“He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

(Micah 6:8)

If the ancient Greek judgment is true, that “the unexamined life is not worth the living,” then there is surely an obligation to reflection resting upon a clergyman rounding out, by God’s grace, four decades in the ministry.  Certainly there is for me the obligation to express my gratitude to this wonderful congregation for their loyalty and generosity to me as their pastor through twenty years.  Most important of all, my reflections must include thanksgiving to God for the devotion and obedience of the Idlewild congregation to our Lord Jesus Christ.

I’ve had lots of surprises – and many confirmations of my faith and expectations – across these 40 years.  Even the surprises – dramatic, upsetting, humiliating and even defeating though they at the time have been – have really turned out in the end to be confirmations of the faith that God’s thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and His ways of righteousness, justice, and mercy far beyond my searching out.

For me, the experience of being a pastor across the four decades – 1935-1975 – is perhaps best symbolized by this personal experience.

In the summer of 1971, while I was trying to do a watercolor painting of a sunrise over the bay at Oban, Scotland, I was suddenly made aware that someone had come close and was watching what I was doing.  No one else was moving about the harbor at that early hour and my watcher became very talkative.  He told me all sorts of things about himself.  “I paint, too,” he said, “But I never do landscapes.  I’m an illustrator.  I always work inside.  My wife and I are up from London on a holiday.  She’s never been out of London before.  This is the first vacation we’ve had in a long time but the children are gone now from home and we’ve come for two weeks in the Highlands.”

Since the fellow was so free in gushing out a stream of information about himself, I could not refuse to answer directly when he put a question to me: “Do you do this for a living?”  “No,” I responded, and then when he asked, “Well, what do you do?”  I told him: “By profession I am a clergyman – a minister, from a church in the United States at Memphis, Tennessee.”

“Church?” the man said with a gasp.  “Church? You mean you go to church?  I never go to church.  Do you mean that you are one of those chaps that stands up in a box and tells people what to do?  I can’t believe it.”

I mumbled that I never had thought of my vocation quite like that.  He shook his head in unbelief.  “For me,” he said, “being good to my wife and children, that’s all there is to it.  People don’t need to go to church for that.”

I tried to explain that the minister’s function was not to stand in a box and tell people what to do, but rather to be one of a community of people who were united by a conviction that God is in control in His world, and that together they must seek through worship and study and service the answers to the question of what God thought about man in all his relationships – including a wife and children.  I believed that unless this were discovered by men and translated into action, that all man’s structures of home and business and society would go sour or fall to pieces.

My early morning friend at the Oban Harbor just shook his head and walked away.  While I had been doing something with my hands in colors on paper – something of his real world with which he was familiar – he talked uninhibitedly.  When I mentioned the church and raised the God question, it turned him off.  He walked away.

Now, as I look back on my life trying to be a pastor to God’s people in His Church, I think I’ve come nearer to fulfilling my vocation when I’ve tried to raise the God question, in the changing kaleidoscope of church ministries, community crises, family and personal situations; to ask the prophet’s question, “What does the Lord require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to have mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

People’s reactions have been quite varied:  Sometimes they have turned in disgust at the intrusion of the God question, like the British illustrator at the Oban sunrise; sometimes they have been roused up in hot hostility at the suggestions of judgment and reform the God question raised; sometimes they have found the God question opening a way of salvation both costly and rewarding.

I suppose the most dramatic surprises I’ve encountered in my ministry have occurred when I’ve tried to raise the God question in the area of race relationships.  I came to Memphis in August of 1954, soon after the Supreme Court decision on the desegregation of the public schools.  Some concluded when I talked from “the box,” or in private, of Christians’ race relations, that I was taking my text from the Supreme Court Decision – that I was a political or social agitator who was departing far from the gospel.  I can remember hearing people back in 1954 and 55 complaining that the church was awfully late in waking up to the race problem.  “For 200 years we’ve lived in peace with this business of a dual society,” they said, “and the church was as quiet as a mouse.  Then the Supreme Court speaks and all the pulpits in the land begin to thunder.”  The only thing to be said to that is that it sounded like some folks had been absent from church a long time.

I can remember in Lexington, Mississippi, in 1935, during my first pastorate when I began to work some with the black people there, one of the deacons in my congregation rebuked me by saying, “Paul, don’t you know that black people don’t have souls?”

I can remember in Greenville, Mississippi, during my pastorate there from 1939-45, how those generous Delta people endured grudgingly their pastor’s participation in a black minister’s conference.

During the middle 50’s here in Memphis, when the papers carried my name as one of a number of citizens working on an inter-racial committee for better race relations, I received an anonymous letter stating, “I have made a contribution of $1.00 to the NAACP in your name.  Now you are an honorary nigger.”

I’m sure that many concluded that Parson Jones was more concerned about black people than anything else in the world.  But nothing could have been farther from the truth.  I was trying to raise the God question in the whole troubled area of race relations.  Of course, I was concerned over justice and mercy for God’s black children.  But I was more concerned about the spiritual condition of myself and my white brethren vis a vis our black brethren.

God had called me, a southern white man, to be a pastor to southern white people.  I had admired, as a seminary student, the beautiful partnership of those pioneer Presbyterian missionaries, William Shepherd, the black man, and Samuel Lapsley, the white man, who went out to the Congo, but God did not call me to Africa.  I worked while a student in Louisville Seminary with Dr. John Little’s Negro Mission there, but I did not stay, as did some of my classmates, in Louisville with the Little Mission.  I have not been approached to pastor black congregations, south or north.  I have considered opportunities to go to the Campuses of Christian colleges, white and black, but I have not gone.  My call, so far as I have been able to discern it, has been to my brother, white southern Christians, and has included the agonizing calling of raising the question God has been asking across four decades: “What have you done, and what are you doing with your black brothers, my children for whom Christ died?”

But in my experience of raising the God question the biggest surprise, and the most saddening one I’ve had in my entire ministry, occurred not in the area of race relations but rather in the recent sudden change in theological climate in America.  For thirty-five years the prevailing wind in the churches had been blowing, so it seemed to me, in the general direction of a more rational religion – toward a more humane and just society for all people.  Then suddenly there came this abrupt shift, three to five years ago, when popular interest in religion turned away from the old-line established churches and their experimental ministries to meet contemporary needs, and the masses began to flock to the Pentecostal and charismatic and emotional gospellers.  Doctrinaire theology served up in 16^th century stereotypes began to displace creative Biblical scholarship.  Fundamentalist seminaries became crowded while the theological schools of the established churches suffered diminishing enrollments.

All this surprised and saddened me.  What it means I would not attempt to say.  I’m sure there is the judgment of God in it to correct and condemn the sins of men, including His church for her errors and her wasted opportunities.  But I’m sure also there is God’s merciful salvation in it, too; His grace to revive and to renew His church after her chastening.

But in this connection, I must mention that there has also come a joyous surprise to me in the recent hurricane of what I count to be counter-clock-wise theological winds: from our Idlewild congregation we have seen more of our choice young people offering themselves for church vocation and going away to seminary during the past five years than the congregation has produced in all the rest of its history put together.

Finally, I must admit that of all my surprises encountered as I have tried to raise the God question during 40 years in the ministry – though the most dramatic occurred in the area of race relations, and the most saddening in the changing, fitful winds of theological climate – surely the most exciting surprises have occurred in the realm of public and private morality. My, what jungles and zoos we’ve been through the last few years: situation ethics, relative morality, co-ed dormitories, group sex, election campaign committees for dirty tricks, Watergate trials, hush-money payments, obstruction of justice by the highest of our officials.

My surprise at the disclosure in recent months of the sorry and shabby condition of American morality – public and private – has been exceeded only by my awed reverence at history’s reaffirmation of the everlasting regnancy of the Biblical principles of right and wrong, of justice and truth.

Whatever permissiveness we’ve been through for ourselves – however we’ve excused our political party’s or our businesses’ ethically shoddy procedures by mumbling, “Look at what the other side is doing,” we know that no Republic and no individual character can stand unless it squares with what God has revealed through His prophets and Apostles and law givers and His own Son as the divine measurements for human life.

Never before had it been so clearly revealed to me how deplorably ignorant and chaotically confused the American people are on basic morality and ethics than it was on that memorable Sunday when President Ford granted ex-president Nixon a full pardon.  Immediately the whole nation was in an uproar.  Some were saying Ford did a gracious and courageous thing.  Others, just a forcefully, were contending that he had done a stupid and unjust thing.  The rumblings and reverberations still continue, even as recently as last Friday’s sentencing in Judge Sirica’s courtroom.

The whole fiasco has revealed the abysmal ignorance, of people in responsible places as well as in the general public, about the Judean-Christian theology of forgiveness and reconciliation; of how to meet the necessary conditions before forgiveness can be granted and reconciliation take place; which conditions scripturally, invariably are: repentance, contrition, open avowal of the specific wrong done, and beginning to perform acts of restitution.

I’ve mentioned to this congregation before my vivid memory of going to the Southwestern campus long ago to see Dr. Charles E. Diehl, the college president.  The campus then was almost deserted.  A large number of the student body had gone away to war.  It was the early 40’s and the whole nation was then settled in a gloom of depression, which deepened day by day as news reports kept coming in of one American military defeat after another.  I found President Diehl in his office, busying himself with routine duties.  We talked briefly about the crisis in national and world affairs, but more about the death of his nephew and my friend, a recent war casualty in the Pacific theatre.  In that setting of national and personal sorrow Dr. Diehl spoke quietly but with conviction, saying: “In this crisis, our nation and the world need more than anything else moral and spiritual leadership, and if the church and the church college do not furnish that leadership, it will not come.”

In our current crunch of leader-lessness nothing is more obvious than the fact that the only leadership which will suffice mankind’s desperate need now is moral and spiritual leadership.

Arnold Toynbee suggests that the world needs new leaders “Who will come to Socrates’ conclusion that the most urgent business on mankind’s agenda is to close the morality gap.”  The famous psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, commenting on Toynbee’s suggestion, says: “Imagine our leaders today striving not to heal the sick, not to comfort the anguished, not to feed the starving, not to terminate the waste and pollution of our resources, but first, above all else, to close the morality gap: to establish in national, international and personal affairs the supreme importance of distinguishing right from wrong.  Imagine our leaders trying to end their concealment of sin under various euphemistic disguises, and to confess sin, and atone for it, and desist from it.” (Whatever Happened to Sin? – Karl Menninger.)

George Gallup, in his 1975 report on the status of religion in America, said: “Seldom in history have the American people so craved moral and spiritual leadership as they do today.”  This is encouraging, but I wonder how supportive we, the rank and file, in America today will be of moral and spiritual leadership which insists on the strict application of Judaeo-Christian principles in the economic and political world order?  James Cogswell, one of our denomination’s leaders, came away from the World Food Conference in Rome last December convinced that the under-developed nations, the “have not peoples” of the earth, are fed up with a U.S. policy that on the one hand ships in relief supplies to feed their hungry … and at the same time persists in American trade policies that … keep their people impoverished.

George Telford said to our Church’s General Executive Board meeting in Atlanta last October that “We are in a national and international crisis, and the heart of the matter for Americans now is whether we can muster the courage and the vision to effectuate so profound a moral conversion as the crisis demands.”

Criticisms of the church in the world today rise to a horrific crescendo.  So many of these criticisms are clearly justified.  Let the church confess her sins, admit her weaknesses, and plead forgiveness for her many failures.  But let the church, with renewed courage and bolder audacity than ever before, stand up, unafraid, and raise the God question in every nook and cranny of human activity, for if the church fail, who will ask it?  For who, other than Christ’s men and Christ’s women will keep declaring as the years and decades and centuries come and go:

All things bright and beautiful.

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.