J. DANIEL WHITE, Ph.D. – Gene, Ann and I had been good friends since the early ’60s in eastern NC, so, when I came to Charlotte in 1971, I immediately gravitated to my old and dear friends and came to MPBC for worship.  At the close of one of my first Sundays visiting, a woman sitting at the inside end of the pew on which I was sitting stopped me before I could get away and asked me my name, thanked me for visiting MPBC and expressed a warm wish that I would return soon.  I did, and Frances Reville again greeted me after worship and again repeated her hope for my return.  Having been “burned” by Southern Baptist theological arrogance and racial intolerance for years, I had vowed never to join another SBC-member church, but keep my membership at Drexel Hill Baptist Church near Philadelphia until… Then, one day during the occasional lunch sessions Gene and I had, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Dan, you do not have the grace to forgive Southern Baptists for what they did to you!”  In a pique, my response to him:  “Damn it, Gene, I do too!”  His response was, “Good, because I need you and Myers Park needs you.”  He had tricked me with a bit of theological guilt (not unlike Southern Baptists at all), and I was in, but with a caveat:  I wrote Gene, and sent a copy of the letter to Bonnie Cone, chair of the Board of Deacons and a friend at the university, and said that I would join under one condition: that my statistic would never be reported to the SBC as a member of a SBC church.  Reporting that statistic to Valley Forge was permissible, but not to Nashville, TN or Raleigh, NC.  What was made of that request, I’ll never know, but I do know that in forcing me to confront my own failure to consider my past and move forward, I found a church–not perfect by any means–that, more than most, admits its sinfulness (though frightened of that word all too often) and usually seeks forgiveness.  That is about all any of us can hope for.

TILLIE TICE - “Tillie Tice remembers a young boy who was challenged by an egg and the high ceiling of Heaton Hall. Hear how he ‘made his mark’ on our church...”

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BOB THOMASON – One of Bob Thomason’s first memories was how, when he was diagnosed with a childhood illness, his family received a note from Dr. Heaton promising that the church would take care of them. In this interview, Bob shares the MPBC moments and stories that have touched his life throughout the tenure of five senior ministers.

In his first sermon as Senior Minister of Myers Park Baptist Church, Reverend W. Benjamin Boswell drew on the words of our covenant for inspiration. He focused on two sentences in particular: “We covenant to be a community of God’s new creation and affirm that we are open to all and closed to none. We covenant together to nurture this Church as a community of faith and as an instrument for reconciliation in the world.” His sermon evokes Paul’s “kaine ktisis” — the new creation was Paul’s term for the dream of the Church.

John Walsh takes a fresh look at the Genesis story of creation, in lieu of the environmental degradation we see all around us. He pays particular attention to the new covenant that God established with living things of every kind after the story of Noah and the flood. He makes a passionate plea for Christians to be stewards, not destroyers, of the earth.

Dr. Shoemaker introduces this sermon as the beginning of a discussion on homosexuality, and asks the question of whether we can be both a biblical people, and a people who honor homosexual persons in our community. He acknowledges the Christian Community to be a community of grace and compassion. The heart of the sermon is a thorough examination of the five biblical passages that are often used to condemn homosexual persons. Dr. Shoemaker interprets these scriptures anew, based on the words and life of Jesus, and the New Testament texts that speak to greater inclusion and acceptance of all people.

This is Dr. Marney’s controversial 1965 Christmas Eve sermon which was broadcast live on the CBS network. Critics claimed it focused on man instead of Jesus. It emphasized peace and social justice and called for “a new kind of man.” He called for all men to transcend nationality, race and tribe. He spoke of a true Ecumenism “that recognizes the Jew, the Christian and the Muslim (all 700 million of them.)” This was quite radical for the times.

In this sermon, Dr. Marney criticizes the church, and the nation, for whitewashing its history. We “report favorably” and avoid honesty and reality. We must confess honestly before God. The future is “not with Caesar but with Jesus.” The future is “not with the bank director downtown but with a baby being born at Memorial Hospital.” Further he states, “potential is on our side. Reality does not threaten us…we can stand anything we know or learn.”

In this beautifully delivered, short sermon, Dr. Gene Owens tells us that the ordinary becomes holy through an act of dedication. Where in your life is the ordinary becoming holy through your dedication? Worship is the opportunity to dedicate the ordinary – to dedicate our ordinariness to God. But our dedication is too reluctant and it denies us the Kingdom of God. But the potential is there…to convert the ordinary to the divine.

We are our ancestors plus ourselves but we live and act in our own time. Truth is the ticket and is particular to a particular time. In the late 1930s the German church said Hitler was using the church the same way Henry VIII used the church in England so why should anyone object? Time and context are relevant and defining. Clinging to old truths is denying God’s dynamic presence. Our forebearers will always be in us, but we need to recognize the glory of our own time.