Church of Sea and Land

My brothers and sisters at First Chinese Presbyterian Church should be familiar with this building, but I decided to do some digging as to its history.  FCPC was not the original owner of this interesting edifice that sits on the corner of Henry and Market Streets, and I wondered about what happened to the previous congregations that owned it?

The land on which FCPC currently sits on was owned by Col. Henry Rutgers.  He was single through his life, and so after his political career in the New York State Assembly, he gave out large tracts of land in Manhattan and New Jersey which were in his possession.  A choice property in Elizabeth, NJ was given to a school which would become Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.  But many small parcels were given out, including the land on which Rutgers Presbyterian Church stood today.  In 1816, Rutgers gave his land to the Northeast Dutch Reformed Church, which spent the next 2 years constructing the edifice. 

Much of the early history of the church can be found in The Kirk on Rutgers Farm by Frederick Brückbauer in 1919, but I found a quote that was particularly interesting:

Of the sanctuary, which, for one hundred years, has stood on the corner of Market and Henry Streets, the author, like many others who have put their lives into it, might well say: ‘Thy saints take pleasure in her stones, Her very dust to them is dear.’ The story of ‘The Kirk on Rutgers Farm’ is one of pathetic interest. In its first half-century it sheltered a worshipping congregation of staid Knickerbocker type, which, tho blest with a ministry of extraordinary ability and spiritual power, succumbed to its unfriendly environment and perished.

Now, I was befuddled at that last sentence because what kind of "unfriendly environment" would kill off a ministry? A New York Times article from 1893 revealed that it was not because of the unsafe environment or because of Chinatown, but because - now that the congregation was becoming wealthy - moved northward.  The church was built in what is essentially a red-light district, prospered, and blessed the area to the point where the disreputable places left!  But how interesting, that this "unfriendly environment" was wealth!

Indeed, FCPC's story is following this course.  In my few months there, I was quite blown away at the raw ingenuousness of the worship.  That, over the past few weeks, some people were willing to share stories of their troubled past to a stranger such as I, was quite befuddling to me.  But as people went to college, get married, move to the suburbs, and decide to go to the suburban Chinese churches there, FCPC's numbers shrink for no other reason than for wealth.

To finish the story, in 1866 the church was sold to a private buyer who gave the land to the New York Presbytery. It was subsequently reconfigured as the Sea and Land Church, which ministered to the seamen who came to worship from the docks.  Unfortunately, as the land became valuable around Lower Manhattan, the seaports moved to Brooklyn and Elizabeth, NJ.  And so the congregation suffered a slow death, again by demographic shifts.  Fortunately, however, in 1951, FCPC moved in and shared the facilities with the Sea and Land Church.  In 1972, the Sea and Land Church dissolved, and the Presbytery graciously gifted the church to FCPC. 

One of the stories I hear about FCPC from old-timers concerns when they were "big" - as in, the pews were filled, etc.  What, then, can we do?  Now, there are strategies, of course.  We can dumb down our preaching and worship and make it more "relevant."  Let's have super-nice sound systems like they have at Pillow Creek (<- not the real name of the megachurch), remove the crosses and pulpits, and have super-shallow sermons with lots of oomph in it.  I have no doubt that would attract numbers, but in attracting numbers we would be selling our soul in the process.  To put it starkly, it is dancing with Mammon.  And if a church must die, I can find no better way for it to die than to say "No" to Mammon.

FCPC's location, however, is an advantage - one in which the old Northeast Reformed and the Sea and Land Church did not have.  Chinatown itself is a huge missions field.  But how do we reach out to the Chinese in the area?  We need to keep in mind these are not suburban Chinese, who work at Lucent, Merrill Lynch, or all the Fortune 500 companies.  They get by with (much) smaller paychecks, and some are here in the United States having left their families home in China.  What do you tell those people?  That they need Jesus?  Well, if Jesus can bring their families to the US from China, or if Jesus could make their lives financially more secure, maybe.  But I'll leave that kind of "evangelism" to prosperity gospellers and their ilk.

Suffice it to say that the gospel of how we need Jesus because we are separated from God is not sufficient!  It is not sufficient because it does not speak to the complexity of the human condition.  Dare I say, it only speaks to the suburban mentality, where we do have the time and space to contemplate transcendence.  My mom has frequently criticized me, and even more so since I've gone to graduate school, that I'm not very realistic.  She came from a very poor background, where buying pencils for school is considered a serious expense, and buying a Tootsie Roll back then is the equivalent of buying Godiva Chocolate today (ironically, she likes Godiva chocolate now...).  She had no time for contemplating the transcendent.  For her, Christianity matters because it makes us good people.  And that's that.

If we're going to stick with the rhetoric of a utilitarian Christianity, then it should not surprise us that Christianity is growing!  It's growing not because it's better, but because it is becoming more worldly and, thus, more palatable to worldly tastes and preferences!  The Gospel at its heart is not nice.  It is profoundly unrealistic and profoundly offensive.  It offends those of us who go to Princeton, with our massive endowment (and the Scriptures say a lot about wealth, does it not?), and it offends those of us who go to liberal Union (because the Scriptures are too conservative) and those of us who go to conservative Wheaton (because the Scriptures are too liberal).  The Gospel never should make us happy, because the Gospel divides.  It unsettles the soul and relentlessly questions.  Like a Guantanamo interrogator, it probes us, asking us if we're really ready to take the plunge into the waterboarding tank if we divulge our secrets...

Now I'm sure none of you liked my illustration.  You would prefer that the Gospel come in the form of a nice pamphlet with colorful pictures of the Caucasian Jesus.  But unfortunately, the Gospel is not that pretty.  It forces us to bare our soul to God and to acknowledge that, yes,  He is right in that we are forlorn and weak.  We have not the spiritual fortitude to follow Him.  We're too educated, too wealthy, too comfortable.  Of course, we don't want to acknowledge that.  We're educated, yes, but "too" educated?  None of us go to Harvard.  Wealthy, yes, but "too wealthy"?  Anyone own huge mansions with sports cars?  Comfortable, yes, but let's be honest now, none of us live in the Hamptons.  But what we're essentially doing is lying to ourselves.  The evangelical propensity to overvalue actions which translate to holiness often is a symptom of just that.  Since when did abstaining from alcohol translate to holiness?  Since when was going through "The Four Spiritual Laws" equivalent to evangelism?  Since when was going to This University, getting married with That person, and having kids who go to This University a measure of how right one is with God?

To spoil your day, to follow Jesus is essentially to follow him into the waterboarding tank.  Life is never comfortable with Jesus.  Following Jesus necessarily means doing more than just give money to the homeless on the streets on the way to church.  It might mean singleness, poverty, and - yes - death. So why bother being Christian?  It is because my God is who matters.  Not my wife (or husband), because God is the love of my life.  Not my money (or lack thereof), because God is my wealth.  Not even my life, because God is my life.  It is my God who ultimately matters. 

And it is this sick love of God that enraptured a newly married couple in the early days of the church. They were captured by the Romans who bound the new husband and tortured him gruesomely in full view of his new wife, telling her that if only she recanted her faith, they would release him.  To which the husband shouted, "Don't do it!  Are you going to give up your soul just for me instead of God?!"  To which she tearfully refused to recant her faith.  It enraged the Romans who promptly tortured both to death.

It is this irrational love of God that prompted a young man who was destined to take on his father's huge business to give everything away to live in the wilderness, to beg for food with only a brown habit.  You know him - he's St. Francis of Assisi. Or a young teenage girl in ancient Barcelona who was taken by the Romans in an effort to get her to recant her faith.  She refused, suffering tortures ranging from her breasts being cut off to being rolled down a hill in a container with sharp barbs in it.  And when the furious Romans decided they've had enough, they lopped off her head.  But, according to tradition, God had the last laugh - a dove came out of the throat of the decapitated young girl, and flew away to the amazement of her Roman executors.

And it is this unwholesome love of God that led Archbishop Oscar A. Romero to preach against the Salvadoran government, to preach against injustice against the poor.  The government sought to silence him by killing the priests under his care, and in the end, killing the archbishop himself.  Even to this day, the Vatican remains ambivalent in declaring him a saint, showing how hard it is for even the leaders of the church to understand the importance of loving the poor and downtrodden instead of just speaking about loving them.

So what can we do at FCPC?  Simply put, I think we are called to live out this offensive gospel, and to have this sick, unwholesome, and irrational love of God.  It is sick, unwholesome, and irrational, but only in the logic of the world.  But in a world where there is much suffering, where there is so much pain, where hurt abounds, and none of it seems to be allayed anytime soon, it is this sick, unwholesome, and irrational love that can lift us up to realize that our predicament is not the end of the story.  What makes the Gospel the "good news" is that there is a God who cares and loves, and so powerful is he that only he determines what that end of the story looks like.

And if the Scriptures are right - and I think they are - the end of the story is magnificent.