Month: March 2024

Throughout the season of Lent, we talked about listening to the heart of God through a better understanding of Celtic spirituality. The celts of the British Isles believed God could be found in anything and anyone, that God was all around us. God comes to us.

As Christians, we believe God most profoundly comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. But people killed God among us. We often destroy what is good and what is beautiful and who tells us the truth. We celebrate Easter because that doesn’t keep God from remaining with us, coming back to us again in human form. Easter is finding God even in death… and therefore finding love and life even in death. On Easter the veil is torn between life and death, just as the curtain in the temple was torn on Good Friday. The veil is torn, the boundary is broken, and Jesus comes back—to life, in life, with life for all. 

The early Celtic people who lived in the British Isles believed that you could go to certain places to be closer to God. These places have long been called “thin places.” Thin places are geographic locations scattered throughout Ireland and Scotland where a person experiences only a very thin divide between the past, present, and future — even between worlds, between earth and heaven. These places spoke of meeting, of transitions from one state to another, “where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer you can almost step through.”

Have you ever experienced a thin place? The Isle of Iona, where St. Columba set up a monastery, which we’ll talk more about next week, is said to be a thin place. I found Glendalough, another monastic community south of Dublin, Ireland, to be a thin place, and Inchcolm Island in the middle of the Firth of Forth, within view of Edinburgh.  But I’ve also experienced them in the mountains of Colorado and a stream in the Adirondacks. 

Easter morning is a thin place. Our natural and ordinary world comes close to God this Sunday morning. Two thousand years ago, in ancient Israel, the tomb for a renegade prophet became a thin place. When Jesus was laid in that tomb, his friends and his family, his followers and lovers and devotees, were distraught. It appeared that hope was lost. 

So many of our weak hopes go unfulfilled. The death of those hopes is one of the most common of human experiences. But there is another hope.

On the morning of the resurrection, at the edge of night and day, at the edge of despair, in the thin place that we call dawn, God delivers hope. God says, “I have known the suffering and pain of the world, because I have known them in Jesus the Christ. I have buried that suffering and death in the grave, and I have caused a new life to arise.”

The thin place of Easter proclaims death is not the victor. We are not forever lost. God loves us too much to let death keep us from God. 

May you be drawn into resurrection hope and life this Sunday morning and every morning. May you see the life and love of God at work in the world. May you feel God’s presence in all and through all. And may the Kingdom of God come closer in and through you. 

In the early 1700s, religion was in decline in the British Atlantic world. Two centuries of near-constant religious warfare and intellectual and emotional conflict over the right way to worship and know God left Europe bloodied and exhausted in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. As scientific understanding grew, many people wondered if religion was merely a harmful superstition that could be left in the past. 

The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening

The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, emerged partly from this disillusion with religion. In longer estimates, this era lasted from 1680-1820, a period known as the Long Eighteenth Century. Working from a generally secular mindset, Enlightenment thinkers valued rational thought and logic and developed systematic processes for organizing knowledge and understanding the world. 

Theologians (especially those based at major universities) were not immune to the influence of the Enlightenment. During this time, the Protestant religious experience became more institutional and less personal. This perhaps suited those disposed to systematic study, but it proved less popular with the people in the pews and church attendance dropped.

Partly in response to the Enlightenment, a religious revival called the Great Awakening swept the British Atlantic world in the 1730s and 1740s. The Great Awakening was characterized by revivals in which charismatic itinerant preachers worked attendees into an emotional fervor leading to an awareness of personal sinfulness and need of salvation to escape eternal damnation. Great Awakening preachers emphasized the need for a personal, often emotional, conversion experience and a personal relationship with God and downplayed the importance of religious institutions.

It’s tempting to think of the Enlightenment as a secular movement and the Great Awakening as a religious movement. However, that ignores the complexity of the times and the personalities involved, especially among Presbyterians, as the traditional Presbyterian emphasis on education required clergy to undergo rigorous academic training, typically at institutions steeped in the values of the Enlightenment.

Presbyterians had long regarded formal study and its resulting knowledge to be both the primary qualifications for ministers and the primary path to knowing God. At the time of the Great Awakening, ordination required education at a divinity school and subscription to the Westminster Confession. Presbyterian ministers could receive training at the University of Edinburgh, and later at Harvard or Yale. Most Presbyterian ministers in North America either emigrated directly from Scotland or Ulster or traveled there for their education. Even an education at Harvard or Yale removed potential clergy members to New England, far from the centers of Presbyterian population in the Mid-Atlantic colonies.

The Old Light/New Light Schism

Under these conditions, it’s not surprising that fully qualified Presbyterian ministers were scarce in the colonial backcountry, where Scots-Irish Presbyterian communities pressed against the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia. The lack of called pastors left many pulpits open to itinerant preachers. These men often had not met the requirements for ordination or received permission from the local presbytery to preach to congregations under its care, and they generally preached the gospel according to the Great Awakening.

Predictably, conflict arose, not only among the Presbyterians but among all Protestant denominations in North America. Those members of the clergy and the laity who continued to hold study and knowledge as the primary way to know God and who continued to value the corporate nature of the church and the processes of the institution became known as “Old Lights.” On the other hand, “New Lights” believed that knowledge of God was revealed by the Holy Spirit through a personal conversion experience that saved the converted person’s immortal soul. They privileged the personal relationship with God over participation in a religious community.

In the battle for hearts and minds, Old Lights favored the mind, while New Lights favored the heart. Both clergymen and congregations took sides. (Sometimes the conflict is referred to as “Old Side” and “New Side.”) Each group bitterly accused the other of leading people astray.

In 1741, the year Derry Church acquired a land grant from Thomas and Richard Penn, the Synod of Philadelphia broke into Old Light and New Light factions, and a slim majority of Old Lights managed to evict the New Lights from the synod. (Moderates, perhaps uncomfortable with the way the eviction played out, chose to depart with the New Lights.) The conflict centered on two issues: itinerant preaching and ministerial qualifications. If that sounds dull, the personalities involved were anything but. Marilyn Westerkamp writes, “An outsider might well think that this reasonably small population and geography could have been managed by a single synod, but such an observer would be forgetting the large personalities involved—personalities too vibrant, too doctrinaire, too righteous, to govern themselves together” (3).

One of those personalities belonged to William Tennant, Sr., who arrived from Ireland in 1718. Within ten years, he opened a small, informal school that offered the only training for Presbyterian ministers south of New England. Scoffed at as the “Log College” by those who doubted its ability to produce qualified ministers, Tennant’s school emphasized New Light values. Filled with their mentor’s evangelical piety, Tennant’s students often preached outside their own jurisdictions, sometimes even preaching to congregations with called pastors. 

In another blow for the Old Lights, by the 1730s, pastors who were unable to secure calls in Scotland and Ireland looked to the North American frontier for positions. From an Old Light point of view, both these circumstances meant that unqualified pastors were able to gain membership in presbyteries, where they exercised the same amount of power as anyone else. In other words, the vote of a graduate of the Log College counted the same as the vote of a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. These were the major issues at play in 1741. 

Nor were these issues confined to Presbyterians. Across British Colonial America, clergy and congregations of all denominations self-identified as Old Light or New Light and reached across congregational and even denominational lines to align with those who shared their beliefs.

In Derry’s own Presbytery of Donegal, almost every congregation either left the presbytery entirely or split along Old Light-New Light lines. Derry Church experienced its own schism in these years. As the battle between Old Lights and New Lights was largely a battle between strong personalities, the dates of Derry’s schism indicate that something similar happened here. 

Derry Church’s Schism

In 1741, Derry’s first called pastor was in the ninth year of a “harmonious and spiritually profitable” tenure (“Reverend William Bertram”). Derry Church was lucky to get William Bertram. In many ways, Bertram seems to have been the ideal Presbyterian minister for his era. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and served in Ulster for many years before immigrating to North America for personal reasons. He had a long career prior to the upheaval of the Great Awakening, and perhaps he served as a stabilizing force. However, the fact that his salary was not always paid suggests disagreement, if not outright dissension, with church leadership. Lawsuits of the era indicate that the laity were known to withhold salaries in an attempt to control clergy. In any case, while Bertram was alive, Derry mostly weathered the schism in the larger church. Still, as early as 1745, Derry’s New Light faction attempted to bring in an energetic, talented young preacher newly arrived in the Susquehanna Valley.

Upon Bertram’s death in 1746, the New Light majority at Derry Church called John Roan. Roan could not have been more different from Bertram. For a start, he was 43 years younger and of a different generation and mindset. His early training as a weaver also indicates a class division. Born in Ulster in 1717, he immigrated to Pennsylvania in his early twenties. He received his training at William Tennant’s Log College and earned a reputation as a troublemaking preacher in Virginia before arriving in the Presbytery of Donegal.

During Roan’s tenure, Derry became a solidly New Light congregation. The Old Light minority left to join an Old Light majority at Paxton Presbyterian Church, which had been served by John Elder since 1738, after an overworked Bertram asked to be relieved of his duties to that congregation in 1736. Like Bertram, Elder was born in Edinburgh and educated at the University of Edinburgh and had emigrated to join family members. Roan served several local New Light congregations, including Derry, until his death in 1775. Synod records indicate that Roan’s career was marked by “points of difficulty” (“Reverend John Roan”). He appears to have been a polarizing figure, and he left all the congregations he served with deep debts.

Reconciliation

The actual divisions between Old Light and New Light clergy were never as deep as they appeared, or as their impassioned preaching must have had their congregations believe. While there were extremists on both sides, a strong contingent of moderates remained, and they served as peacemakers who succeeded in bringing the estranged factions together only 17 years after their initial split. Reconciliation came as tempers cooled, as some incalcitrant personalities joined the church triumphant, as some New Light ministers became alarmed by the extent of the emotional piety they had unleashed among the laity, and as some Old Light ministers found themselves able to compromise.

The Synod of New York and Philadelphia’s Plan of Union of 1758 attempted to address the issues of ministerial qualifications and itinerant preaching that split the Presbyterians in 1741. Some of its major points are familiar to us today:

• Candidates for ministry must produce evidence of education and theological knowledge as well as an experience of personal salvation through grace.
• Clergy must not attack each other publicly but follow the appropriate disciplinary process if they feel a colleague is in error.
• Clergy must ask permission of the called pastor or the presbytery (in case of a vacancy) before preaching outside their own congregations.

Finally, the Plan of Union affirmed the Great Awakening as “a gracious work of God, even tho’ it should be attended with unusual bodily commotions…whenever religious Appearances are attended with the good Effects above mentioned, we desire to rejoice in and thank God for them.” (Synod of New York and Philadelphia qtd. in Westerkamp 15).

Perhaps the most significant indicator of reconciliation was the recognition, upon reunion in 1758, of both sides of the schism of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) as an acceptable location for ministerial education. Founded by New Lights in 1747, that institution’s first decades were marked by instability. However, with the recruitment of Jonathan Witherspoon in 1768, the Presbyterians finally had a leader of national prominence who could serve as a unifying symbol as the head of a respected educational institution located in the heart of North American Presbyterianism.

Derry Church experienced its own reconciliation. Upon the death of John Roan in 1775, Derry called John Elder. Thirty years after the churches along the Swatara split into Old Light and New Light congregations, they reunited. John Elder served as pastor of both churches until his retirement in 1791. For another century, Paxton and Derry would frequently be served by the same pastor.

Division has always been a part of Presbyterian—and American—life and history. As we live through our own era of deep division, may it encourage us to know that reconciliation is also part of our story.

Bibliography

Fea, John. “In Search of Unity: Presbyterians in the Wake of the First Great Awakening.” The Journal of Presbyterian History (1997-) 86, no. 2 (2008): 53–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23338196.

“Reverend John Elder (1706-1792)” Church Timeline. Derry Presbyterian Church (USA). 2024. https://www.derrypres.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Elder.pdf

“Reverend John Roan (1717-1775).” Church Timeline. Derry Presbyterian Church (USA). 2024. https://www.derrypres.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Roan.pdf

“Reverend William Bertram (1674-1746).” Church Timeline. Derry Presbyterian Church (USA). 2024. https://www.derrypres.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Bertram.pdf

Synod of New York and Philadelphia, Minutes, 22 May 1758, printed in Klett, ed., Minutes of the Presbyterian Church, 340-43, citation, 342.

Westerkamp, Marilyn. “Division, Dissension, and Compromise: The Presbyterian Church during the Great Awakening.” The Journal of Presbyterian History (1997-) 78, no. 1 (2000): 3–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23335294.

Just as an oak tree grows from a small, sprouted acorn to an enormous, sturdy tree, our church has rooted and grown into the vibrant, healthy family of faith that we know today. I invite you to our hymn festival commemorating the 300th anniversary of Derry Presbyterian Church on March 17 at 4:00 pm. The Sanctuary Choir and Derry Ringers will sing and ring the great hymns of faith in celebration of our rich history.

Under the direction of acclaimed conductor, Linda L. Tedford, we will sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs that have been published in every Presbyterian hymnal dating from the 1551 Genevan Psalter until the present Glory to God hymnal, which we currently use. Our Sanctuary walls will resonate with the joyous sounds of a full orchestra, including brass, strings, woodwinds, percussion, our mighty Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ, and the Lee Ann Taylor Memorial Steinway and Sons Concert Grand Piano.

We begin our concert giving thanks for Almighty God’s divine providence as the choir processes in with Tom Trenney’s setting of Earth and All Stars, and the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune, arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams, for choir, brass, organ, and timpani.  From the Genevan Psalter of 1551, we sing I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art, often attributed to John Calvin, and more commonly known as Lord of All Good. We pray that God will be glorified through musical pillars, such as How Firm a Foundation, Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty, Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah, and A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

Modern lyricist and hymn writer David Gambrell commissioned a new text in honor of Derry’s tri-centennial to the Irish folk tune, Londonderry Air, entitled In Jesus Christ There is a New Creation. Our choir is honored to share this new hymn in its world premiere. In keeping with our Celtic roots, we are led to sing Be Thou My Vision, set to the traditional Irish tune, Slane.

Derry Ringers will envelop you with the sounds of bronze as they present Te Deum Laudamus, a riveting setting by Cathy Moklebust, and Crown Him with Many Crowns, elegantly arranged by D. Linda McKechnie. Other choral works featured are Allen Pote’s beautiful arrangement of The Lord is My Shepherd, and American composer Aaron Copland’s interpretation of the spiritual Shall We Gather at the River. The choir will conclude the program with John Rutter’s benediction, The Lord Bless You and Keep You.

I invite you to join us under the oaks for an afternoon of worship-filled hymn singing, as we glimpse the pages of our history through songs of faith and stories of our founders.  Let us worship together through music and the spoken word, giving thanks to God for 300 years of ministry on these sacred grounds.

Editor’s Note: On the first Thursday of each month, the eNews feature article highlights the mission focus for the month. In March we’re lifting up the One Great Hour of Sharing offering. 

Millions of people around the world lack adequate housing, clean water, sustainable food sources, education, and the opportunity to manage their own affairs. For 75 years the Presbyterian Church (USA) has come together in the season of Lent to support the One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS) and to help improve the lives of people and communities struggling to overcome these challenges. The OGHS Offering at Derry is shared equally with three programs administered by PCUSA and Bridges to Community (BTC), a non-profit organization with long ties to Derry, who are building homes in the Dominican Republic. 

The three PCUSA programs supported by OGHS are: Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Self-Development of People and the Presbyterian Hunger Program. 

PRESBYTERIAN DISASTER ASSISTANCE (PDA) is well-known for its rapid response to national and international disasters by supplying funds to help initiate the recovery process. Through its long-term partnerships with several Middle East church councils, PDA has been able to respond to the recent earthquakes in Syria and Turkey and humanitarian needs in the Ukraine and Israel and Palestine.  

PRESBYTERIAN HUNGER PROGRAM (PHP) is working to alleviate hunger and eliminate the root causes. Some of this is accomplished through providing animals, bees, and seeds, promoting better crop selection and agricultural methods, fair trade practices, and family gardens. PHP also seeks to supply better and more nutritional foods, secure loans for income-producing projects, tree planting, establish wells for clean water, and sanitation systems, as well as addressing labor and environmental pollution issues. 

SELF-DEVELOPMENT OF PEOPLE (SDOP) works in partnership with people in low-income communities in the United States and around the world to overcome oppression and injustice. The aim is to invest in communities responding to their own challenges of oppression, poverty and injustice, thus helping them to develop solutions to their particular problems in areas such as youth-led activities, disabilities, farming, skills development, and immigration/refugee issues.  

Derry has been involved with Bridges to Community since its founding more than 30 years ago, in building new homes in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic and providing Bible school activities for the community. In June we will return to the Dominican Republic to help build a house for a needy family. By working with the family, local masons, and community members, a safe and secure house can be completed in about one week. Additionally, with the BTC model, new homeowners are encouraged to pay into their local community fund, which can then be used by the community at their discretion for selected improvement projects. 

The Mission and Peace Committee has set a goal of $19,000 for this year’s OGHS Offering. You may give online or by check payable to Derry Church and notated OGHS. Place it in one of the OGHS envelopes available in the pew racks, and drop the envelope in an offering box. Taken together, your contributions to the OGHS Offering, with our goal of $19,000, will enable both PCUSA and BTC to assist many needy people with the opportunity to improve their quality of life. Thank you, Derry, for your generous support!