Weekend Panorama - Part One

What a weekend, now behind me late on Sunday evening--a panoramic series of memorable events. So many varied experiences! So much to capture and digest. Reminds me of something my brother Zenos once told me after my feeble attempts to capture the Grand Canyon on a few slides. Excited to share it with him I was crushed by the inability of my camera to display what I had experienced. "Jim, Jim," my brother said, trying to console me. "There are some things you just have to hold in your heart." How true. As in nature, so also in our human pilgrimage, events need time and perspective to seal their image on our hearts.

Recognizing all that, it does seem important simply to offer thanks to God for the many events that came together to make this weekend so rich and memorable. It all began with a national conference on Pietism from Thursday evening to Saturady afternoon, sponsored by Bethel University and underwritten by a grant from the Lilly Foundation. Arts, Worship, and Theology from historic Pietist perspectives were featured in papers and presentations by scholars from many Protestant traditions who came from all over the United States and Canada. While it is surely too early to tell what will become of it all, I think it fair to say that this initial effort at gathering Pietist scholars bodes well for the forming of bonds and coalitions which could well not only boost Pietist viability on the North American scene but serve as a scholarly corrective to the negative connotations that many not associated with Pietism have associated with it in recent times.

Two memorial services for dear Pietist friends of ours framed the conference, one before it began for R.J. Carlson of Bloomington, a leading Covenant layman in the Twin Citiy area, and the other, as the conference was concluding at Bethel, for Robert Dahl of Salem, New Brighton, a really colorful and memorable retired Covenant pastor . Being at both of those only livened our sense of the blessings Covenanters share as inheritors of a Pietist heritage deeply rooted in the ongoing life of local congregations of believers who, as the Covenant seal says, are "conjoined in Christ."

The panorama continues in Part Two.