John Haynes Holmes - A Statement: On the Future of This Church
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John Haynes Holmes >> A Statement: On the Future of This Church
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The Messiah Pulpit
A STATEMENT:
the Future of This Church
By
John Haynes Holmes
Minister of the Church of the Messiah
Series 1918-1919----No. VI
PRICE, FIVE CENTS
Published by the
Church of the Messiah
Park Avenue and 34th Street
New York City
[1]
NOTICE
The Messiah Pulpit, by tradition and practice, is a free platform,
dedicated to the ideal of truth. Its sermons, in both their spoken
and written form, are the utterances of the preacher, who accepts
for them exclusive responsibility.
The publication of these sermons is made possible by a private fund
for this purpose. Contributions to this fund are needed, and may be
sent to Rev. John Haynes Holmes, 61 East 34th Street, New York City.
[2]
A STATEMENT:
On the Future of This Church
On Sunday, November 24 last, as most of you know. I was invited by
unanimous vote of the people of All Souls Church, Chicago, "to take
up the work laid down by (their) beloved pastor," the late Dr.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones. On Thursday, November 28, I received this call
through the personal visitation of two members of the Chicago
church, and agreed to give it most earnest consideration. On Sunday,
December 1, through my associate, Mr. Brown, I announced this call
to the congregation of the Church of the Messiah, explaining that it
involved the ministry of All Souls Church, the directorship of
Abraham Lincoln Centre, and the editorship of the weekly liberal
religious journal, called "Unity." I stated in my announcement that
I had asked and been granted ample time for the consideration of
this call, but that I intended to answer it as speedily as possible.
On Thursday last, just five weeks to a day after receiving the
invitation to Chicago, I sent my reply for transmission to the
people of All Souls Church this morning. I choose this same time to
announce to you my decision.
At the beginning of my consideration of the problem, I found
questions of personal inclination and comfort inevitably to the
fore. For twelve years minus one month, I have lived and labored in
New York City. Every particle of moral energy which I possess, I
have invested here. Nearly all of my friends are associated with
this community. Especially am I bound by ties of deepest reverence
and affection to this church. Here are memories of joy and sorrow
and great trial which are more truly a part of me than the voice
with which I speak, or the hand with which I turn these pages. It
[3] needed but this single summons to teach me what I had not
known--how deeply my roots are struck into the soil of this place,
and how great the pain and hazard of their exposure, removal and
replanting.
It very soon became clear to me, however, that personal
considerations could rightly have but little part in the settlement
of this problem. In no spirit of bravado, but in simplest
recognition of the truth, I say to you that I believe I would have
been betraying the profession which I have sworn to serve had I
permitted conditions of personal affection, however lovely and
precious, to determine my decision in this case. I take seriously
the fact of my ordination--that as a minister of religion I have
been "set apart," as the traditional phrase has it, to the high
purpose of propagating an idea, championing a cause, seeking the
best and the highest that I know in terms of God and of his holy
will. I am here, in other words, not to make or to keep friends, not
to enjoy pleasant associations of hand and heart, not even to serve
a particular church, but to serve, perhaps at the cost of these
other and more personal things, the great idea of which I speak. To
allow my individual sentiments to fix the place and fashion of my
professional service, would be to me as dastardly a thing as to
allow considerations of profit or prestige to make decision. Not
even my wife or my children could interfere in this case. My problem
was to determine where I could best advance the ideals to which I
have given my life--where I could find the weapons or tools best
fitted to my hand for the doing of my work--and there to stand. To
remain in this church and city might be infinitely desirable to me
as a man; but I must decide not as a man but as a minister, and
therefore if I remained, it must be because I could do no other!
But there was another consideration which held me to this impersonal
relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had
brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious
spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4]
much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to
serve, and disclosed to myself at least the picture of the
realization of this ideal in institutional form. This same Great
War, however, had distracted my parish, absorbed the energies and
attention of my people, and in spite of wellnigh unexampled
forbearance, had introduced elements of misunderstanding and even
alienation. The conflict, in other words, had no more left our
church unchanged than the world itself. We had been shaken and
distressed and tortured and driven, so that we were no longer the
persons we once were. You knew me, and I knew you, as we were
yesterday; but we did not know one another as we were going to be,
or should want to be, tomorrow. It was necessary that we should meet
not on the plane of the past, nor even of the present, but on the
plane of the future, and thus find ourselves again, and discover
what now, in this new world, we wanted, and would be able, to do
together. Months before the War was ended, it had clearly entered
into my mind to summon you to conference on our future relations as
minister and people. This invitation from Chicago but precipitated
suddenly what was in itself inevitable sooner or later. It
introduced into a problem already existing between you and me, a
third element--namely, the people of Abraham Lincoln Centre. The
problem, however, in its nature, remained the same. I have work to
do. I have set my hand to the plow, and I must find the field where
I can best drive this plow through the furrow of my sowing.
In order to make plain the situation, as it has presented itself to
my mind during the last five weeks, I must turn to the past for a
moment, and bring to you therefrom some fragments of autobiography.
Those of you who were present at the meeting on last Monday night,
have already heard what I am about to say. I beg your undivided
attention, none the less, that you may note the bearing of this
recital not on a problem presented, as then, but on a decision made,
as now.
I entered the Unitarian ministry in the year 1904, [5] under the
influence of motives not unfamiliar. In the first place, I saw the
pulpit. I went into the ministry for the same primary reason which
has held me there through all these years gone by--a desire to
preach. I think I can say, in no spirit of boasting, that from my
earliest days I have had an intense interest in the problem of
truth, and a passion to interpret and defend by the spoken word, the
truth as I saw it, to other men. It is just this passion, I suppose,
which makes the preacher, as distinguished from the poet or the
scientist. So Phillip Brooks would seem to suggest in his famous
dictum, that preaching is "Truth (conveyed) through Personality."
Furthermore, the truth which I desired to expound was theological in
its nature. My whole approach to the problem was along the lines of
speculation in the field of religious, as distinguished from
political or social, thought. God, the soul, immortality, the origin
and destiny of man, sin and salvation--these were the questions that
held me, even as a boy, partly, I suppose, because of native
inclination, partly because of careful training in a Unitarian home
and church, mostly I am convinced because I early came under the
spell of that prince of liberal preachers, Dr. Minot J. Savage. To
do what Dr. Savage was doing each Sunday, preaching to eager throngs
the great truths of the Unitarian gospel--this became the consuming
ambition of my life. I wanted to stand in a pulpit and preach. I
decided to do so; and if judgment in such a question can be based on
experiences of inward joy, I am ready to testify that my decision
was not unwise.
I entered the church, therefore, primarily because it had a pulpit.
But other reasons, not so decisive, and yet impressive, persuaded me
to this same end. Thus I saw in the church not only a pulpit but an
altar. Indeed, the pulpit distinguished itself in my mind from a
platform or a teacher's desk, by the fact that it was always
associated with the presence, visible and invisible, of an altar for
divine worship. It was easy for me to picture myself as saying all I
wanted to say in [6] college halls, in theater meetings, in public
forums, but I craved for my work on behalf of truth the atmosphere
and environment of spiritual devotion. It was my desire, in other
words, to be not merely a teacher or speaker, but a preacher; not
merely a prophet, but also a priest. This does not mean that I am a
churchman, as such; or that I find any permanent significance in
rituals or other forms of worship. But there is in me that which
seeks the stimulus of praise and prayer, the uplift of conscious
communion with the Eternal, the consolation of appeal to, and trust
in, God. Not only from habit, but from temperament, I find myself at
home amid religious rites. Nothing so moved me on my one trip to
Europe, as the hours I spent under the shadows of the great
cathedrals. As a quiet place of worship, as well as a high place of
testimony, the church called me in those youthful years, and I gave
answer.
A third motive for my choice of the ministry must not be forgotten.
I refer to the appeal of the church as a place for action, a service
station on behalf of public causes. My vision of what we mean by
public causes was strangely limited. It scarcely went beyond the
Unitarian denomination, and the works of charity and kindly reform
with which it has always been identified. I was a passionate
Unitarian in those days. I had read, and been deeply stirred by, the
story of the achievements which Unitarianism had wrought on behalf
of freedom, fellowship and character in religion. I reverenced its
saints and prophets, and longed to follow in their train. Hence the
eagerness with which I sought preparation for the Unitarian
ministry--that I might serve the church--advance its glory and
magnify its work.
It was with such ideas as these in my heart that I was ordained in
February, 1904. Within two years there came an event which shook my
life to its foundations, revolutionized my thought, and changed the
whole character of my interest and work. I refer to what we have [7]
learned to describe in our time as the social question. This
question, of course, is nothing new. It has burned at the heart of
life from the beginning, and at intervals has flamed forth like the
eruption of a volcano, to the terror and glory of the world. Its
latest phase, as we know it today in the religious field, made its
appearance at about the time I entered the ministry. I recall that
the book, which first revealed the fires so soon to burst upon
us--Prof. Peabody's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question "--was
published in 1903, the year before my ordination. I was not
unprepared for what was coming. My deep-rooted reverence for
Theodore Parker, the supreme prophet of applied Christianity in our
time, and my enthusiastic study of his life, had revealed to me the
meaning of socialized religion. But I had caught only the pure
essence of its spirit; I had not thought to apply it to the social
problems of today. Indeed, I was not aware of the existence of such
problems. My whole approach to the question of truth and experience
up to that time, had been along the lines of speculation in the
field of theological, as contrasted with political or social,
thought. In the second year of my ministry, however, I read Henry
George's "Progress and Poverty"; then followed the writings of Henry
D. Lloyd and Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch; then came the deep and
prolonged plunge into the waters of socialism. For several years
after I came to this church, I was in a state of intellectual and
emotional upheaval impossible for me to describe. At last came a
conviction which was a complete reversal of all my former ideas. I
was as a man converted; I was as one who had seen a great light.
Henceforth I was a social radical; and religion, pre-eminently not a
testimony to theological truth but a crusade for social change. Of
course, my interest in theology has persisted; but its place in my
life has tended to become ever more subordinate to other and more
directly practical interests. You know how the character of my
preaching has changed since I first entered the Messiah pulpit. You
know with what [8] waxing intensity of expression I have moved to
the left of our various divisions on the social question. You do not
know, hence I must tell you, how this intensity of radical
conviction is destined to continue in the years that are now before
us. For the war has accelerated the social crisis beyond all
forecasting. In two years has transpired what fifty years could not
have consummated under more normal conditions. Three great
empires--Russia, Germany, Austria--and several newborn countries,
like that of the Czecho-Slovaks, have been captured by the
Socialists; and the British Empire seems promised to the British
Labor Party in not more than another decade or two. The social
revolution long prophesied, long hoped for, long feared, is here;
and this means in countries like our own, still untouched by change,
such a "sturm and drang periode," as makes even the Great War pale
into insignificance. Now in these years which are before us, I
propose to speak and serve for the speediest and most thoroughgoing
social reconstruction. I am committed both by conviction and
temperament to the program of the British Labor Party and its policy
of indirect or political action for the advancement of that program.
This is my predominant interest at this moment, and through what is
destined I suppose to be the whole period of my life. This is as
much the cause of our day as abolition was the cause of the days
before the Civil War. To this I have given all I have--from this I
intend to withdraw nothing that I have given. Not in any sense of
bitterness or violence in method, but in every sense of utter change
as the end desired, I am committed to the ideal of the complete
democratization of society.
When the significance of this transformation first broke upon me, I
felt an impulse to leave the church, and attach myself directly to
the labor movement. I recall how my soul leapt in answer to the
great scene at the close of Kennedy's "The Servant in the House,"
when the Vicar strips off his clerical garb, seizes the dirty hand
of his brother, the Drain-Man, and cries out, [9] "This is no
priest's work--it calls for a man!" I was deterred, however, not, I
hope, by cowardice but by wisdom. On the surface I felt that I
should miss the services of the church--the prayers and worship with
my people. Deeper down, and nearer the heart of things, was an
unshaken trust in the church as a social institution. I loved her
traditions, reverenced her saints and prophets, believed in her
destiny--was unconvinced that she must necessarily serve the
interests of reaction. At-bottom, was a perfectly clear
understanding that my approach to the social question was a
spiritual approach, and my acceptance of it the acceptance of a
religious task. I saw my new position as nothing more nor less than
the logic of Christianity. Men must be free from all oppression,
because they are children of God, and therefore living souls. They
must be equal in opportunity and privilege, because they are members
of the holy family of God, and therefore brothers. They must be
lifted up out of poverty, disease, war, because their heritage is
the life of God, and they must have it abundantly. The material
aspects of the social question, I would be among the last, I trust,
to ignore. These are central--but central only as the fetters are
central to the problem of slavery. Furthermore, the means which I
recognized to the great end, were also spiritual. I could find no
place in my thought for the use of violence. The plea of
class-conscious rebellion never won my acceptance. Only patience,
persuasion, and much love for humankind, seemed to me legitimate
weapons of reform. In other words, I was again a victim of the logic
of Christianity. And where did this logic hold me, if not to the
church? Where could I make plain my spiritual position, or bring to
bear my spiritual influence, apart from the church? If this
institution must hold me altogether aloof from the social question,
then of course my duty was manifest. But its pulpit was wide open to
social preaching; its altar a chosen place for social consecration;
and its machinery of service all at hand to be shifted from the gear
of [10] charity to the gear of justice. Why not stay, therefore, in
the church, as Theodore Parker stayed, and fight capitalism, as he
fought slavery, in the garb of a minister of Christ?
Decision on this point came fairly early, and it was favorable to
the church. Strangely enough, however, it brought me little peace
and surety in my church relations. Outside, in the denomination at
large, I found myself in almost constant conflict with my fellows.
There were few meetings or conferences in which I did not speak in
protest and vote with minorities. Here in the Messiah parish there
was no trouble, thanks to your forbearance, friendship, and
scrupulous loyalty to freedom; but almost from the beginning there
was uncertainty, wonderment, at times unrest, on the part of those
longest associated with this society; and the records show a
melancholy tale of withdrawals of those, not unable to endure
differences of opinion, but impelled to turn away when the
institution, long precious in their sight, no longer presented the
recognizable attributes of a Unitarian church. That my own
shortcomings as a man and a minister were responsible for much of
this disturbance inside and outside the parish, I have no doubt. But
as I look back over the years, I also have no doubt that there was
something much more fundamental here, at the heart of the trouble.
That I was a heretic on the social question was insignificant, for
Unitarians have long since learned not only to tolerate but to
respect their heretics. What was infinitely more important, as I now
see, was the fact that unconsciously through these years, I was
coming to question not the church itself, as I have explained, but
the whole order and purpose of the church as it now exists. Every
ecclesiastical institution today is denominational in character. It
belongs primarily to some particular sectarian body, and is pledged
to the service of this body. Sometimes the central body is narrow,
as in the case of the more orthodox Protestant denominations;
sometimes it is liberal, as in the case of the Unitarians and
Universalists. [11] But always there is a distinctive form of
organization, or type of ritual, or doctrine of belief, or spirit of
association, which binds these separate churches into a single
group; and always this distinctive feature is something which had
its origin, and still finds its vitality, in the thought and
experience of an earlier age. Every one of our denominations, and
every one of the churches in our denominations, is representative of
past controversies, not of present interests and duties. No one sect
can be distinguished from any other, except by a reference to the
text books of Christian history.
Now with the intrusion of the social question into religion, a new
concept of church organization came immediately to the fore. The
unit of fellowship was now no longer the denomination, but the
community. The centre of life and allegiance was no longer the
challenge of ancient controversy, but the cry of present day human
need. The more I became interested in questions of social change,
the less I was concerned with questions of denominational welfare.
The more I became absorbed in the people of New York City, the
closer became my fellowship with other ministers similarly absorbed,
and the remoter my fellowship with those who were bound to me only
by the accident of the Unitarian tradition. More and more my hand
and heart went out directly to men who saw and labored for the
better day of which I dreamed; and only indirectly to those with
whom I was appointed to serve, but who could not or would not catch
the vision of my dreams. An irreconcilable conflict was here being
joined--the old, old conflict between a dead and a living
fellowship. It was my intuitive, although unconscious knowledge of
this fact, which made me a rebel in every Unitarian gathering of the
last ten years. It was a similarly unconscious instinct of
self-preservation which taught my Unitarian brethren, to whom the
old association was still central, to resent the things I sought. We
had been born together, and we lived together; our past and our
present were joint possessions. But when we faced the future, we
divided; my [12] colleagues, many of them, were content with old,
familiar ways, while I sought new associations.
What was dimly felt in those days, was suddenly transformed into
something clearly seen by the impact of the Great War. If this
stupendous conflict has revealed anything in religion, it is that
the sectarian divisions of Christendom are no longer to be
tolerated. In the fusing fires of battle, Presbyterian, Methodist,
Episcopalian, Unitarian, even Catholic, Protestant and Jew, have
been melted, and now flow in a single flaming stream into the mould
which shall fashion them into a single casting. Man after man has
returned from the front, to tell us that the denominational church
is dead. A new ordering of Christendom is at hand. The unit of
organization will be not the one belief, nor even the one spirit,
but the one field of service. Not the sect, but the community, will
be the nucleus of integration. We will have groupings not of
Methodist churches, and Baptist churches, and Unitarian churches, to
remind the world of ancient differences, but of New York churches,
and Boston churches, and San Francisco churches, to teach the world
of present needs and future hopes. Our churches will be related as
the wards in a city are related, or the cities in a state, or the
states in the nation. We shall be all Christians together, as we are
all Americans together. We shall have different religious ideas as
we have different political ideas. But we shall be organized
religiously, as well as politically, in a single community. Our
churches, like our schools, will be the possession, and the resort,
of all!
This vision of the church as a community, or civic centre, is the
logical application of socialized religion. It is no accident that
together these two things have captured my life. For a moment, just
as the idea of the social question set me thinking of leaving the
church altogether, so this idea of the community church set me
thinking of leaving this church and organizing in this city an
independent religious movement. Indeed, this latter thought has been
something more than a [13] momentary temptation. To have a church
has been with me from the beginning a necessity. To have a church of
the new community order has become a great desire. Last spring I
seriously considered presenting to you my resignation, that I might
enter upon the fulfillment of this hope. Last summer I pretty
definitely made up my mind to lay this problem and prospect before
you, as soon as peace should come, and the distractions of war be
gone. Then, at the very moment when peace came, as though to
anticipate and thus forestall my decision, there came the call from
Chicago.
Most of you know what Abraham Lincoln Centre is, and many of you by
what pioneer devotion this church of the future was fashioned out of
a traditional church of the past. It is not perfect; in some ways it
is already itself became traditional again. But it stands today as a
more complete embodiment of what I feel a modern church should be
than any other institution of which I know in America. The
invitation from the people seemed to me an instant bestowal of all
for which I seek. I do not think I could have resisted this call to
service, had it not been for your rightful claims of loyalty and
affection, and my own reluctance to abandon the project of
accomplishing my desires in New York. These considerations made me
hesitate--and while I hesitated, I thought. Why should I turn
elsewhere for the fulfillment of hopes which may be as surely if not
as swiftly realized here? Why should I undertake to build an
independent church in this city, or accept the leadership of a
church however remarkably developed in Chicago, when the Church of
the Messiah, pledged to freedom, and long committed to the idea of
progress, lies ready to my hand? Why should I seek the easy
inheritance of another man's completed work, and thus avoid the hard
labor of building an institution of my own, which, for that reason
alone, would be moulded nearer to my heart's desire? Above all, why
should I assume that my people who have loved and sustained me these
dozen years, are unwilling to move on with me in comradeship [14] to
the new pathways of the new world which we have entered, or by what
right make decision involving my future ministry here or elsewhere,
without taking them fully into my confidence and searching the
utmost temper of their minds? These were the questions which came to
me promptly on the receipt of the Chicago call. Should I undertake
to organize an independent church in New York, should I go to
Chicago as minister of All Souls' Church and Director of Abraham
Lincoln Centre, should I stay here as minister of this Church of the
Messiah--this was my problem. I could not solve it, with fairness to
myself or to you, until you had spoken. Hence, the meeting of last
Monday night, called by the helpful co-operation of the Board of
Trustees, and attended largely by our people.