Category: Pastors’ Column

One of my joys this past year was accompanying the Associate Pastor Nominating Committees in their search for new pastors to call to Bryn Mawr. A pastoral search is a long, and sometimes arduous process, but the overriding sentiment of that good work remains joy. When a group of seven diverse members gets elected to an APNC, they begin as a gathering of acquaintances, church friends with a big task at hand, but also with strong and sometimes divergent opinions about the direction a ministry area should take. Initial debate and even argument ultimately pave the way for consensus to build toward a strong sense of call to an individual.

This Sunday, September 21, at 4:00 p.m. in the Chapel, we will celebrate the joyful culmination of the search that led the APNC for Youth and their Families to the Reverend Andy Greenhow. After a year of diligent work: to get input from the congregation, especially our youth; to establish values and priorities; hammer out a position description; networking, identifying potential candidates and hosting multiple interviews from across the country, we came to unanimous consensus and a strong sense that Andy was called by God to serve BMPC as a pastor and with special responsibility for youth ministry. To paraphrase Greek philosopher Aristotle, these committees become greater than the sum of their parts, and the joy in completion is but one gift of the Holy Spirit.

Join us for Andy’s Installation on Sunday afternoon and for the reception following in Congregational Hall. We are delighted to host the Commission of the Presbytery of Philadelphia, to welcome Andy’s good friend, the Reverend Vincent Kolb, as guest preacher, special musicians, and enjoy worshipping God together for this special occasion in the life of our church.

This Sunday, September 14, at 10:00 a.m. in the Gym, is Youth Kickoff. It’s a chance for 6^th to 12^th graders and their families to hear about events in the year ahead, play games together, meet the caring adults who will be looking out for the youth this year, and for adults to sign all the necessary paperwork. I won’t want to pontificate more than necessary at Youth Kickoff, so I think I’ll use this venue to share a bit about my hopes for the BMPC youth program – and for us.

Many of us will remember exactly where we were 24 years ago today. It is hard to believe that there can be people with their own ideas, dreams, ambitions, and opinions who weren’t even born yet on that day, but that’s our youth. They have only ever known the world after 9/11, with all the fear and uncertainty that we as adults feel and unwittingly impart to them.

Likewise, you may remember where you were when the early adopter in your friend group showed you their smartphone. I remember my friend Mark showing me an app – what is an app? – that could listen to music and tell you what song was playing. They changed everything, and our youth have only ever known a world where adults are buried in their phones.

Finally, our youth have spent at least half of their life in the political and social realignment that began in 2016. For those of us with longer time horizons, the normalization of violent rhetoric, which we saw again this week, will inevitably lead to acts of political violence, feels brand new. But for our youth, it is a fact of life – it has always been this way.

So, what does that mean for the youth program at BMPC? My prayer is that youth at BMPC spend time with caring adults who try hard to set aside their own fears and uncertainties and instead center the ideas, dreams, ambitions, and opinions of the youth. I pray that the BMPC youth ministry models something like an analog community, where people are present with each other and hang in there with each other, even when it would be much easier to escape into our phones. And I pray that the BMPC youth ministry is a place of peace, where the ambient violence of our culture is kept at bay.

I’m looking forward to kicking off another year on Sunday at 10:00 a.m. Join us!

Over two years ago, when the church was looking for an Interim Associate Pastor for Pastoral Care and Senior Adults, several colleagues in Philadelphia Presbytery recommended the Reverend Dr. Kirby Lawrence Hill. These were people well acquainted with the size and complexity of BMPC, and with Kirby’s gifts and experience in ministry.

When a team representing our church’s Personnel Committee, Deacons, and Senior Adult Council began to consider candidates, we were quickly drawn to Kirby. Not only did he bring nearly 40 years of pastoral experience, but he also impressed us with his confident demeanor, his compassion and empathy, his creative spirit, his love of God and of Christ’s church, and our mission in the world. Kirby clearly understood the calling of this transitional ministry to help lead congregational care and senior adult ministry, and also to prepare the church for a new Associate Pastor. In addition, he was graciously open to serving BMPC as long as we needed him, which afforded the Personnel Committee time to realign the roles and responsibilities of the pastoral staff with our vision for ministry, as well as to undergo a national search to find a new Associate Pastor.

We have been blessed by Kirby’s presence on the pastoral staff. The Deacons and Senior Adult Council have benefited from his creative leadership; classes and groups from his teaching; the Care Team has been nurtured by his pastoral sensitivity; and the whole congregation by his preaching, worship leadership, and eloquent, heartfelt pastoral prayers.

This coming Sunday is Kirby’s last as a member of the pastoral staff. He will preach at both services, and there will be a special reception in the Atrium after the 10 a.m. worship service so that you can thank him for sharing his gifts with us. While we bid Kirby farewell from the church staff, we are delighted that Nancy Lawrence Hill plans to continue as a member of the Sanctuary Choir and play the Carillon, so they will continue to be a part of our church family in worship. Join us for worship and the special reception on Sunday as we express our gratitude!

You may have heard it called a “reverse coloring” or “blob art.” The premise is simple—first someone (or you) make blobs of color. The shape doesn’t matter, the colors don’t matter, just blobs of paint, random brush strokes, even the ring of a coffee cup left behind on a piece of paper can work. From there, you are challenged to transform it into something. A fantastical beast? A comfy chair?  A complex flower? As one art teacher explained to me, “It is an exercise in seeing and imagining rather than the mechanics of drawing.”

I often think of my ministry in similar ways. As we imagine a year ahead, we know some of what we will be facing, but most of it is a mystery. Blobs are beginning to form, but there’s so much we don’t yet know. Is that the right classroom for a child? Is that friendship going to flourish or fail? Will they love or hate being in a play? Will they ever remember their lunch on a busy morning? Some blobs look ominous and others have such incredible potential.

This Sunday after church, we will pause for a moment of prayer before the start of the school year. Anyone with a backpack, school bag, or just a desire to take a deep breath is invited to attend. It will be an exercise in seeing, rather than in the mechanics of being a good student. We’re going to speak our hopes for the year ahead. We’re going to ask God to help hold some of our worries. We’re going to encourage one another. We are going to pause and remember that while we’re still seeing blobs, God is already at work and invite us to create something beautiful alongside the creator.

As you think about the children, teachers, school administrators, coaches, parents, guardians and grandparents around you, here is a prayer to start the year:

Bless your child for the year ahead.
Bless these eyes that they will look with kindness
and with awe on the world you created.
Bless these ears that they will hear words that help her grow.
Bless this voice as it speaks so that her words build up others.
Bless this mind with curiosity and wisdom.
Bless these shoulders that no burden is too heavy.
Bless these hands to do your work.
Bless these feet to walk in your way.
Bless this heart to grow and grow filled with your love.
Bless each breath and each step as you bless your child today and always. 

Amen.

 

 

Bless, O Lord, us thy servants, who minister in thy temple.
Grant that what we sing with our lips, we may believe in our hearts,
and what we believe in our hearts, we may show forth in our lives.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
 ~ (The Chorister’s Prayer) 

The Chorister’s Prayer has existed since the thirteenth or fourteenth century, first appearing (in English) in ‘The Choirboy’s Pocket Book’ in the 1930s. There is something incredibly special about words that have been said, sung, and a part of prayer for over eight centuries. They, like the detailed and intricate High Gothic architecture of the same era, have seen the world transformed beyond belief. How is it that words written and translated 800 years ago can be so relevant today? How do we understand them in 2025? What has changed? More importantly, what has not? 

Though this is not a biblical text, it is inherently sacred, and all these years later, has deep meaning for each of us. Next month, Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church will launch a new music program for children from PreK-12th grade. These young musicians will be known as ‘Choristers’. Simply put, a Chorister is a singer in a church setting. Before each rehearsal, the Choristers will read and say this prayer. They will join those who have said these words countless times before them, those who happen to be saying it at the same time, and those who will say it in the future.  

We become a community that goes beyond the confines of our building, of our city, of our denomination. May we read these words with a renewed sense of hope, as we lean on the past, to look forward to the future. 

Fred Rogers was famous for saying, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that’s mentionable can be more manageable.”  Our children are deeply aware of injustice in the world. They see, hear, and notice that people are treated differently and have access to different resources. Often, we allow children to sit with those observations. As adults, it can be difficult to talk about sad and difficult topics with children, so we remain silent, and children are left wondering what can be done.

Over the past few weeks, we have had the opportunity to talk about the hurt and reality that there are children who do not have all the supplies that they need to start the school year. It is not an easy conversation, but it is an important one. While we name this injustice, we also remind children that they have agency in helping our neighbors near and far.

The Backpack Project is one of the tools we use to help children learn more about service, justice, and our obligation to care for one another. It is powerful to see supplies, packed backpacks, and donations arrive to make the project possible. Our students learn about how these backpacks are used by our partners at Gemma Services to support children at the start of the school year. This year was a little different. Our students made a bold decision. In the past, we have provided crayons and either colored pencils or markers. This year, our students asked that their offering be used to help purchase extra markers and colored pencils so that each backpack would include all three items. When your offering is measured in quarters and dimes, it’s a big decision to commit $100.

Last week, because of your generosity, children were able to start filling up backpacks. The project will continue this Sunday. Next Tuesday, more than 75 backpacks and a cash donation to help cover needed supplies will go to Gemma Services. Those backpacks will join 100s of others that will then be sent out. Each backpack is a testimony that we can work together and fight the injustice we see all while helping our neighbors near and far.

I have been thinking back quite a bit these days to a trip that several of us took in the fall of 2021. Women from BMPC, as well as other congregations, traveled together to St. John in the Virgin Islands to visit historic National Park sites that were originally sugar cane plantations where human beings had been enslaved. These sites were particularly historic because of their proximity to the British Virgin Islands, where slavery was outlawed almost 30 years before being banned in the US.

Standing on the beach at the former plantation, this group of white and black women stood together, prayed in memory of the men and women who lost their lives in that place, especially those who jumped into the water hoping to swim to freedom, gave thanks for the ways that the world has changed since those days, and asked that each of us might be transformed by the things that we saw and experienced together.

The impetus for the trip was the way that the National Park staff had used their time and energy during the lock downs of the pandemic to both update the interpretation materials for the site that better described the experience of enslaved people in that site, and to add it to the National Park’s Network to Freedom listing identifying sites on the Underground Railroad.

I was moved, all of us were, by the way that the staff talked to us about their responsibility to tell the truth about that place and the ways that telling the stories of the enslaved people there was a small measure of repair to the inhumanity of slavery.

I think of this trip and experience each time I read news of the attempts in these days to remove these kinds of interpretive tools and stories from National Park sites and historic locations around the country.

Many might consider this a political issue outside the realm of our purview as a church or as people of faith. But in most ways, it is deeply connected to our history, present, and future as Christians in the United States. Not just because of the ways that Christianity, the Bible, and the church were used to justify slavery; the fact that Presbyterians more often than not declined to stand up against slavery when it really mattered; and the ways that we have collectively failed to be accountable for the lasting impact of these historical roots in our culture and communities today, but simply because what we believe as Presbyterians about confession and forgiveness.

Each time we gather in worship, we begin our liturgy with an act of confession. Some people find this incredibly off-putting and maybe even tedious. Still, its placement at the start of worship is very intentional, positioned so that every time we hear scripture read and proclaimed, we are reminded of the ways that we and the world are broken and the truth that through Christ, forgiveness and repair are promised and fulfilled. The echoes of our forgiveness still ring in our ears before any part of scripture is spoken.

We practice this act of spiritual repair each week, so that when we step into a broken world, we are not caught off guard or offended by the need for this same kind of liturgy of confession and repair in our community and national life.

As we do that work, may this prayer of forgiveness from Cole Arthur Riley’s book, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, be a part of each of our comings and goings this summer as we travel the breadth and beauty of this land:

Let your soul receive this rest: God seeks to mend the brokenhearted, provide for the economically oppressed, honor the aging, and protect the vulnerable.

Receive forgiveness for the injustices you’ve participated in and be purged of those that still reside in your own heart.

Find renewal in the divine, that we would welcome healing as it knocks.

That we would reintegrate every part of us that this world has tried to cleave apart, claiming the dignity of our bodies daily.

As you receive this mercy, let it hold you and keep you, that your hope for liberation would be reborn each morning. Amen.

For some of us, summer is a season when we do some traveling. We live in an age when the challenges of travel are quite different from those of earlier generations. I read something that described travel in the Western part of our country during the 18th century. Even when people were traveling by stagecoach, there were different classes based on how much one spent on a ticket. In contrast to airline travel today, the classes of tickets on the stagecoach did not have to do with the size of the seat or the kind of food that was served, but rather with what was expected of the ticket holder in case the stagecoach got into a difficult situation. There were occasional deep mud holes, steep inclines, or other difficulties to be negotiated at one time or another along the way.

There were three types of tickets sold. The first class, which, of course, was the most expensive, entitled the ticket owner to remain in the stagecoach no matter what conditions might be faced. When you got the most expensive ticket, this meant that you were exempt from having to put forth any kind of effort during the trip. A second-class ticket meant that if difficulty arose, you had to get out to lighten the coach, walking alongside it until the difficulty could be resolved. The cheapest ticket – the third-class one – called on the holder to take responsibility for difficulties. This meant they not only had to get out of the coach when there was a problem, but they also had to, alongside the driver, get down in the mud and do whatever had to be done so that the vehicle could either get unstuck or get up the hill. 1 You would not be surprised to know that those who had this category of ticket held the least prestige.

We live in a society that values appearance, status, fame, wealth, power, individualism, materialism, and consumerism. But what Jesus calls upon us to value is counter-cultural when it comes to what is first class, second class, and third class in terms of behavior. The willingness to serve, doing so in a loving fashion, is the greatest of all the values in the Christian hierarchy of understanding. According to Jesus, the true first-class status is not one of exemption or privilege, where we pay the most so we’ll have to do the least. It is, rather, the eager willingness to do whatever a problem situation requires, no matter how menial or seemingly disagreeable, so that we might continue our journey together, assuming, of course, that we are moving in a direction under God’s guidance. This servant willingness represents the highest of all values. One is free to live in this way by the realization that our worth as human beings comes from an act of God and not from our own competitive achievements. Our worth is given to us as a gift, and realizing this in the depths of our being is the great freeing reality which allows us to lovingly serve. Once that gracious truth takes root in the depths of our being, then each one of us, in whatever role we play in the life of this church, can begin to act out what is truly first-class in God’s eyes.

1 From content shared by John Claypool