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Title: A Statement: On the Future of This Church

Author: John Haynes Holmes

Release Date: March 6, 2006 [EBook #17939]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FUTURE OF THIS CHURCH ***

Produced by Edmund Dejowski

Transcriber's Note: Page numbers are indicated thus [3] at the end of each printed page.

The Messiah Pulpit

A STATEMENT:

the Future of This Church

By

John Haynes Holmes

Minister of the Church of the Messiah

Series 1918-1919——No. VI

PRICE, FIVE CENTS

Published by the

Church of the Messiah

Park Avenue and 34th Street

New York City

[1]

NOTICE

The Messiah Pulpit, by tradition and practice, is a free platform, dedicated to the ideal of truth. Its sermons, in both their spoken and written form, are the utterances of the preacher, who accepts for them exclusive responsibility.

The publication of these sermons is made possible by a private fund for this purpose. Contributions to this fund are needed, and may be sent to Rev. John Haynes Holmes, 61 East 34th Street, New York City.

[2]

A STATEMENT:

On the Future of This Church

On Sunday, November 24 last, as most of you know. I was invited by unanimous vote of the people of All Souls Church, Chicago, "to take up the work laid down by (their) beloved pastor," the late Dr. Jenkin Lloyd Jones. On Thursday, November 28, I received this call through the personal visitation of two members of the Chicago church, and agreed to give it most earnest consideration. On Sunday, December 1, through my associate, Mr. Brown, I announced this call to the congregation of the Church of the Messiah, explaining that it involved the ministry of All Souls Church, the directorship of Abraham Lincoln Centre, and the editorship of the weekly liberal religious journal, called "Unity." I stated in my announcement that I had asked and been granted ample time for the consideration of this call, but that I intended to answer it as speedily as possible. On Thursday last, just five weeks to a day after receiving the invitation to Chicago, I sent my reply for transmission to the people of All Souls Church this morning. I choose this same time to announce to you my decision.

At the beginning of my consideration of the problem, I found questions of personal inclination and comfort inevitably to the fore. For twelve years minus one month, I have lived and labored in New York City. Every particle of moral energy which I possess, I have invested here. Nearly all of my friends are associated with this community. Especially am I bound by ties of deepest reverence and affection to this church. Here are memories of joy and sorrow and great trial which are more truly a part of me than the voice with which I speak, or the hand with which I turn these pages. It [3] needed but this single summons to teach me what I had not known—how deeply my roots are struck into the soil of this place, and how great the pain and hazard of their exposure, removal and replanting.

It very soon became clear to me, however, that personal considerations could rightly have but little part in the settlement of this problem. In no spirit of bravado, but in simplest recognition of the truth, I say to you that I believe I would have been betraying the profession which I have sworn to serve had I permitted conditions of personal affection, however lovely and precious, to determine my decision in this case. I take seriously the fact of my ordination—that as a minister of religion I have been "set apart," as the traditional phrase has it, to the high purpose of propagating an idea, championing a cause, seeking the best and the highest that I know in terms of God and of his holy will. I am here, in other words, not to make or to keep friends, not to enjoy pleasant associations of hand and heart, not even to serve a particular church, but to serve, perhaps at the cost of these other and more personal things, the great idea of which I speak. To allow my individual sentiments to fix the place and fashion of my professional service, would be to me as dastardly a thing as to allow considerations of profit or prestige to make decision. Not even my wife or my children could interfere in this case. My problem was to determine where I could best advance the ideals to which I have given my life—where I could find the weapons or tools best fitted to my hand for the doing of my work—and there to stand. To remain in this church and city might be infinitely desirable to me as a man; but I must decide not as a man but as a minister, and therefore if I remained, it must be because I could do no other!

But there was another consideration which held me to this impersonal relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4] much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to serve, and disclosed to myself at least the picture of the realization of this ideal in institutional form. This same Great War, however, had distracted my parish, absorbed the energies and attention of my people, and in spite of wellnigh unexampled forbearance, had introduced elements of misunderstanding and even alienation. The conflict, in other words, had no more left our church unchanged than the world itself. We had been shaken and distressed and tortured and driven, so that we were no longer the persons we once were. You knew me, and I knew you, as we were yesterday; but we did not know one another as we were going to be, or should want to be, tomorrow. It was necessary that we should meet not on the plane of the past, nor even of the present, but on the plane of the future, and thus find ourselves again, and discover what now, in this new world, we wanted, and would be able, to do together. Months before the War was ended, it had clearly entered into my mind to summon you to conference on our future relations as minister and people. This invitation from Chicago but precipitated suddenly what was in itself inevitable sooner or later. It introduced into a problem already existing between you and me, a third element—namely, the people of Abraham Lincoln Centre. The problem, however, in its nature, remained the same. I have work to do. I have set my hand to the plow, and I must find the field where I can best drive this plow through the furrow of my sowing.

In order to make plain the situation, as it has presented itself to my mind during the last five weeks, I must turn to the past for a moment, and bring to you therefrom some fragments of autobiography. Those of you who were present at the meeting on last Monday night, have already heard what I am about to say. I beg your undivided attention, none the less, that you may note the bearing of this recital not on a problem presented, as then, but on a decision made, as now.

I entered the Unitarian ministry in the year 1904, [5] under the influence of motives not unfamiliar. In the first place, I saw the