An address given at the PFR Breakfast, 215^th General Assembly, Denver, Colorado, on May 28, 2003.

We were flying home from Canada into LaGuardia, my least favorite airport in the New York metropolitan area, because it requires driving through Manhattan on our way home to Princeton. One compensation, however, was the promise of a good nap in the car.

It was not to be. Our driver was in a loquacious mood and began philosophizing about the moral decline of America. He was an African American who had served with Douglas MacArthur during World War II, all the way from Australia back to the Philippines in fulfillment of the general’s promise, “I will return.”

The monologue ranged from the S&L bailouts to the deadly grip of the drug culture upon the white suburbs as well as the black ghettos. I was sitting in the back seat where I could see the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror. With deep sorrow he commented finally, “I will be seventy years old in September, and I am glad I do not have that much longer to live, for I think it’s over for us. I mean, I really think it’s over.” By that he meant, of course, that he believed the people of the United States had passed the point of no return in our moral degradation and that, accordingly, there was no hope for a better future.

Frankly, I hear that same mood of pessimism being expressed these days in our church. Many think it is over for us, that we too have passed the point of no return, and things are only going to get worse. Not that there are no reasons for concern. At every General Assembly for the past thirty-five years, we have heard our Stated Clerk report on our ever-decreasing membership. We have even come to celebrate those years in which our losses were less than the previous one.

With the membership loss has come the experience of marginalization. Presbyterians for the first hundred and fifty years in this country assumed a certain privileged social position. We became accustomed to speaking to the culture with authority. We expected others to care about what we thought on matters religious and political. Now we find ourselves being ignored. We are experiencing public neglect. Having been recognized as a mainline denomination for so long, it is painful to find our church relegated to the position of a “sideline” institution. The commissioners to this Assembly will devote much time and energy on social/political positions, but the sad truth is that our world no longer cares what we think. That is tough to take.

The reason for this marginalization, however, is not the result of membership decline. It is the result of something big that is going on in our social world. We have entered into the time of the “Posts”—Post-Christendom, Postmodernism, Postdenominationalism.

Surely it is clear to everyone by now that Christendom, the official or unofficial social recognition of Christianity as the religion of the state, is long gone.

Postmodernism refers to the demise in our intellectual culture of the Enlightenment vision of a universal Reason common to all people at all times in every place without regard to historical, cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender differences. If Rene Descartes were alive today and dared to say, “I think, therefore I am,” he would hear the Postmodernist rejoinder, “That’s what you think.”

As our social ethos continues to fragment under Postmodern preferences for the things that make us different, and under the pressures of the anti-institutional sympathies of the Boomers, the Busters, and the Gen-Xers, we hear a lot about ours being a Postdenominational age. And that is a downer.

Perhaps most troublesome and discouraging of all is the internal strife within our church as well as others. We Presbyterians have perfected the art of fighting over theology. Most recently we have had our shorts in a knot over someone asking at a Peacemaking event, “What’s the big deal about Jesus?” Now that is a good question. And it could have been answered quickly and simply by either the GAC or the next GA declaring, “Jesus is a big deal.” When you think about it, that is a very apt contemporary christological title, for according to the Scriptures and the confessions of our church, Jesus is a Big Deal.

Then there is also the elephant in our ecclesial house, the issue of human sexuality and ordination standards. In a recent book entitled Out of the Ruins of the Church, author R. R. Reno argues that in his Episcopal Church, the same argument is not about theology at all but about social status. He thinks that Episcopalians tend to be what David Brooks has called Bo-Bos (Bourgeois-Bohemians), people who want to enjoy the freedom of the sexual revolution spawned during the cultural revolution of the sixties and the social respectability associated with upper middle class society. Whatever the underlying cause, there is no question about this being a church-dividing issue that won’t seem to go away. And many are just sick and tired of fighting about it.

Now add to that the fight over polity. It is ironic that we Presbyterians settled the Modernist-Fundamentalist debate back in the thirties by deciding to find our denominational identity no longer in our confessional tradition but in our polity. The Book of Order, we declared, is what makes us Presbyterians. Now certain provisions in that constitutional document threaten to undo us.

So there is much to be upset about and discouraged over, and that is why we hear so many saying, “I think it is over for us.” But let me call your attention to the fact that this mood has biblical precedent.

I am thinking now of the mood of Israel when the people of God entered into Babylonian exile. You know the story, how 528 years before our Lord was born, the Babylonians came over the Judean hills, laid siege to Jerusalem, eventually breached its walls, destroyed the palace, burned the Temple, and carried off into captivity the king, the priesthood, and all of the other leadership of Israel.

Resettled as displaced persons in suburban Babylon, along with many other subjected nations, the question was “how to sing the Lord’s song in an alien land” (Psalm 137). In other words, how do you keep faith alive when it no longer enjoys the cultural support of the king and the priesthood? In those circumstances, I can hear the people of God moaning, “It’s over for us. I think it’s really over.” But at that point in time and in that place, God raised up a prophet to speak to the people of God, and you can read what he said in Isaiah 40–55.

Consider this one word from Isaiah 51:

“Hearken to me, you who pursue deliverance,
you who seek the Lord;
Look to the rock from which you were hewn,
and to the quarry from which you were digged.
Look to Abraham your father
and to Sarah who bore you” (verses 1–2).

This was not an invitation to look to the past, to the good old days, and to drown their sorrows in good old nostalgia. Abraham and Sarah were the original covenant partners with the God of Israel. They were the bearers of the divine promise that God would make of them a great nation and that through their progeny the nations of the whole world would be blessed. The prophetic message was simple: “If you remember the promise in the past, you may look to the future in hope.”

In truth, the Babylonian exile of Israel was merely episodic. It was a tough time, but not the end of it all. There was a future for the people of God in the providence and purpose of God.  We need to read our historical situation in the same way. What we are experiencing is not final but merely episodic. And amidst our mood of darkness there are wonderful signs of life and hope.

As president of Princeton Seminary for the past twenty years, I have preached in Presbyterian churches across the length and breadth of this great land. I have been a pulpit guest of congregations located in every conceivable demographic situation. I have been uptown, downtown, out-of-town. I have been in urban, suburban and country churches. And I can honestly tell you that in over 90% of those pulpits, you can stand there and palpably feel the energy in those congregations.

I’m thinking of an inner-city church in Philadelphia. The day the pastor of that church candidated some eleven years prior, there were eight people in the congregation. On that September Sunday, the sanctuary was full—and we were piped into the service by an African-American jazz bagpipe player.

Then there was the time I preached at the five Sunday worship services of the University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, three in the morning and two (count them!) at night. All five filled the 1,200-seat sanctuary. The 5:00 p.m. service was attended primarily by young marrieds and accompanied by a full Sunday School program. At the seven o’clock service, there were over a thousand collegians from the university across the street.

I could go on with other illustrations of the fact that not all of our congregations are in decline. There are many that are alive and well. And that is a sign to me that the Presbyterian way of being Christian is not outmoded.

Let me also say that I am not persuaded by the gloom-and-doom talk about the future of denominations. I am old enough to remember the predictions of the demise of congregations back in the sixties and seventies. When I went to Burlingame in 1968, I discovered that the long-range planning committee of the session had seriously proposed that the church sell off the parking lot and even the sanctuary, for it predicted that within ten years we would be worshiping in the chapel. Thank God that recommendation was tabled! For, thirty-five years later, the First Presbyterian Church of Burlingame remains a thriving and growing congregation.

So my counsel is not to take the predictions of the demise of denominations too seriously. My guess is that we will continue to recognize that we need each other to do things none of us can do alone.

And finally I would urge you not to be discouraged by the state of theology. There are many bright young theologians at work today, many of them Presbyterian, and they are taking our biblical and confessional traditions seriously while seeking to articulate the Christian faith anew in a changing world. At the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton (a think tank founded by my predecessor, Dr. James I. McCord), the brightest and the best of Christian theologians from around the world are coming to tackle the intellectual challenges that face us in our postmodern world. Research consultations are today working on such issues as Scripture and interpretation, the Jesus Seminar, and what it is that makes us uniquely human.

It was Professor Thomas F. Torrance of New College, Edinburgh, who once commented that the reason Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire in a brief four hundred years is that the Christians out-thought the pagans. They had better answers to life’s crucial questions. That is our task today, and I, for one, am encouraged by what I see happening.

Having begun with a story about a driver, let me now conclude with another. It is about a businessman who traveled to Washington, D.C., by train for a meeting. He arrived early and decided to use the morning to see the important sights. He hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him by all the government buildings and the monuments. So the cabby, delighted by the opportunity, drove him by the Capitol, the Senate and the House, the Supreme Court, the White House, the United States Post Office, the Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.

Running out of buildings he then drove this first-time visitor to the National Archives by the Capitol. The man noted the inscription on the plaque above the door: “WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE.” “I wonder what that means,” the visitor murmured. To which the cab driver replied, “That means, ‘Buddy, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.’”

I believe that applies to our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Not because I am by nature an American optimist, but because I am a believer in Jesus Christ and a member of his Church. When I look to Christ the Rock (1 Peter 2:4ff), the seed of Abraham and Sarah, I hear the promise of God from out of the past. And hearing that promise, I am compelled to look to the future in hope. In God’s purpose for our denomination, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”