WHY THE CHURCH WON’T SURVIVE [R. 10-15-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Curmudgeon—WHY THE CHURCH WON’T SURVIVE [R. 10-15-26]

 

Craig Miller called the other day. He was a student at IL State U when I was campus minister there. I helped him get into my seminary alma mater, Garrett School of Theology, at Northwestern U.

Craig recently turned 80 and decided he should take a thanks tour, “visiting” the people who were important to him along the way. A really neat idea. We had a nice long conversation, not only about ILSU days, but the forty or so years that we were clergy colleagues.

At the end of our talk, he said, “One more thing. Just sort of yes or no. Are you in favor of what Garrett is doing?”

I said, “My brain tells me it’s probably a good thing, or at least necessary. My heart, though, is very sad.”

“Yes,” he said. “Me, too.”

Here is the deal. Garrett is trading its great old building on the Northwestern campus for a couple of office type buildings on the campus. I don’t know what will become of the large and beautiful Chapel of The Unnamed Faithful, but the Garret library will be subsumed into the Northwestern library. There are various housing and eating options on campus.

In many ways, it’s a good deal for Garrett. Its present building has a lot of deferred maintenance. It has high utility costs. It needs to put its assets into students, not buildings.

Except students are sort of a problem, too. Meaning Garrett doesn’t have any. Oh, yes, it has students, but isn’t a seminary an extension of the church? Isn’t it supposed to be preparing students to be pastors?

When I was at Garrett, nine of every ten students were preparing to be preachers. Now only one in ten seminary students wants to be a congregation pastor. The others are preparing to be chaplains, counselors, social workers, professors, et al. They want to be spiritual. They want to be part of the church. They just don’t want to be a preacher.

Garrett is facing facts. It’s not really a seminary, a theological school, anymore, because no students want to be pastors. Of necessity, it is becoming a professional school for people who want to be part of a helping profession, and not make any money. That used to include pastors, but not now.

That beautiful, gothic Garrett building was appropriate for educating pastors. Its new office buildings will be appropriate for its new mission, although I’m reluctant to call it a mission. It’s more like a business, a business that exists to survive. Survival like in, We’ve got a faculty and a history and it seems like we should be doing something and we don’t know how to quit….

So, I guess it really is still an extension of the church, because the main purpose of the church now is survival. And, of course, that is why it won’t survive.

John Robert McFarland

THERE’S A TAVERN IN THE CHURCH [T, 10-13-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THERE’S A TAVERN IN THE CHURCH [T, 10-13-26]

 

After we moved to the farm, when I was ten, each spring I would decide to make a room for myself in the attic. Our house was small. My sisters shared a room. Our parents shared a room. I shared a pull-out sofa bed in the living room with my little brother.

There was a narrow staircase up to the attic. It was small, and the house had a pitched roof, so you could stand up in the attic only in the middle, but that middle was floored. By moving the stored junk around, I had a perfect place for a room of my own. No bed, no closet, but I didn’t care. It was a room of my own…

…until summer came. We had heard about air conditioning back then, but I don’t think we had ever experienced it. Anyplace in a hot, humid southern Indiana summer was miserable, but a windowless attic? It wasn’t long before I was back on the sofa bed, which pleased my little brother, since he liked for me to scratch his back while he fell asleep.

Everybody needs a space, as individuals or as groups. We are spatial people. Our space and our identity are tied together so closely.

I’ve thought about this a lot as we have tried to rethink the nature of church. As congregations decline, especially in small towns, they often have old buildings that are too large for them and too expensive to maintain. When the building closes, that’s the end of the church, even though we constantly say that the church is the people, not the building.

The truth is, it’s awfully hard to have a church without a building, because we all need a space. So how--in this era of church buildings closing by the thousands--can the church continue?

Yes, online streaming of worship service is a good idea. Helen and I go to church every Sunday that way, at St. Mark’s On The Sofa, We sing the hymns and pray the prayers along with all the folks across town in the sanctuary. But it’s not the same. People who worship online are folks who started in the physical building. A church that is only online won’t last for long. Probably can’t even get started.

Culturally these days, mega churches do best. People seem to like big, be it a church or a pickup truck. Mega churches are great because you can belong without belonging. But you can’t have a mega church in a small town.

When Helen was growing up in Monon, Indiana, she and her mother went to the American Baptist Church. One night the church was doing a fund raiser and ran out of French fries. They had potatoes, but no way to make French fries. But a tavern downtown did. They called, and the tavern folk said, “Sure. Come on down. You can use our machine.” But they made the mistake of sending Gladys. She was embarrassed to be seen in a tavern. She marched in with her potatoes, looking neither left nor right, went into the kitchen, used the machine, and marched out again. When she got back to the Baptists, they realized the had gone to the wrong tavern! She was supposed to go to Joe’s, but she went to Duffy’s. Being a good Baptist church lady, she didn’t know one tavern from another. They called Duffy to apologize. “Well, we thought it as a bit strange,” Duffy said, “but we weren’t using the machine right then, so…”

That church is closed, but Monon still has its taverns. Which is why in small towns, and maybe other places, too, churches need to share building with taverns. In any town, the last business standing is always a tavern.

Taverns are always available on Sunday mornings. Not only would the church have access to a French fry machine, communion elements are already present, and when the preacher shows up, there might be a few congregants already there, left over from Saturday night.

I’m totally serious about this. If I were a bishop, I’d mobilize everybody with a Bible and a Buick and send them to all the little towns where the churches have closed and have them preach in the taverns on Sunday mornings. If I could still drive beyond the city limits, I’d do it myself.

You don’t need stained glass or an organ or an ordination certificate to be a church. You do need a building. And a preacher. And people. That’s the church.

John Robert McFarland

Joe’s, Duffy’s, and Gladys are all names of convenience. “Duffy,” of course, comes from the old radio show, “Duffy’s Tavern.”

There’s even a prelude chorus to sing to start tavern worship services, to the tune, of course, of There’s a Tavern in the Town. [Look it up on YouTube if you don’t know the tune.] There’s a tavern in the town, [in the town], where the worshippers sit down, [they sit down], and listen to the Word while hymns they gladly sing, and praise the coming of the King…

 

 

 

 

MOTHER AND BOBBY KNIGHT [sun, 10-11-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscenes of A Very Old Man—MOTHER AND BOBBY KNIGHT [sun, 10-11-26]

 

The Indiana University basketball season starts today, sort of, so it is worth recalling that my mother once took a course in coaching basketball. At IU. From Bob Knight.

That probably sounds strange, to anyone who knew Mother or who knew Knight. Until you remember that they were both outliers.

Mother liked basketball. No sports for girls in her day, of course, so they had to play vicariously. For Mother, it was through her brothers, especially her oldest brother, Ted.

He was born in 1900 and played before the Francisco, IN school had a gym. Just having a school at all then was not to be taken for granted. When Mother graduated, her class actually dedicated their yearbook to the taxpayers of Center Township for providing a school for them. That was after Uncle Ted’s playing days.

 

Uncle Ted played basketball in a barn. That’s how we get the basketball term, “barn burner,” a game so exciting that the barn catches fire, at least emotional fire. Mother talked of Uncle Ted’s games like that.

When I started on the staff of “Oak Barks,” the Oakland City High School newspaper, as a lowly fourteen-year-old, editor Benny Albin gave me the job of doing the “years ago” column, as in Ten Years Ago, Fifty Years Ago, Etc. In our archives we had the school papers from all the Gibson County schools, including Francisco. Going through the archives, I discovered that Uncle Ted had indeed been a standout player. He had often been high point man. In games that ended in scores like 6 to 4!

Of course, the game was slower then. Whenever anyone scored a basket, someone had to climb up to the loft to get the ball, since the baskets were actual baskets, with the bottom still in.

Francisco was named for a Mexican who was helping to build the Eerie Canal. He lived in a hut there. As other people began to settle in the area, they referred to the place as Francisco’s. It is often called Frisco. There are several members of the Pond family, Mother’s family, who still live there.

When Mother was growing up in Francisco, it had about 600 residents, about the same as today, but in those days before automobiles it had two hotels--to serve the drummers, [1] two doctors, a bank, a barber, several restaurants, several grocery stores, several churches, a blacksmith, etc. And, of course, the infamous “company store” of the coal mine owners.

 

I think Uncle Ted started his general store to try to put the company store out of business, by giving miners, like his father, decent goods at a reasonable price.

Mother and Dad went to live in Frisco in their last years, because Mother’s 7 siblings gave her the family home when Grandma died, but Frisco, like all small towns, was rapidly declining. When the last grocery store closed, my brother moved Mother and Dad to a house he owned in Bloomington, IN, only a couple of blocks from the Indiana University campus.

That’s where Bob Knight “taught,” [2] so that’s where Mother bought a pink sweatshirt with Indiana University on the front, and walked over to campus to listen to Bobby explain the motion offense.

 

She finally got what she always wanted; she was a college girl.

John Robert McFarland

1] Called “drummers” because they traveled on the railroad, from town to town, “drumming up” business. The opening scene of Meredith Wilson’s great The Music Man pays tribute to them.

2] In his early days, before everyone knew who he was, when people asked Bob what he did, he replied simply, “I teach at IU.”

THE FEMINIZATION OF THE CHURCH [F, 10-9-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Man—THE FEMINIZATION OF THE CHURCH [F, 10-9-26]

 

 

In my discussion group, at a national conference, a young woman pastor--I’ll call her Julie--was making the case for women in the ministry. “I know the names of all the children in my church,” she said. “That’s why we need women pastors.”

I was flummoxed. Julie was pastoring a church of a hundred members and knew all the children. Good. But I was pastoring a church of a thousand members and knew all the children. I knew a lot more kids than she did, and I was a lot more male than she was. I had always known the names of all the kids in my churches, from when I started preaching in 1956, which was also the year the Methodist Church decided it was okay for women to be preachers, whether they knew the names of children or not. [1]

I didn’t say that, though, about how this tall, deep-voiced, bearded man was just as concerned to minister to the children as Julie was. Because that wasn’t really what she was talking about.

It was the 1970s. Equality for women was the big and important issue. She was just trying to say that it was okay for women to be preachers. Unfortunately, Julie felt that she had to find something unique about women pastors to justify their existence. The only thing that matters in a preacher is competence, “gifts and graces.”

I kept my mouth closed in that discussion because I was on Julie’s side. I had been an advocate for women in the ministry from 1956 on, although I really had not had opportunity to do much about it until I became a campus minister in 1964 and began to encourage college girls to go to seminary. [2] [Yes, college students were boys and girls back then.]

The problem now is—and notice that I’ll quickly say it’s not really a problem—is that we’ve gone all the way from saying it’s okay for women to be preachers to having a feminized church. Men really don’t have a place in the church anymore. That’s probably a good thing.

[When I say the church has become feminized, a female institution, I am fully aware that the church has always been a feminized movement, unacknowledged as such, from the moment when women were the first ones at the tomb on Resurrection morning.]

In important ways, the church has always been a female institution. Not in its leadership structure, of course, but in its work structure. That’s always been almost entirely female. That’s why the church has been so successful. Let men think they are in charge while women actually do the stuff is a guaranteed recipe for success.

The Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist Churches are smart. They know if women get out of work positions and into leadership positions, the men will run like scared rabbits.

Here’s the stinger—a feminized church isn’t a bad thing. Men have been in charge for a long time. We’ve messed things up rather badly. No, I have no naive notions about women. They are full of original sin, too. They’ll mess things up just as badly now that they are in charge. Isn’t that what equality is all about, equal opportunity to steer the boat into the ice berg?

Maybe there is one problem. Women think church power is worth fighting for. Not anymore. The church used to be relevant in society but it is no longer. Churches are closing left and right. Being in charge of the church now is like being president of the buggy-makers association.

The church is not irrelevant because of its increasing feminization. The irrelevance and the feminization just happened to come along at the same time. But the women who now fight over church power don’t realize that’s it is like dogs fighting for the last chicken bone.

Men don’t have a place in the church anymore. That’s okay. They have football on Sundays. That’s a spiritual experience, especially after eight beers. [3]

John Robert McFarland

1] I am in a uniquely qualified position to understand this and comment on it since my 70 years as a preacher have coincided with the 70 years the Methodist church has ordained women. Also, I am tall, male, and straight, and comfortable with white privilege.

2] The first was Joan Tuttle Smoke, from Indiana State U. She became an Episcopal Priest, and I preached at her installation. Her email address is “holysmoke.”

3] This leads into my plan to have churches share buildings with taverns/bars. More on that in four days.

 

 

WHEN DO WE BECOME ADULTS? [W, 10-7-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—WHEN DO WE BECOME ADULTS? [W, 10-7-26]

 

Anna Quindlen, in her novel Every Last One, has her protagonist say, “So much of friendship is being in the right place at the right time.” So it was with Darrel and me.

I first met Darrel when we were both in fifth grade, although because of different birth dates, he was one semester ahead of me. [1] It was a pleasure to watch him grow up. I didn’t think about it at the time, of course, because I was so concerned about my own growing up, but looking back, yes, it was a pleasure to watch him grow up.

When is it that we move from childhood to adulthood? Puberty? In some ways, but not always. With a ritual, like bar mitzvah or confirmation? Or commencement, from junior high? Or senior high? Or college? Or when you get a girl pregnant? That did it for Darrel.

We had parted ways early in high school because of girls. He had a car and money. It wasn’t a great car, and he didn’t have scads of money, but it was more car and money than I had. Thus he always had a girlfriend, or several. I did not. Also, he was very good looking and a basketball star. Those attributes helped to attract girls.

We had not stopped being friends, but he and I were busy with different lives. Nonetheless, I watched him, and learned.

I appreciate more now than I did in high school that Darrel was always faithful to me as a friend. From age ten, he said I was his best friend. He never replaced me with a different best friend. He always saw me that way, even though he entered that handsome jock-clothes-cars category and I did not. But when it came to girls, I was always disposable. More than once I walked home from a school event, late at night, in the ditch beside the highway, and then on mud or gravel roads, 3 miles, because he had connected with some girl and totally forgot about me and went off to Lover’s Lane with her.

I knew that sometimes he used me, but I didn’t mind. I knew he was the alpha male and I was the wingman. This was especially true when he was a junior and wanted to date a cute 8^th grade girl. [Our high school started with 8^th grade.] Judy was an only child with protective parents. But I had a reputation as a nice boy. As long as Judy dated Darrel when I was along, either via double date or as a chaperone, Judy’s parents thought it was okay.

Darrel didn’t just put up with me because he got something out of it. He had accepted me as a friend clear back when we were ten years old, and he never wavered from that, even though our lives diverged in significant ways. I was his best man, for a wedding that started a fifty-year marriage.

He got a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue, and worked for as an engineer for 29 years. But his real passion was music, especially Dixieland. He played trumpet and tuba. Even in college, and during all those years as an engineer, he really thought of himself as a musician. He even directed a church choir.

He retired from engineering in his early fifties to play Dixieland music all over the world. It was coming back from a gig on a snowy night that the car slid off the road and a brain injury ended his life some weeks later. He died much too young, at 72.

Is this a column about Darrel? Not really. I’m trying to distinguish when and how we change from childhood to what we are as adults. Because Darrel held onto me as his friend, even in those moments when he abandoned me, I got to see him grow up. His ups and downs were greater than my own, and so I learned a lot about growing up from watching him. Friends do that for you.

Shortly before he died, in his brain-injured state he looked at his wife and said, “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” When is that we become adults? Perhaps when we realize that our friends have grown up, and taken us along with them.

I have CD of Darrel playing Gospel Dixieland. It’s one of my most prized possessions.

John Robert McFarland

1] In those days, kids born in December through May started school in January, at the start of the second semester of the school year. Children born April through November started in September, after Labor Day.

 

 

ONE OF US HURTS [M. 10-5-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—ONE OF US HURTS [M. 10-5-26]

 

Helen had a dream recently in which I was in great pain. She awoke to learn that she was in great pain [tooth]. That’s what happens when you’ve been married 67 years. If one of you is in pain, you aren’t really sure which it is.

I was going to go to our dentist and say, “One of us hurts. Can you figure it out?” I was afraid, though, that he would say, “Sure. I’ll work on one of you and charge both of you.”

Immigrant Elon Musk says that what is wrong with America is that we are too empathetic. You don’t make any advances if you feel the pain of others, he says. You have to ignore the pain of others. He does a good job of living what he believes. Makes you wonder why he immigrated from South Africa, where they have a better history of ignoring the pain of others.

Humans have the capacity to be self-aware. Narcissists and sinners don’t. Sinning is mostly failure to recognize who we really are.

I recall a preacher story about a little boy who got mad because his mother did…whatever mothers do to try to control little boys. He went to the yard and kicked his little puppy and then sat down to pout. A moment later, he felt a tentative licking on his arm. The little puppy had come to comfort him, even though he had abused it. He ran into the house with the puppy in his arms and cried, “Mommy, I’m mean! I’m mean!”

Redemption is accepting who we really are. If we are not embarrassed by hypocrisy and lies, we cannot accept salvation.

Jesus said, “The well have no need of a physician.” If you don’t feel your own pain, you’ll die physically. If you don’t feel the pain of others, you’ll die spiritually.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT INCLUSION IN 70 YEARS AS A PREACHER [Sa. 10-3-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT INCLUSION IN 70 YEARS AS A PREACHER [Sa. 10-3-26]

 

My 70 years in the ministry were the same 70 years that the church and America became inclusive. My next 70 years will be dealing with the backlash against being inclusive—in church and nation and world.

I’m going to use American Methodism as representative for what happened in the whole nation. How the Methodists went from a church that kept women out of the pulpit by keeping them in the kitchen, how we kept black churches in the back pews of the organization, how we kept gay folks out of everything while claiming that they were “persons of sacred worth,” how we went from a church of exclusion to a church that actually practiced “Open Doors, Open Minds, Open Hearts.” And how we paid an institutional price for that.

I started preaching in 1956. That was the year the Methodist Church agreed that it would be okay for women to be preachers. This year, my Conference is presided over by a woman bishop, and my District Superintendent is a woman, and my congregation has a woman preacher. [It also has a man preacher.] Open Doors.  

When the Methodist Episcopal [ME] Church, and The ME Church South and the Meth Protestant Ch reunited in 1939, we agreed to let black congregations be part of the denomination, but not of the regional conferences. They were segregated organizationally into what was called The Central Jurisdiction [CJ]. White Methodists, from bishops on down, didn’t have to go to meetings with black Methodists. The CJ was a denomination within a denomination. When Brown v Board of Education was passed in 1954, some Methodists said it was time to abolish the CJ. In 1972, the CJ was finally abolished and black congregations became parts of regular annual conferences. Open Minds.

That same year, 1972, a couple of boys in my Wesley Foundation told me they were going to go to a gay bar to find out if they were gay. I advised against it, for a lot of good reasons [safety, including from police who liked to go there to beat up on gays], and for a bad reason. Like almost all the rest of society, I thought homosexuality was a choice. I told them they should not make up their minds too soon about whether they were gay.

Who was I to disagree with The American Medical Assn and the American Psychological Assn? They both claimed that being gay was some sort of mental illness.

A lot of research was done from 1972 to 2024, when we finally realized that being gay is not a choice but simply the way you are born, and there is no reason for gay folk to be kept out of any part of the church. Open Hearts.

A lot of good people are scared of things that are not easy to understand. Gender and race and sex are areas where our views are almost entirely emotional. Every time the Methodist Church became more inclusive, we lost folks who don’t feel comfortable with open doors and minds and hearts. That loss is important, not because the organized denomination is smaller and less powerful now, but because it is always a grief when the Body of Christ is broken for any reason other than sharing the body in communion.

The story of Jesus is a story of inclusion—women, Samaritans, prodigal sons, tax collectors, lepers, sinners… For 70 years, we’ve tried to be better followers of Jesus. We’re a smaller church, but we’re a better church.

John Robert McFarland