A great 'get-to' in my life: I was pastor of Gurley United Methodist Church from 1971 to 1974. From there, I commuted each week to seminary at Vanderbilt. To the right of the church was the pretty flagstone parsonage, the handiwork of their carpenter pastor, Rev. Jones, in the 1930's.

A couple blocks away, was the home of Mr. Mercer and Mrs. Johnnie Williamson. Up in their 70's, no children of their own, they were 'parental' with many, including their 23-year-old pastor.

A summer day in 1972, on his screened in front porch in the wicker rockers, Mr. Mercer and I talked about what had happened at Annual Conference. We ratified an action of the 1968 General Conference: merger between previously segregated white and Black conferences.. After heated debate in Munger Hall at Birmingham Southern, we voted to merge...it passed by one vote.

Mr. Mercer was upset. Not a mean bone in his body, still, he knew that an era of life had passed, one that had made sense to him and in which he had felt at home. In his dignified sonorous voice, he said, "Son, the Bible says the Israelites should not mix with other people, and we shouldn't either. But we've been Methodists all our lives and we're not going anywhere else now. We will do our best."

With the recent meeting of our United Methodist General Conference, there has been a lot of talk about how can we have unity when there is not unanimity about 'the' issue of our day. With the 2-year study our Bishops recommended and the GC adopted, I guess we have a sort of truce.

In his book NUDGE, Leonard Sweet quotes church historian Robert Wilken about our notion that the church once had a kind of golden unity to which we need somehow to return. "The apostolic age is a creation of the Christian imagination. There never was a Golden Age when the Church was whole, perfect, pure-virginal. The faith was not purer, the Christians not braver, the Church was not one and undivided." P. 72-73

That quote sent me to the Morgan Archive Vault of Non-Digitalized Stuff...also known as the books and files closeted in my study. There I found an off the top of my head list I did some years ago entitled AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF WHAT CHRISTIANS HAVE FOUGHT ABOUT... Across time Christians have argued, had councils and synods, had wars and splits, stopped speaking to each other and taken one another off their Christmas card lists for all sorts of reasons.

Our Christian movement began with the controversy over Jewish and Gentile Christians, settled in Acts 15, celebrated by Paul in the above Galatians quote. NOTE: they had to sort and discern what their tradition had taught, the 'Bible' of their day. What had been 'timely', they now discerned the 'timeless' Spirit of Christ was moving them beyond.

The popular attempt to call one's view Biblical and the other guys' view a cultural/ 'social' issue doesn't work, at least not for long. It IS Biblical, when with honesty, courage and humility we try to discern the Spirit's movement, that never takes us back to a place we have been, but always takes us to a place we have not yet been.

Good news and bad news. Following the God we know in Jesus is seldom neat and sweet. Among other reasons: imperfect people, the only kind God has to work with, are seldom neat and sweet.

So, when tempted to get hysterical over the tough issues of now, take a moment to get historical. Not to return to history... but to learn from it, in order to go forward in our time. I thank God for the Mr. Mercer's who modeled faithful letting go and taking hold.