I grew up with Whitney Houston’s rendition of “The Greatest Love of All,” and at one time you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing her soaring vocals sing the song first made famous by George Benson. I learned it alongside my multiplication tables and sentence diagramming. There’s a line in the song that did not strike me until I was well into adulthood, particularly after I went into ministry.
World Food Day — celebrated on Oct. 16 every year — commemorates the founding in 1945 of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO was created to respond to famines and hunger in a world of God’s abundance. Despite the abundance of land, water, nutrients and sunlight on this precious planet, even in the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people go hungry.
In armed conflicts around the world, the combatants include tens of thousands of children who were conscripted to serve against their will. They are snatched away from their childhood innocence and from the nurture and comfort of their families.
When it comes to Christian education, Maria Harris stands out as one of the most influential teachers and writers of the past 30 years. In her 1989 book Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church, Harris helped shape a theology of educational ministry in the church that understands “The Word continually becoming flesh, in us.” If the Word is perpetually at work in us, then by our ordinary, everyday, walking-around lives, all of us are de facto Christian educators. Curriculum may include printed materials and classroom instruction, but an incarnational “curriculum” resides in our life together where we embrace every member as a teacher to every other member — regardless of our age or ability.
Evangelism is good news. The ministry of evangelism was never meant to be a tool by which we reach people to simply fill our churches. Evangelism is a ministry which blesses others. In A Light to the Nations, Michael Goheen writes, “Blessing is a biblical term with rich resonances, implying the reversal of sin’s curse and the restoration of creation’s fullness.” As God in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is changing our lives, we are invited into God’s mission of changing and transforming our communities and world.
In 1996, the year after I graduated from seminary, presbyteries in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) ordained 408 new ministers of Word and sacrament. Many of them continue to serve and lead in the PC(USA) two decades later in critical ways. In 2016, the PC(USA) ordained about half (47 percent) of the number we did in 1996, with only 214 ordained. While we have fewer congregations in 2016 than 1996, it is only 17 percent less, not 47 percent! The need for qualified ministers of Word and sacrament will increase as Baby Boomer generation pastors continue to retire over the next decade or so. The median age of a Presbyterian minister in 2017 was over 60 years old. The PC(USA) pastorate mirrors the demographics of about 20 mainline denominations in the U.S.
Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, says, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
Starting this reflection about youth in the church with the death of an ancient, Old Testament, king in the back of my mind is a strange place to begin. My “today” mind is full of the images I am enjoying on social media of young people in the middle of summer mission immersions, camps, service projects and other summer activities.
As we wind down from the slower pace of the summer, we’re reminded that a seasonal shift is upon us. Our Sunday newspapers are littered with ads that boast the best “back-to-school” sales, as our grocery stores beckon us to stock up for “one last summer BBQ.” With cooler, less humid days are on the horizon, we prepare to say goodbye to summer, as we welcome autumn and all that it brings.
Today at 8:15 a.m., the exact time that the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the Peace Bell at the Hiroshima Peace City Memorial Monument will ring. Residents of the city, whether at the Peace Park or elsewhere in the city, will pause for a minute to pay their respects, to pray for peace and to remember the horrors of war and of nuclear weaponry. Now, 73 years later, this moment of attention still seems like a sensible and prudent thing to do.
