CHANGING UNTIL WE GET TO WHERE WE STARTED [W, 10-10-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories and Musings of An Old Man—CHANGING UNTIL WE GET TO WHERE WE STARTED [W, 10-10-24]

 

I think molasses dropped out of kitchen staples about the time Helen and I got married. When we married, everything was as it had always been. There was men’s work and women’s work. There were pencils and paper, augmented by fountain pens and typewriters. But… ah, there’s the point… sort of.

Vera Largent became the registrar at Garrett Theological Seminary the year that I started there. All her records were on cards, in pencil. Then they started using ink. Then they started using manual typewriters. Then electric typewriters. Then computers. That’s when she decided to retire. In the length of one career, she went from chipping letters into stone all the way to computers.

BUT…it was all the same thing. Just different methods. All for the same church. Guys [and a few gals by then] went to seminary in the electric typewriter era for the same reason they went in the pencil era--to get their names onto those registration cards so that they could pastor the same churches in the same towns in the same way as all the names that had been on those cards before. The same hymns and prayers and sermons as always, just new preachers.

Some of us radicals, though, claimed that sameness wouldn’t do. We wanted to change things, “keep up with the times.” The changes we wanted weren’t radical, though. We just wanted to tweak things a bit, put our mark on them.

As I mentioned in the column of 9-30, when I started, preachers were still praying by using these and thous. I was one of the first in Indiana Methodism to refer to God as a “You.” I figured it was time to pray and liturgize in modern English. It caused a bit of a stir.

I wasn’t really trying to cause a stir, but that became a part of my reputation. Once a reputation is started when we are young, we think we have to live up to it. So I began to push the limits almost as a habit, even after I had transferred from IN to IL. Either my rep followed me from state to state, or I kept it going.

I once asked the senior minister at the largest church in all midwestern Methodism why I wasn’t getting any positive response to some initiative I was pushing. “Why, the administrators are scared to death of you!” he replied. “They exist to keep things calm. You stir stuff up.”

I was sort of proud of that, and sort of chagrined by it. It was nice to be noticed, but I wanted people to like me, not fear me. I wanted bishops and district superintendents and other administrators to send me to “bigger and better” [and higher-paying] jobs.

Yes, I was a change agent. I knew change had to happen. But I really did not anticipate that things would change so much that the 1950s church would no longer exist. I knew things would change, but I had no special foresight. I thought that denominational identity and pulpit preaching would carry the church forward as it always had. I did not understand how totally television, and then the internet, and now AI, would change so completely the ways we relate to one another.

I was always the idea man, the one who tried to think up better ways of doing the same old things. Now there are no same-olds. I’m out of ideas.

For someone my age, that’s a good thing. It was too easy to rely on my new ideas and new ways to make me feel worthwhile. Now, I have to trust in God for that. That’s the way it’s always been.

John Robert McFarland