Tag: churches

The Lydster, Part 95: A Good Heart, for Jamaica

Donations to the project came from all different sources including a generous, heartfelt gift from Lydia who had saved several months of her spending money because she felt ‘all children should have a safe school’

The Moses Baker Basic School in Golden Grove, Jamaica is in one of the poorest communities in a poor country. My mother-in-law writes: “The previous building was a wooden structure which was in bad condition, made even worse each time it was blown apart by hurricanes.” Her church in Oneonta, NY “had been sending teams down each summer [since 2000] to do projects in the community,” first working on getting the health center up to snuff, then repairing the preschool for about 80 kids. “No sooner were the repairs completed each year a storm blew through more than undoing all of the work. The residents picked up the pieces and put them back on as best they could.

Finally, the church decided to postpone the annual trips to save up some money to build a school strong enough to withstand severe storms, made of “rebar reinforced concrete… The old ‘building’ was torn down as soon as school ended in June 2011.

“The new construction started immediately in order to be completed in time for school in September 2011.” Info about the construction can be seen here. The Oneonta church pastor and her husband, an RN, went down last month to dedicate the building. The church had “raised about $70,000 for the project and, as the community wanted, built a strong building which could have a second story added at some time in the future if needed. The people were ecstatic, not only for the building but that the [pastor] had come since they have no pastor at present. But there is more to the story.

“Donations to the project came from all different sources including a generous, heartfelt gift from [her granddaughter, my daughter] Lydia who had saved several months of her spending money because she felt ‘all children should have a safe school’….” When she and my wife went to a clothing consignment shop to sell some clothes, Lydia was told that the money gleaned from the sale of her clothes could be spent by her. But she opted to donate this money to the Jamaica project as well.

Then, “the sugar company which has a monopoly on selling the area’s sugar had to return [some] money to Jamaica, and the decision-making group heard about this school. The company is giving $65,000 to build a needed retaining wall around the school and to further finish the school construction. In addition, they plan to give about $75,000 to the health center for community needs. Amazing! “

No Time

post I wrote about murderabilia in this blog some time ago is scheduled to appear in the newsletter of the New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NYADP) this spring,

I found that this past week or so, I’ve had no free writing time to post to this blog. Part of it was self-inflicted. I saw parts of four football games this past weekend, though I did record them all and fast-forwarded through a lot of them – GO, NEW YORK GIANTS! (The key to pulling that off without accidentally getting the scores is to avoid all media – standard, such as TV and radio, as well as social, such as e-mail and Twitter.)

I also saw two movies with my wife last weekend, including a Golden Globe winner, and read one book (THAT book, Jaquandor), none of which I’ve had time to review. I had an article due for my church’s newsletter. I am also the compiler of a sermon evaluation team, which is part of one of my pastor’s educational requirements.

So I got nothing. Well, you could read my current Flashmob Fridays post about Cleveland, a posthumous book by Harvey Pekar, or the previous posts about Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes or The Survivalist by Box Brown.

Or you can read about my takes on:
No more savings bonds of the paper variety
The Internet piracy bills SOPA and PIPA
Going bald
Why the Postal Service is REALLY going broke

Lefty Brown, who was one of the very first bloggers I followed even before I was writing myself, is blogging again, after a 5+ year hiatus. He’s been doing The Married Gamers with his wife Kelly – I am not a gamer – but now he’s back with his own musings. And he answers some of my questions. (Should be ‘believe,’ not ‘belief.’)

I should note that ABC Wednesday is starting up again (psst, at the letter A) and it’s not too late to join. Though, in fact, you don’t HAVE to start with A. (I started with K.)

Here’s something that’s interesting to me. A post I wrote about murderabilia in this blog some time ago is scheduled to appear in the newsletter of the New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NYADP) this spring, augmented by an interview with me. And another piece about the death penalty may appear in a later issue.

(Had to post this picture, sent to me, as one of the best examples of constantly wrong spelling I have ever seen.)

H is for (Methodist) Hymnals

I don’t know how many of those hymns were meant to be sung, because – I neglected to mention – there is no music in the book, only lyrics! Evidently, “everybody” already knew the tunes.


When I was growing up at Trinity A.M.E. Zion Church in Binghamton, NY in the 1960s, we used a hymnal that looked exactly like this. (A.M.E. stands for African Methodist Episcopal.) The first hymn was Holy, Holy, Holy [listen], and when I was younger, I mistakenly believed that the phrase “Blessed Trinity” was a reference to my church, rather than to the preceding phrase, “God in three persons.”

The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) initiated the process of creating a new hymnal in 1928, with Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MEC,S) joining in 1930, and the Methodist Protestant Church (MPC) soon thereafter. The hymnal has a 1932 original copyright date. Not incidentally, “The Methodist Church was the name adopted by the Methodist denomination formed in the US by the reunion on May 10, 1939, of the northern and southern factions of the MEC with the MPC”, the three entities that had created the hymnal. Ironically, since the split within the MEC had arisen over 19th-century treatment of blacks, the newly-formed Methodist Church created a segregated entity known as the Central Jurisdiction as a compromise.

Still, the hymnal was of such quality that the black Methodist churches (A.M.E., A.M.E. Zion, C.M.E., and others) often adopted it.

But once the United Methodist Church was created in 1968 by the union of The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, getting rid of the Central Jurisdiction, I suppose the powers that be decided that the UMC needed a hymnal of its own.

When I started attending the United Methodist Church in Albany in the mid-1980s, coincidentally also called Trinity, they were using a different hymnal (the red one). Still, many of the congregants at that time referred to the hymnal I grew up with as the “real Methodist hymnal,” such was the universality of its use, due to the quality of its structure of the Christian life.

Still, the black hymnal may not be my favorite. That title might fall to the one pictured below; the one to the left looks more like mine, in terms of condition. It has an 1849 copyright date. In the mid-1980s, my girlfriend at the time bought it for me for the handsome sum of $2.50. It has a LOT of hymns by Charles Wesley, many more than in subsequent iterations, starting with O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing [listen] on the first page, and including Hark! the Herald Angels Sing and Christ, the Lord, is Risen Today, plus a whole bunch with which I am not familiar.


And I don’t know how many of those hymns were meant to be sung, because – I neglected to mention – there is no music in the book, only lyrics! Evidently, “everybody” already knew the tunes.

It too had a structure, but in addition to those in the 1932 hymnal, it also included Duties & Trials, and Humiliation. Fun stuff!

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Roger Answers Your Questions, Tom the Mayor and Jaquandor

Presbyterians are much more deliberative than Methodists.

Jaquandor, the Buffalo area’s finest blogger, asks:

1. Are there any words you dislike, just because of the sound of them and not necessarily the meaning?

Used to be that German words I tended to dislike as too guttural. The K sound would get stuck on the roof of my mouth. But I’ve mellowed, and nothing immediately comes to mind.

2. Are there any subjects you really want to know more about and yet never seem to get around to learning about?

Oh, yeah, dozens, everything from various sciences, such as astronomy and botany; to languages, which I do not seem to have a talent for, starting with Spanish and Latin. But I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I probably won’t do anything about it unless I give up something else, and evidently, I’m not willing to do that.

3. Are you surprised that gay marriage passed in New York? (I am, a little….)

Heck, yeah. It failed miserably some 600 days earlier when the State Senate was controlled by the Democrats. OK, “controlled” is probably an overstatement, since it was pretty chaotic. The last two governors supported it, and it didn’t matter. And it passes with a Republican-controlled Senate? More like shocked.
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Tom the Mayor, once a mail order whiz at FantaCo, among other attributes, asks:

Are all the members of your church as Liberal as you are? could you be a good Christian, yet disagree with the beliefs of your church’s leaders?

Tom asks simple questions which I will complicate in answering.

Somehow, as a result of singing in my old church choir at my grandmother’s funeral in May 1983, it got me to decide to start attending church again, after more than a decade of mostly not going. But I couldn’t just go back to a church like the one from my childhood, which I loved then, but found that my theological development was not in tune with that church’s theological positions.

So I went church shopping.

When I first attended Trinity United Methodist Church, it was June 13, 1982. I remember this quite well because the day before, I was at an anti-nuke rally in New York City. The minister, the late Stan Moore, said something quite positive about the rally in his sermon, and this endeared him, and the church, to me. While the shopping continued for some months, I decided I wanted to be there by the end of the year, though I didn’t actually join until December 1984.

In that congregation, I did have leadership roles, first as vice-chair, then chair of the Administrative Board, which was the church’s meeting of the whole, then chair of the Council on Ministries, which was the chairs of the major service committees. I left, not because of theology, but autocracy, involving a change in church structure under a subsequent minister which made it less accountable to the congregation.

I started attending First Presbyterian in the spring of 2000 and joined in 2002. At some point, I was an elder there, but didn’t enjoy it; I think I’m all meetinged out.

So to your actual question: if by the church, you mean the congregation, most of them are as liberal as I am, though by no means all of them. I remember having a conversation with one of them at the (late) YMCA, where you used to work. He mentioned that one of the Clintons, Bill or Hillary, was having a book come out, and he, who reads the New York Post, a conservative tabloid, every day, said he was sure that I would be buying the book from that “liberal”. I surprised him by stating that I didn’t think the Clintons were liberal at all.

If you mean the Presbyterian Church USA, our congregation is definitely more liberal than some. But of course, this depends on your meaning of liberal. If feeding the hungry, clothing the needy is “liberal”, then it’s almost the whole denomination that is liberal. If it’s something such as the role of gays in the life of the church, the Albany Presbytery, which represents our church, is more progressive than others. But given the fact that the PCUSA denomination in 1997 created MORE restrictive language re participation of gays as ministers, elders, and deacons, then in May 2011 agreed to less restrictive language, not many people bolted the church when either event occurred.

Presbyterians are much more deliberative than Methodists. The fact that our Presbytery was at odds – no, too harsh, disagreed – with the PCUSA on gay ordination for over a decade was surprisingly not a big deal.

Oh, one other thing: I wanted Trinity UMC to take more of a stand on gay rights issues when I was involved there in the 1990s. It was downplayed because the church had “made a proclamation” back in 1979 or 1975, or whenever, which preceded my tenure there, and that seemed, to some, to be enough. So it’s not just a matter of beliefs; it’s acting on the beliefs, regularly. My current congregation participates in the Gay Pride parade annually, with our rainbow tapestry hanging from the bell tower as well as over the entrance, as an ongoing, living, breathing statement of faith.

Did I actually answer the question?

Presbyterian Church allows gay ordination

The votes reflect a shift in attitudes within the church, and within American society, as public attitudes against homosexuality have softened.


I knew that the vote was coming, but I didn’t know what the outcome until I saw the news stories about the Presbyterian church allowing gays to serve as ministers and lay leaders:

“A debate that has raged within the Presbyterian Church for more than three decades culminated Tuesday with ratification of a measure allowing the ordination of gay and lesbian ministers and lay leaders, while giving regional church bodies the ability to decide for themselves.

“With the vote of its regional organization in Minnesota, the Presbyterian Church USA became the fourth mainline Protestant church to allow gay ordination, following the Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran churches and the United Church of Christ.”

The MSNBC story actually gave the best description I saw of the process: “The change to the Presbyterian Church constitution was approved last summer by the church’s General Assembly, its governing body. But under church rules, such changes must then be ratified by a majority of the 173 regional organizations known as presbyteries.

“Late Tuesday, at a meeting in St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb, the Twin Cities Presbytery put the measure over the top with a vote of 205 to 56, becoming the 87th regional body to vote yes. About 90 minutes later, the Pacific Presbytery, representing parts of Southern California and all of Hawaii, added its voice, voting 102 to 60 in favor.

“It was the fourth time the church had voted on issues related to gay ordination, and the votes reflect a shift in attitudes within the church, and within American society, as public attitudes against homosexuality have softened. Since the last time the matter was brought to a vote, in 2008-09, some 19 presbyteries have switched their votes from ‘no’ to ‘yes,’ including some in relatively conservative parts of the country, such as central Nebraska and northern Alabama.”

The More Light Presbyterians, who have been working “for the full participation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of faith in the life, ministry and witness of the Presbyterian Church (USA),” explain the specific language.

I’m happy about the vote, but also relieved. Truth is that there have been a number of gay Presbyterian elders and deacons across the country. They or their congregations had been in technical violation of church polity and theoretically could have been brought up on charges, as has happened to some pastors in various Protestant denominations, though it would be unlikely to actually take place in the Presbyterian church without some additional issues involved.

Actually, I suppose it was more the theological disconnect, such as the Catholic church’s teachings on contraception versus poll after poll noting that about 70% of the church ignores the policy.

Here’s an article on this topic from 365gay.com
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A National Hockey League player for marriage equality.

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