This reflection was written by the College’s principal, the Rev. Dr. Jesse Zink, for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.
I spent this past weekend with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the founding of their congregation in 1826. St. John’s is the church in which I was raised, confirmed, and eventually ordained.
In many ways, St. John’s is a pretty standard Episcopal Church: a mixed congregation in a mixed town with a beautiful building and a lovely stone tower and many challenges as it adapts to the changed world of church we all inhabit today. But it is a place that means a lot to me, and at the celebration on Saturday evening I was asked to say a few words about what the church had meant to me. Two things stood out.
First, this church was a place where inter-generational relationships were formed. As a child, there were people of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation who took an interest in me, in my passions, and in my religious life. One of the things I’ve always loved about church is that it’s one of the few places where children have regular interaction with people of other generations they aren’t related to—and that love stems from own experience as a child in church. When a child is baptized in my Anglican tradition, the congregation is asked if they will support this child as they are raised in the life of faith. This is a congregation that fulfilled that role in relation to me.
In just a few weeks on November 1, we’ll celebrate All Saints Day, when we remember the many faithful people throughout the history of the church who are not commemorated by name in our calendar but who have nonetheless had a decisive impact on our Christian tradition. For me, some of those saints are the many people at St. John’s who have been saints to me and set me on the path that has led me to where I am today. Many have joined the communion of saints, but it was such a delight this weekend to spend time with those who are still among the living and still rooting for me.
The second thing St. John’s gave me is that it sent me out in the broader church with this model of Christian community in mind. Lots of other people from St. John’s have done the same. William Stringfellow, a noted Episcopal theologian of the mid-twentieth century whom I will make some of you read in an Anglican History and Theology course, also grew up at St. John’s (about 55 years before me). The preacher at this weekend’s anniversary service was Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, currently the Bishop of Indianapolis, but a member of St. John’s when she was a university student. There are a lot of others who have spread across the broader church from St. John’s, just as others from the wider church have come to enrich St. John’s. The church is not just any single congregation but the whole network of them across the world.
Wherever we are in our journeys in life and our relationship with the church, I hope that all of us can find at some time and in some way the rich network of relationships that this congregation gave me and which I seek to pay forward to others as best I can.
Jesse Zink
Principal