9. The future OPC (if the OPC is to have a future)

When a piece of furniture has occupied the same place in the living room for decades, it’s hard to remember you put it up against the opposite wall when you first moved in. Some eighty years on, it’s hard for us to remember that the present shape of the OPC was dictated neither by holy writ nor by careful planning: the way we do Church is contingent on countless choices which were all conditioned by historic circumstance. Yes, we’ve always done it this way. But the careful observer notes our is not the only faithful tradition, and others do things differently.

So imagine another OPC, in which the average urban or suburban congregation numbers well over a hundred members, with a pulpit from which several men preach on a regular basis.  (In rural areas, imagine congregations yoked into a circuit with a shared session and pastoral staff.) Instead of resources spread thin and ministry opportunities missed, imagine resources so concentrated that a surplus builds and ministry opportunities can even be sought out. Imagine not wondering whether your congregation will be around in another ten years, but instead knowing where your children will be baptized and your funeral service held.

It’s not the OPC’s past, nor is it our present. But it wouldn’t be a bad future.

This is why we bake

Monday mornings Grandma rose an hour early to make rye,

onion & challah, but it was pumpernickel she broke her hands for,
pumpernickel that demanded cornmeal, ripe caraway, mashed potatoes
& several Old Testament stories about patience & fortitude & for
which she cursed in five languages if it didn’t pop out fat
as an apple-cheeked peasant bride. But bread, after all,
is only bread & who has time to fuss all day & end up
with a dead heart if it flops? Why bother? I’ll tell you why.
For the moment when the steam curls off the black crust like a strip
of pure sunlight & the hard oily flesh breaks open like a poem
pulling out of its own stubborn complexity a single glistening truth
& who can help but wonder at the mystery of the human heart when you
hold a slice up to the light in all its absurd splendor & I tell you
we must risk everything for the raw recipe of our passion.


 -"Pumpernickel," by Philip Schultz

Farewell, Wiretap

Wiretap may have been the first, albeit unofficial, spinoff from This American Life, when frequent contributor Jonathan Goldstein returned north and began a CBC radio show comprised (mostly) of recorded telephone calls. Regular listeners soon learned that the more absurd a call seemed, the more likely it was to be a completely true story.

When the latest episode didn't turn up in my podcast feed this week, I went to its home page and learned Wiretap's run has concluded. Even if you're not a fan of Canadian whimsy and profundity, go there to be moved by a video presentation you'll find of one of the show's most memorable pieces.

And now I have to find another CBC podcast to meet my minimum weekly required dosage of Canadia.

A debate over abortion & adoption

I just stumbled on a fascinating debate over abortion and adoption at the First Things website. In "Adoption, Abortion, and a Message of Hope," J.D. Flynn argues that pro-lifers overemphasize adoption as an alternative to women considering an abortion. These two paragraphs toward the close struck me:

Unfortunately, our views on adoption can be colored by our consumerist culture. Out of real generosity, families are often willing to expend huge sums of money to adopt a child. But in justice, we ought to ask what the same amount of money might do to preserve a child’s natural family, and whether we’re willing to provide it.

Of course, adoption sometimes really is the best choice. When parents decide that, we should support it. But we should begin our charitable support by working to preserve the natural family through the solidarity, and charity, that combats the fractioning and isolation of the culture of death.

Well said, although I feel compelled to point out that those huge sums of money (also often spent on infertility treatments) can be saved by those willing to consider the non-white children in the American foster systems who desperately need a real home. My compulsion is echoed by the less eloquent, but no less forceful, "We Need to Talk About Adoption" by Elizabeth Kirk. Her point is simple: given that over a million babies are aborted in this country each year, and that less than 20,000 newborns are placed for adoption, we need to talk much, much more about adoption.

8. A modest proposal

I love the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Although not a native, I have found an ecclesiastical home here. Love and loyalty, however, should be neither blind nor naïve. For the reasons I have outlined above (and I can think of more), the OPC model of a small Church ministered to by a solo pastor is not indefinitely sustainable.

I have a very modest proposal to enable the OPC to endure and maintain her witness to Christ for many more years: wherever feasible, merge congregations until the average OP Church has the size and financial resources to weather economic storms and pay two or three pastoral salaries. In many urban areas, this could be done (almost) overnight: join a congregation with a building to one without; continue to pay both pastors; bank the money saved on rent for a rainy day, or even to fund a new Church plant.

As an urban pastor, I am not well-positioned to offer recommendations to rural congregations. However, it occurs to me that one strategy would be to invert the recommended urban program. Rather than consolidating worship facilities and multiplying pastoral staff, consider holding on to the buildings and consolidating pastoral staff. Rather than three or four Churches with three or four pastors, create a circuit of four or five congregations which could be shared by two or more pastors. In Regional Churches with both rural and urban constituencies, urban Churches might be able to assist rural ones with the extra funds they will now have lying around.

The challenges are great, but we already have the resources to meet them. All we have to do is decide to do so. In that sense, it really is a modest proposal.

(And God bless Jonathan Swift.)

What we talk about when we talk about The Terminator

I've been trying to figure out why I care so much about The Terminator and its first sequel, and have been mildly disappointed with all its subsequent iterations. Age has a great deal to do with it, I'm sure: the two films bridge my high school and college years, and like music, films often make the greatest impact in one's youth. Still, in my typical self-congratulatory manner, I like to think there's a bit more to it than that.

(I suppose I should insert a spoiler alert here, as I will be discussing points in a metanarrative kind of way. But why would you still be reading if you didn't already know these movies intimately?)

All the Terminator movies take place in a timeline in which, at some future date (called "Judgment Day"), a computer program takes over the world and very nearly wipes out humanity. Of the five films, in the last three the protagonists are attempting to either prevent Judgment Day or reverse its consequences. That's a plot point in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but as in its predecessor, is not the main conflict.

The Terminator (1984) is remarkably simple: a cyborg from the future tries to kill a young woman, who is protected by a human soldier sent back from the same future. It's one long chase sequence, one narrow escape after another, ending only when, against wildly improbably odds, said cyborg is destroyed with great difficulty, mayhem, and collateral death.

For those of us of a certain age, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was a revelation because it told THE EXACT SAME STORY, except that this time the protector is another cyborg who looks exactly like the terrifying cyborg from the first film. It was thus able to tap into all the emotional resonance of the first installment while simultaneously disorienting the audience and upending all expectations.

That disorientation was important because the first two Terminators retold one of our most primordial and universal nightmares: you are being chased by something terrifying, and wake up screaming just as it catches you. Those movies are about running away, and their conclusions provide such satisfying relief because, after all those sweaty nights, we finally, even if only vicariously through the magnificent Linda Hamilton, escape.

The next three installments are about achieving a goal, but achievement can never be as certain or absolute as escape. Moreover, the protagonists must decide to move toward their objectives, whereas one never has to decide to escape danger: it's a simple, thoughtless, and absolutely necessary instinct.

The first two Terminator films succeed so marvelously because they retell a universally shared nightmare and promise an escape from it. Until the franchise can figure out how to tell us that story again, all its installments will leave us a little bit disappointed.