The church’s one foundation

Of faithfulness and pipes | JoAnn Shade

I

walked up the steps of a Methodist church with my husband on a recent Sunday. In the past, Sunday mornings found us in our own pulpit, but the change of roles to that of administrative duties within our denomination had made “specialling” now a possibility for us. So it was with anticipation and a bit of anxiety that we walked through the doors of that sanctuary, prepared to preach in a foreign pulpit. Well, at least foreign for my husband, whose only church experience has been The Salvation Army.

“Oh, this feels like home.” My first thoughts on entering the church took me back to my roots, growing up in a mainline church with the choir and organ, stained-glass windows and Presbyterian punch. As I looked around, I could almost see Mary and George Lane, Fern, Bud and Jane Wolf, the Miller sisters, Miss Mager and, of course, my Aunt Florence. Aunt Florence was quite a woman - bossy, determined, in-charge, with a zest for life that thrived despite the alcoholism that had invaded her home. My sister may carry her name as her middle name, but on my good days, I carry her spirit.

It was in Aunt Florence’s living room that my early gift for music was nurtured. Aunt Florence played the piano with little success, and she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but she loved music, and her teen-aged son was an accomplished pianist. And so it was that George began to teach a seven-year-old girl to coax simple melodies from the ebony and ivory of that old piano. And yes, my mother made me practice - thank you, Mom; those hours of forced servitude have led to a life-long love affair with eighty-eight keys.

That love affair took me next to Miss Wambsganz, an elderly German woman who sometimes called the girl with the bouncing braids “sonny,” but who drilled the rudiments of music into me, which provided the underpinnings for my ability to write the psalms, hymns and spiritual songs that I so love to create. Another teacher or two, and then finally the chance to take organ lessons, even being allowed to practice on that magnificent pipe organ in the church’s sanctuary. I would be the organist there one day, I dreamed, as I would ride my bike downtown, get the key from the secretary, and climb the steps to the choir loft, impatient to hear the breath of the tibia, and the majesty of the brass stops.

One day, one life-changing day, my organ teacher, soon to graduate from high school, turned to me and said, “Would you like a job playing the piano at a small church?” He had done it for a couple of years, but now he had to leave and wanted to find a replacement. As Paul Harvey would be sure to tell us, the rest of the story is that the small church was The Salvation Army, and for twenty-seven years I have served within its ranks as an ordained clergywoman and administrator. I have traded the strains of Bach and Handel for the drinking songs of nineteenth century London, and the haunting flutes of the pipe organ for the trombone of the street-corner brass band.

And so it was, on this Methodist Sunday, that as the organ began to lift up the notes of Aurelia, I found myself wiping tears from my eyes. It was, at first, a longing for home, for the liturgy and worship of my early years, for the peaked ceilings and the way the dust motes danced in the colored light of the stained-glass windows. Paul Stookey knew of those days; “Sunday morning, very bright, I read your book by colored light that came into the pretty window picture.”

Yet as we began to sing the words of this hymn, the naïve and nostalgic fifteen year-old girl was pushed out of the way by the weary, sorrowful fifty year-old woman. Samuel Stone’s words spoke truth:

The church’s one foundation
is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is his new creation
by water and the Word.
From heaven he came and sought her
to be his holy bride;
With his own blood he bought her,
and for her life he died.

Elect from every nation,
yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
one Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy name she blesses,
partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
with every grace endued.
Yet the words of the third verse rang true as well.

Though with a scornful wonder
we see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
by heresies distressed,
Yet saints their watch are keeping;
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.

I just finished a book that began with the question, “Why do women stay in the church, with its structures that subordinate women?” Or, I wonder, that shoot its wounded, male or female? Or that use power in ways that sin against its people? For it is not only the subordination of women that brings the tears to my eyes, nor the schisms or heresies, but more the day-to-day ways in which the church (and I) fail to honor Christ.

And yet we stay. We stand, the faithful believers of Christ, and we sing, with my Aunt Florence and the saints who came before her, “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.” We stay, because like Peter, we must answer the words of Jesus. “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:67-69, NRSV).

Does that mean that we must stay in one denomination, one church, or one seminary? No. There are times to move on, a “time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing,” as well as “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Ecc. 3). No magic formula as to when to stay and when to go, when to keep silence and when to speak. Only the steadfast Word of God, the stirrings of the Holy Spirit within, and the discernment of dear brothers and sisters in the faith.

In the end, I am glad for the tears. They remind me of the power of music, the legacy of the saints of God who have come before, and the tears of God. They take me back to what I believe, and why. And they give me courage to face the decisions of the coming months with grace and integrity, knowing that, as Madeleine L’Engle professes, “What God began, God will not abandon” (The Rock that is Higher, 260). And that, I pray, is enough for today.

Writer: Major JoAnn Shade, D. Min., serves along with her husband as a corps officer in Ashland, Ohio, USA. She is a corresponding member of the International Doctrine Council of The Salvation Army.

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