Pastors’ Column

I have grown fond of telling visitors and newcomers to BMPC that we are a congregation with swinging doors. It is a metaphor, of course, for the many ways we open wide our doors to any who would come in, and those same doors open out upon a world in need of Christian witness and service. At BMPC all are welcome to worship, attend programs, and participate in opportunities for nurture and mission, members of the church and community alike.

Our congregation is at work every day living out the commandment to love our neighbors. Sometimes that love looks like a stack of casseroles delivered to a shelter in Center City Philadelphia; other times it is the act of sorting books for a new library in West Philadelphia. Love lives in bringing flowers after a long sickness or working all day to build a retaining wall outside of Mexico City. Whether our neighbors live close by or they live continents away, the commandment to love shapes everything we do. 

In our search for a Theologian-in-Residence who would not only honor the legacy of David and Ruth Watermulder that is woven into the fabric of our congregation, but also help us celebrate the vital and yet often quiet work of the Middleton Counseling Center, I am not sure we could have found a more thoughtful scholar than the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones.

It was a bold vision: a counseling center that was concerned with wholistic care – mind, body and spirit. Such a place sounds routine 20 years later, but when Session approved a new Pastoral Care Center at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church on May 11, 1999, it was anything but common. Until that point, it was just a dream, a divinely inspired dream.

Where will you be for Christmas? We pose that inquiry to one another time and again, in this busy season of holiday abundance; many of us trying to carve out moments for visits with family and loved ones; making merriment over baked hams and sugary pies; attempting to keep our little ones entertained with gadgets and gizmos, so we don’t pull our hair out in frustration with them before New Year’s. But we all have some place to be for Christmas, don’t we?

“I know this story.”

Every year at some point in the first week of Advent, I hear the exasperated proclamation of a student, “But I know this story! I heard it last year. I know what happens.”