Pastors’ Column

When I was a child, my church in Pittsburgh always hosted a little “shop” on a Saturday morning in December where children of the congregation could come and buy small items for everyone on their Christmas list. Some items were donated by church members and others from a local wholesaler who traded in dollar store items. I am sure the day will come in the future when I clean out my parents’ home and I find all of the switchblade combs and costume cocktail rings that I bought for them over the years. Even though the gifts weren’t significant, there was a significance in teaching me what it means to give gifts at Christmas. 

A number of years ago, a woman named Sara Miles wrote a memoir called Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion.  It was about her experience of coming to faith. She had grown up in a family of atheists. But she was a journalist who was by nature curious, so one Sunday morning when she was walking by a church in San Francisco, she went in and sat down to see what was going on in a worship service.  It was a church that practiced open communion, and she found herself transformed by receiving the sacrament. She shared her experience saying, “I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine, or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals. The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger.  It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.” 

This year marks the 35^th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. David and Ruth Watermulder Theologian-in-Residence lecture series. The goal at the time was simple. As Dr. Eugene Bay described it in a letter to the Watermulders, the plan was to bring to BMPC on an annual basis, some prominent churchman or churchwoman, who would be in residence for up to a week’s time, teaching, lecturing, and preaching. 

The text dates to the seventh century, written originally in Latin, the lingua franca of the western Christianity for centuries. But I stumbled across it recently in our archives, a place in which I have spent an inordinate and unnatural amount of time over this last year in preparation for our 150^th anniversary celebrations. You can see it in the photo here. It’s a copy of the worship bulletin from January 7, 1923.

The big 150^th Anniversary Celebration weekend is now just hours away! We are excited that so many church friends have indicated plans to be here from among our active congregation as well as from afar. Many months ago, out-of-town members received a Save the Date mailing, and former pastors, Lilly residents and staff received a special letter of invitation.

One hundred fifty years ago, on January 13, 1873, Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church was founded. Three men and 13 women gathered together in Temperance Hall on Lancaster Pike for the purpose of founding a Reformed congregation in the quickly-growing borough. Making plans to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the founding of our church has been a multi-year process.