at silly jokes, giggle with friends, and dive into projects and activities with gusto. There are also sacred moments when we are singing together, and their voices overtake the recording, and they declare in movement and song that God’s love is indeed “wider than my arms can reach, taller than the trees, higher than the stars above, and deeper than the sea.”

Yesterday, we, as a community and a country, once again celebrated Juneteenth, our annual recognition of the day when the very last enslaved people in our country were told that they were free. For several years now, starting even before the pandemic, the BMPC Anti-Racism Committee has been working on ways for our congregation to learn, dialogue, and grow as individuals and as a community around issues of systemic racism and implicit bias.

So, this Juneteenth, we are incredibly hopeful as we share with you a new Statement of Belonging and Inclusion, adopted by the Session this past spring. The statement lives on our website and will guide and encourage the work of all our committees and councils in the years to come. This statement is the product of thoughtful conversation, courageous vision, and loving compassion for the members of our community and the world. I am so grateful to all the members of the Anti-Racism Committee, who each had a part in its creation.

The two overarching values present throughout the statement are these: Our Christian faith compels us to be engaged on issues of belonging and inclusion, and that engagement is not limited to certain parts of our life as a congregation but the whole life of our community.

Over the next year, we will continue to live more fully into these commitments. If you would like to learn more about how you can be directly involved in this work, please contact me directly – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church’s Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

As members of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and inheritors of the legacy of its preceding denominations, we acknowledge and confront the reality of systemic racism and implicit bias within our community and the broader world. We recognize that these injustices have disproportionately affected marginalized communities, perpetuating inequality. We repent of our complicity and recognize that past wrongdoings have resulted in exclusivity, most notably impacting people of color. Historically, our church has opened our doors and hearts to create a welcoming community. Knowing our journey does not end there, we have a responsibility to further that tradition as we commit to ensuring a place of belonging and inclusion for all. We trust in God’s mercy and capacity to renew our common life.

We understand that addressing these issues requires introspection, education, dialogue, and meaningful action. We commit ourselves to the work of dismantling systemic racism, acknowledging our own biases while promoting inclusivity within our congregation. We will be a church where all individuals, regardless of race, ethnicity, or background, feel valued, heard, and embraced as part of God’s diverse creation. We can only fully express our identity as the Body of Christ when all are welcomed and recognized as beloved children of God, whose belonging is unquestioned.

We strive to be agents of positive change, creating a more just and compassionate world inspired by the teachings of Jesus Christ, whose words and actions embraced the disenfranchised, crossed cultural and social boundaries, and challenged all to love both neighbor and stranger.

As an outgrowth of our willingness to learn, change, and grow, we commit:

To create a deep understanding of implicit bias and racism through intentional educational initiatives. These include hosting workshops, seminars, and discussions that explore the historical roots of systemic inequalities, the impact of bias on marginalized communities, the role each of us plays in dismantling these structures, and the relevance of these issues for people of faith.

To promote continuous improvement by examining our internal practices to ensure that they are inclusive and equitable, addressing biases and discriminatory decision-making, and nurturing a culture where all feel welcomed and valued.

To ensure that this work embeds every aspect of our church life from welcome and hospitality to programming and fellowship; from financial, stewardship, and mission decisions to pastoral care and worship life. In all that we do and in all the ways we represent ourselves, the work of diversity and inclusion will be obvious.

To serve as a moral compass and voice for change within our larger community: to provide ethical guidance; to emphasize the values of love, compassion, and justice; to embrace diversity and treat everyone with dignity and respect; to advocate for policies and laws which provide for equal treatment of all people.

The Bible teaches about the reconciliation of humanity with God and with each other. Therefore, BMPC and its leadership have a responsibility to address systemic issues that intersect with inequality and injustice in all aspects of our work and society at large. To ensure that our commitment to promoting belonging and inclusion remains a priority, we must be transparent and establish mechanisms for accountability by regularly evaluating our progress.

Glory be to God, who created everyone equal in God’s image, to Jesus Christ, who broke down the walls that divide us, and to the Holy Spirit, who encourages us to work together for justice, freedom, and peace. Amen.

In 1989, the Sanctuary Choir embarked on its first choir tour. That tour, to Austria and communist Czechoslovakia, turned out to be so exciting that the thirst for travel subsequently led the choir to places as diverse as South Africa, Cuba, and Brazil, along with Northern Ireland during the “troubles” and Russia during the chaotic rule of Boris Yeltsin. Some tours have focused on exploring our roots. Tours through the American South and, several years later, through Luther’s Germany whetted that appetite and gave us a context for who we are in this time in history. And, with a war now raging in Gaza, our most recent tour to Israel and Jordan proved to be incredibly poignant, especially considering our profoundly moving encounters with Palestinian children in the West Bank.

We are excited to announce the next choir tour will be to France in June 2025. As many of you know, France has been a particular passion of mine since traveling to Paris as a 14-year-old and experiencing the glories of Notre Dame Cathedral for the first time. Since then, I have enjoyed extended stays in Paris several times (twice for six months and, most recently, for two months) and traveled extensively throughout the country. An important connection for BMPC is that Notre Dame Cathedral organist Olivier Latry designed our marvelous pipe organ. He and his colleagues, Vincent Dubois and Philippe Lefebvre, have performed here many times over these past few decades.

One of the highlights of our choir tours has been the inclusion of “friends of the choir” on our journeys. Typically, 20-30 travelers join us, adding to the richness of our experiences. We warmly invite you and your friends from the church and community to join us on this tour to France. Information is available . If you have any questions, feel free to contact , who is serving as the tour manager.

Today’s 80th Anniversary of D-Day began this morning in France with a gathering of world leaders from twenty-five countries, elderly French civilians who remember being freed from German occupation, and veterans more than a hundred years old returned to a place of extraordinary memories. It’s a day to pause and commemorate the largest amphibious invasion in military history, which turned the tide of World War II, began the liberation of occupied Europe, and, within the year, brought an end to the war. For the sake of freedom and democracy, more than ten thousand lost their lives on those Normandy beaches eighty years ago today.

Three days ago, on Monday, June 3, Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann died in Germany at 98 years old. Moltmann is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians since World War II. As a teenager he idolized Albert Einstein and had decided to study mathematics at the university in Hamburg but was drafted into military service in 1943 at the age of 16. In a dark German forest, he surrendered to a British soldier and, from 1945-48, was held as a prisoner of war, first in Belgium and then in Scotland. There he was given a copy of the New Testament and Psalms by an American chaplain. He would later write, “I didn’t find Christ, he found me.”

Moltmann returned home at 22 years of age to find his hometown of Hamburg in ruins from the Allied bombings and immediately went to work becoming a theologian. His experiences as a POW helped him begin to forge a theology of hope born of suffering, and through a long career of ecclesiastical and international academic leadership, he became known as the Theologian of Hope.

A year ago, on the occasion of his 97th birthday, he said:

Every morning, I am amazed that I am still here. … To die means to let go. I am preparing myself for this. To die means to give one’s life over to God. I am preparing myself for that, too. The raising to eternal life is my hope in life and in death. The eternal life will also be lived. This is the life of God’s new creation. Death is like a birthday to new life in God’s kingdom. Every morning of every new day that hope gives me new courage to live. But I did not invite you here to ponder things with me but to rejoice with me. Let us toast to life—here and there!

Moltmann relished life, loved the church, and believed that the theology of Christian hope is the most important proclamation the church offers to an uncertain world during uncertain times, such as the ones in which we live. Today calls forth deep gratitude for an important day in history when freedom and democracy proved to be hard-won. And, thank God for theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, who have committed their lives to studying how, in the midst of all the vicissitudes of life and death, God is ever present, helping us have hope.