As the old hymn Blessed Assurance goes, “This is my story. This is my song.” How beautiful a metaphor to understand our faith journey as a song.
Throughout this summer at Metro Baptist Church, groups have come to New York City to help lead a summer camp for children, many who live near the church in the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Each Sunday morning, Metro’s summer staff has led these groups in a devotion that uses the metaphor of a song to make sense of what they may experience in the coming week during their short immersion into New York’s city life.
Andrew Gardner
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This devotion centered upon Psalm 137 where the psalmist, dwelling on the Babylonian exile, asks the very genuine question, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?” While much can be said about this passage, this question served a very particular purpose for these church groups and even myself coming from the southeast to a very foreign part of the country. Since New York City is different from southeastern states, one must ask: How does one’s faith speak to this new, foreign location?
In the midst of this new context, one must be willing to make changes and adjustments to one’s faith or, keeping with the metaphor, one’s song. While we each have our own songs that we sing, they can often change tempo, change key or add harmonic elements. When introduced to a place like New York City, what better question to ask than how to sing the song of the Lord in this new place?
Our own individual songs, however, cannot be understood independently of the larger opus of the Christian narrative. We have not uncovered the revelation of Christ by ourselves, but we are indebted to the saints who have gone before us. We are indebted to the history of the Church.
Perhaps one of my favorite facets of the life of early 20th century Baptist minister Walter Rausch-enbusch was his love and passion for church history. After Rauschenbusch spent a number of years as the pastor of Second German Baptist Church in Hell’s Kitchen, he returned to his childhood home of Rochester, N.Y., in order to become a professor at Rochester Theological Seminary He was appointed professor of church history.
Rauschenbusch achieved this post at the age of 40, but he was not a trained historian. Instead, Rauschenbusch had experience as a minister and a social activist. He brought this experience with him to his new position in Rochester. Rauschenbusch’s social activism helped him read history from the perspective of identifying where the Kingdom of God was at work or not at work in society throughout the church’s historical stream. This was the open bias through which Rauschenbusch framed his historical inquiry.
According to biographer Christopher Evans, church history for Rauschenbusch was a practical discipline that provided a way for individuals and ministers to interpret as well as “reinterpret the timeless truths of the Bible.” In essence, the past provides a resource through which Christians can ask better questions about the present.
Rauschenbusch the church historian, however, didn’t write many historical treatises. His contributions resided in his methodological writings. In a 1907 article he wrote, “History is to the race what memory is to the individual. It can understand its present and forecast its future only in the measure in which it really comprehends its past. … The fundamental fact in the Christian revelation was that the Word became flesh. Therefore Truth became History. Christianity was first a single life, then a collective life, then a stream of historical influences, and always a healing and saving power.”
Our present, Rauschenbusch recognized, needs a robust understanding of our past. Our faiths are not isolated songs or independent stanzas of music. We find ourselves within God’s magnum opus of redemption.
In my final reflection from New York City, I cannot help but think that much like our individual faith journeys, the history of the church has many harmonies and many key changes, many notes and many tempo changes. As Christians, we must remember our history in order to know who and where we are. We are beloved daughters and sons of Jesus Christ, and we are embedded within a score of lived music — a score that requires us to continually ask how to sing God’s song in a foreign land.
Perhaps when we ask this question, we will turn to history and more appropriately turn “my” to “our” in order to sing, “This is our story. This is our song.”
Andrew Gardner ([email protected]), a student at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, spent the summer working at Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries, a social advocacy group affiliated with Metro Baptist Church in New York City.