How It Started
Do you know this person? This is taken from a chapter in a book entitled, Chains of Grace, by Stan Vander Klay.
At the first New year's Eve Watch Night Service in our new church, the night that '63 became '64, Jim Thompson brought a friend to church, ________. _____ was Jewish, living at home and attending his first year at a nearby college. He and Jim had become acquainted because Jim worked after school and on Saturdays in ____'s father's print shop. Harry, ____'s father, deeply believed the rightness of the Civil Rights struggle, and wanted to do something to help. Jim began telling ____ about his church and the wonderful interracial fellowship there, and _____ got curious enought to come that night. Because he loved the fellowship among the young people, he kept coming to church with Jim. After about a month he told me that he just didn't see the point of what I was teaching about Jesus. It wasn't that it antagonized him, but his response was rather, "so what?" Still, sitting through a hour of weekly irrelevance was a trade-off he was willing to make, so he continued to attend.
It was some time later, a month or two maybe, that I heard that ____ had come to put his faith in Christ. At an early point in every Sunday evening service, we would stand and recite the Apostles' Creed in unison. _____ would arise with the rest of the congregation, but stand silently. He told me that on a particular Sunday evening, standing silently with his friend Jim, somewhere in the middle of the creed he began saying it with all the rest, for he had come to realize in his heart that he now believed...
After a few years he went to Calvin College, graduated and came back to Paterson. When we organized in '73 he became a deacon at Northside, and later an elder. He worked for some years for a city social agency, and for a time as well as Director of the Eastern Deaconate of the Christian Reformed Church. For more than a decade now, David Apple has led an outreach ministry to the poor and homeless for the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia where the late James Montgomery Boice was pastor.
It all took place because an African-American teenaged Christian brought a socially conscious Jewish boy to a church where people were learning to live out the racial and social implications of the Gospel.
At the first New year's Eve Watch Night Service in our new church, the night that '63 became '64, Jim Thompson brought a friend to church, ________. _____ was Jewish, living at home and attending his first year at a nearby college. He and Jim had become acquainted because Jim worked after school and on Saturdays in ____'s father's print shop. Harry, ____'s father, deeply believed the rightness of the Civil Rights struggle, and wanted to do something to help. Jim began telling ____ about his church and the wonderful interracial fellowship there, and _____ got curious enought to come that night. Because he loved the fellowship among the young people, he kept coming to church with Jim. After about a month he told me that he just didn't see the point of what I was teaching about Jesus. It wasn't that it antagonized him, but his response was rather, "so what?" Still, sitting through a hour of weekly irrelevance was a trade-off he was willing to make, so he continued to attend.
It was some time later, a month or two maybe, that I heard that ____ had come to put his faith in Christ. At an early point in every Sunday evening service, we would stand and recite the Apostles' Creed in unison. _____ would arise with the rest of the congregation, but stand silently. He told me that on a particular Sunday evening, standing silently with his friend Jim, somewhere in the middle of the creed he began saying it with all the rest, for he had come to realize in his heart that he now believed...
After a few years he went to Calvin College, graduated and came back to Paterson. When we organized in '73 he became a deacon at Northside, and later an elder. He worked for some years for a city social agency, and for a time as well as Director of the Eastern Deaconate of the Christian Reformed Church. For more than a decade now, David Apple has led an outreach ministry to the poor and homeless for the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia where the late James Montgomery Boice was pastor.
It all took place because an African-American teenaged Christian brought a socially conscious Jewish boy to a church where people were learning to live out the racial and social implications of the Gospel.
posted by M Clark at 3/12/2008 11:32:00 AM
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