A recent visitor to our sanctuary noticed something unusual. While viewing the two monuments listing the names of our past ministers and the years they served, she commented on a four-year gap between the ministries of John Hunt and Joseph Eckley. The Reverend John Hunt and John Bacon pastored Old South from 1771 to 1775. The Reverend Joseph Eckley did not begin his 32-year ministry at Old South until 1779.
Suppose Jesus of Nazareth were to arrive in Boston in the year 2025 and pause before the doors of Old South Church. Above him rise arches shaped by centuries of devotion. Stained glass gathers light and disperses it through a face that bears his name with luminous certainty, though not his complexion. Voices swell in English cadences he never spoke. The Trinity is articulated with philosophical symmetry. Incarnation is proclaimed with doctrinal clarity.
What is faith? What is our identity and what are we doing here? These questions have been circling in the back of my mind throughout my days at the Synod. Is this church?
The morning of January 14, 1697, was a special one in the life of the Old South Church in Boston. It was a day of fasting and prayer for several churches in the city, including Old South. As the Reverend Samuel Willard walked towards the pulpit at the beginning of the service, Old South member Judge Samuel Sewall passed him a note.
The first person who came up to me was a woman pushing a carriage with one-year-old twins. It seemed probable to me that she was not the little ones’ mother, but rather their care-taker. She smiled as I spoke to the children and offered a brief prayer, in lieu of the ashes, asking God’s blessing.
This journey of ours often takes us in new and challenging directions: a different slant on a text, a new life experience, another year added to our lives or, as Robert Frost would have it --- ‘divergent roads’ --- and we are off on a new and uncharted leg of that journey.
A peek into the preaching of Rev. Russell Henry Stafford.
The staff at the Congregational Library have long been stewards of the documents that tell the 355-year story of the Old South Church in Boston. Among Old South’s early treasures, you will find a record of Benjamin Franklin’s baptism at the Old South Church and a copy of Mary Norton’s deed that gifted our first members with the land that housed our first house of worship.
The Reverend Thomas Prince enjoyed a long, productive pastorate at the Old South Church. Called to Old South as our fifth senior minister, Prince served as a co-pastor with the Reverend Joseph Sewall from 1718-1758.
The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem’s stable is a wonderfully celebrative event. That is as it should be. It is what Christmas is all about. But I fear we have domesticated it and sanitized it way too much.