Dear Gardening Pianists:

I became a pastor just as mainline Protestantism was on the decline. I’ve never served a congregation that didn’t have members with fond memories of having significantly more members, larger programs and ever-expanding budgets; but that’s okay. My call to and preparation for ministry occurred in the 1980s, not the 1950s, so any wistful notion that I could have been a better pastor if I had started before I was born strikes me as silly. We are called to work, serve, pray and plan in the time we find ourselves; it is the only time in which God is present.  C. S. Lewis noted that the one prayer God almost never grants is “encore.” Lewis wrote that our nostalgia for “golden moments in the past” can be nourishing and sustaining only if we see them for what they are—memories, not blueprints. “Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths,” Lewis wrote. “Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing.” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1964)

Perhaps because it is Annual Meeting time, I’m thinking about our past. It’s so tempting to fill in the trend lines and conclude we’re not anything like we used to be, but such