In the first church I served, as a student minister and then as the assistant pastor, way back in the early 1990s, I had the chance to experience a fairly wide range of the typical world of the local church pastor. I participated in worship, preached about once a month, met with a couple of church committees, and went on regular home visits to a few parishioners. One of the people who was on my visit list was an elderly woman named Louise. Louise had lived in Cambridge all of her life and graduated from Radcliffe College, class of 1925. Although her husband had died a couple of decades before I met her, she was the sort of person who could talk about her life with her husband without ever falling into a morose, depressed, woe-is-me kind of attitude. Louise was upbeat about life in general. She enjoyed getting to know younger people and was a bit of a magnet in her old Cambridge neighborhood, with various neighbors eager to join her to watch her favorite PBS shows or to discuss the latest bestsellers over tea. I remember one of my visits involved Louise asking me to compare Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance with an environmental book written by Harvard professor E.O. Wilson. At the time, I hadn’t read either.

Louise lived not far from the Radcliffe campus, in a neighborhood that had caught the attention of the powers-that-be at Harvard, especially those who dealt with real estate. Harvard had started buying up houses in Louise’s neighborhood. This wasn’t much of a concern for Louise— until Harvard started painting those houses using “historically informed” colors. Louise was outraged. ”Those colors went out of fashion for a reason!” I remember her declaring during one visit. And, then she went on, just in case I had missed her point, “Those colors are ugly! They were then and they still are. And, now I have to look at them every day.”

My visits with Louise often involved this sort of scenario. While Louise loved to talk about the past, her early life growing up in Cambridge, how she had met her husband and then their life together, she never talked about any of it with rose-colored glasses. To listen to her stories involved the good, the bad and everything in between. 

We could use a good dose of that in lots of things, including at Old South. As we continue to shrink in number and try to deal with the reality of our very needy buildings, there is the occasional comment about how things “used to be.” Those comments usually connect to memories of a regularly full sanctuary and the sense of the signficance of the church to the community in general. Anybody who was anyone was a member of Old South, etc.

But, in the midst of the nostalgia, there are a few troubling truths. One person who is a life-long member of the church recently told me about something that happened in the 1970s. A national publication had listed Hallowell as a gay-friendly place. Some of the members of Old South, especially those who lived in Hallowell, were furious. They didn’t like their small city becoming associated with an openness to gays and lesbians. When Old South was going through its Open and Affirming process that resulted in an Open and Affirming statement that was approved by the congregation in 2008, the then-moderator of the congregation told me that in the 1980s, there were church members who wouldn’t eat at certain Hallowell restaurants because there was “something in the water.” The implication was that the water somehow caused people to become homosexual.

The past isn’t always so rosy as people remember. That’s certainly true for Old South, sometimes in heartbreaking ways. In my first few years of serving as pastor at Old South, in the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s, I officiated at the memorial service for a young man who had died in a tragic accident in San Francisco. When I met with the family, they shared with me that this young man, who had known from an early age that he was gay, had never felt welcome at his family’s church. It was deeply distressing to realize that the only time when this young man would receive a full and unconditional welcome at Old South was at his funeral.

There are plenty of other stories as well, of times when the church was not exactly a loving, accepting and welcoming place. Other churches have even more horrible tales to tell, especially around the abuse of children and women.

It’s time to take the rose-colored glasses off and ditch them permanently. If we are to look back, it ought to be with a clear, unfiltered gaze. Our future is not back there and that’s a good thing. Plus, there are important realities of the Church’s past that must be acknowledged. We may be smaller in these days, but maybe, just maybe, we might find a new awareness of what it means to be a faithful and loving church, walking in the ways of our Savior who so often sought out and lifted up the marginalized.

We won’t be perfect either, but we have an important opportunity to do a bit better.