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Having just returned from Harry Butman’s 100th birthday party in Los Angeles, I am honored to appear in this, the last issue of The Congregationalist under Joe Polhemus’ leadership. Both of these men have been good friends to me over the past seven years, as I have had the happy responsibility of figuring out what it means to be the first Harry R. Butman professor of religion and philosophy at Piedmont College.
At Piedmont, “students need not choose between faith and intellect.”
Photo by David Price, Piedmont College.
Before June 1997, I had no knowledge of the NACCC. I had grown up in Atlanta, where Congregationalists were as rare as hummingbirds. The only Congregational church I knew about was on Clairmont Road, just down from the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation. If the Congregationalists had held an annual New England Festival the same way the Orthodox held an annual Greek Festival then I might have learned more about who they were too, but in any case, I grew up with the impression that both churches housed exotic species of Christians. If they were the hummingbirds, then Southern Baptists were the grackles, with sprawling houses of worship on every other corner.
Years later, I walked through the looking glass when I went to seminary in Connecticut, where the ratio between Congregational and Baptist churches was completely reversed. Many of my classmates and professors were Congregationalists (Beth Bingham1 and I both lived in Bushnell House). While the distinctions between UCC, NACCC and CCCC2 never pierced my consciousness, I gained the impression that Congregationalists were not only smart and proud of their heritage but were also committed to social justice in ways that made some of the rest of us look like lightweights. They also knew their history, which was as woven into U. S. history as that of the Episcopalians whom I would eventually join.
I prospered in the ecumenism of Yale Divinity School, but after my confirmation in the Episcopal Church and my graduation from seminary—both in 1976—I did what many ministerial candidates do. I vanished into my own tradition, which required so much of me that I ate, drank, slept and breathed the Episcopal Church for the next twenty years. I loved most of those years, too, but when the telephone rang in the summer of 1997 and the president of Piedmont3 invited me to apply for a freshly endowed chair in religion and philosophy, a whole new world opened up to me.
The NACCC met at Piedmont that summer, where I was invited to offer a brief workshop on preaching. Harry Butman sat in the front row with his shock of white hair and glittering eyes. When he fell and broke his hip later that week, I was among those who visited him at the Habersham County Medical Center, although I did not yet know enough to bring the requisite bottle of single malt Scotch. In the course of what began as a benign conversation, he quoted a long passage from Trollope4 by heart, and then reminded me what bitter enemies our religious forbears had been in 17th century England. I was both dazzled and intimidated by him, as it slowly dawned on me that this was more job interview than pastoral call. Before I left, Harry and I shook hands and prayed together. By the fall, I had been offered and had accepted the job.
Either peculiarly or providentially, I was already signed up as the 1999 Bible Lecturer at the NACCC Annual Meeting in Cromwell, Connecticut, an invitation I had accepted almost three years earlier. I was welcomed so warmly in Cromwell and met so many kindred souls there that I began to feel less like an alien than a resident alien. Don Olsen5 even surrendered his hotel room to me when my own reservation failed to materialize. Since then, I have visited NACCC churches on both coasts and many points in between. I have read every issue of The Congregationalist for almost seven years. Significantly, I have had ample opportunity when visiting other churches to tell the story of Piedmont College, Harry Butman and the NACCC.
If I were forced to rank the blessings of this new life then I am not sure that I could do it. While my initial attraction to the job was the freedom it offered me both to travel and to write, classroom teaching has turned out to be my first true love. One liability of parish ministry is that most of the young people disappear when they turn sixteen. Another liability, in many places, is that clergy are hired to shore up the foundations of faith instead of to ask difficult questions about them.
At Piedmont, I enjoy the rare privilege of exploring the most important questions of all with young people who are still formulating their own answers to them. Furthermore, I am able to explore them in an atmosphere of academic and religious freedom that I attribute directly to Piedmont’s Congregational heritage. In rural northeast Georgia, one of the deep pleasures of my job is watching students discover that they need not choose between faith and intellect.
But an equal blessing has been my own liberation into a much broader understanding of what it means to be Christian. As an Episcopalian who teaches at a Congregational college in the spring and fall and at a Presbyterian seminary in the summer, with regular forays into Baptist, Lutheran, Brethren, and United Methodist circles, I now think of myself as a “Pan-Christian” with a far clearer view of the treasures that each of these traditions protects. The Christian way turns out not to be a rock as much as it is a diamond, whose singular beauty rests in its many glittering facets.
While the NACCC facet is an admittedly small one, it is now a beloved one to me, not only because so many of you have taken me under your wing but also because such hospitality seems to exemplify who you are. I may never learn all the fine points of Congregational history and polity, but I do know from first hand experience about the radical inclusiveness of the Congregational way. In your company, I have been struck anew by the truth that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, enlivened by the same Holy Spirit, and sent by the same God to increase the love and justice in this world. Whether or not this is the gospel that you hoped the Butman professor at Piedmont would preach, I hope that you will accept this resident alien’s deep thanks for the opportunity to proclaim it.
The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor has occupied the Butman Chair of Religion and Philosophy since it was created in 1997.
Footnotes:
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