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St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, where I attended as an undergraduate, has the distinction of being the 3rd oldest college in this country having been founded in 1696. She has had many distinguished alumni with particular importance to our nation, including Francis Scott Key, author of our national anthem. There’s a lot to be proud of my alma mater, which I clearly am.
However, St. John’s almost didn’t survive. Throughout most of the college’s history, St. John’s had many financial issues, and it was thanks to the love of alumni that the school was able to weather these difficulties. That is, the college was able to until the Depression Era.
At this time, St. John’s president decided, against the advice of the faculty, to award a diploma to someone who was clearly not qualified. Thanks to his actions, St. John’s lost accreditation. That mixed with financial difficulties left St. John’s future in limbo.
At the same time, two men, Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr, were pioneering a new education program centered on reading and discussing the Great Books of Western Civilization. They started this idea as professors at the University of Virginia. It didn’t really catch on there. Next they went to the University of Chicago, where they had more success. They got other professors to support their idea, leading to a semblance of the Great Books Program that still exists at UChicago to this day and to many of us Johnnies considering UChicago a sister school to us. This is not to mention the Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books series published through UChicago.
Yet even with their successes at UChicago, Buchanan and Barr were still searching for a place to really cement their Great Books Program. St. John’s was also looking for something to get them re-accredited and out of financial difficulties, and the board thought Buchanan and Barr might be that solution.
It was a gamble. The Great Books Program was something completely different and new for St. John’s. It changed a lot of the life of the school, especially in the sports arena, of which I participated in one of the very few competitive sports we still have left as a fencer. Yet it was this willingness to change, and to do so dramatically, which saved St. John’s and made it so the college still exists today.
St. John’s still remains a school and an important part of American history. To do so, the school had to be willing to change completely into something new.
Now it’s worth noting that the Bible, with sections from the Prophets, is included in the St. John’s Program because Jeremiah speaks to this very change we have seen in the college. In our reading this morning, God turns the Jeremiah’s attention to a potter’s house. There Jeremiah sees the potter taking a vessel that is spoiled and reworking it into something better.
From the Lord’s own words, we hear that this is exactly what God will do with the house of Israel. God will take the nation, which is not serving the Lord very well in Jeremiah’s day to say the least, and rework and remake her into something new and beautiful. No longer will this kingdom fail to serve the Lord. Instead, this new vessel will worship God alone once again.
Now throughout my entire ministry I have heard an incredible amount of fear from parishes. There is concern that the church is dying and that we have to do something about it. Nevermind it would be much more accurate to say that the parish model of ministry is dying, declaring the church is dying is missing the point. If the church did, in fact, die, God would just remake us into something new and better, as we hear in Jeremiah.
Yet we never really have to fear that the church will ever truly die. The church isn’t made up of the stones and wood of our buildings. The church is constructed out of all of us who are willing to step up and proclaim the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ to the world. All it takes is one person to speak and another to listen.
The future of the church is to proclaim the Gospel. I wish I could say what form that will take. I honestly don’t know. My strong suspicion is that form will look very different than it does now. Like St. John’s College or even the vessel Jeremiah saw, I sense that God is working on us, or rather reworking us into something new. Even if all of our parishes, yours included, were forced to close our doors for whatever reason, it would not matter. All that matters is that in whatever form we take as the church, we are spreading the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. That will never change. That work will continue always, from now until the end of time. Don’t lose hope. No matter what happens to the church, no matter what happens to our individual parishes, our work, our purpose, will continue. Nothing else matters.