It’s fun to engage in some Christian-American history. If you find history mind-numbingly boring, my apologies. I will not even get started about the recent “black eye” history has been taking lately. This is a blog, not a debate platform.

Germantown, PA was founded in 1683. Already the seeds that would become a nation, still a century away, were being sown. Soon came the Mennonites and Amish, still licking their wounds from a century of their own persecution in the mother country. In Bethlehem (delicious irony) the Moravians settled. Scots, Welsh, Irish, and Anglicans also found the Quaker State to be fertile ground in more ways than one. William Penn found it hard to reconcile all the disparate factions. Religious foment and the birthing pangs of a still coalescing nation. Oh my indeed.

Enter the first bona-fide Lutheran with “street cred”, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. The City of Brotherly Love would be his home base. Even the Anglicans thought him worthy of being a bishop of sorts. The early to mid-18^th Century religious landscape of our nation became one of preparing for inevitable armed conflict with the British, while still being influenced by Quaker pacifism. This “back story” – history, really – sheds light on how we got to where we are today. There has always been tremendous struggle in learning how to live as Christian-Americans. Like the church, our country doesn’t always get it right. We try to cover up a multitude of sins. As people of faith and citizens of a nation, we must always live in a spirit, an attitude of repentance. It is especially true in an always changing atmosphere of diversity. We learn from our bad history while we rejoice in how we have endured. I will not take the bait of proclaiming what kind of religion our country is. We are many. All who live here are worthy of grace, redemption, and justice. It is unconditional love that binds us together. As believers and followers of the Living God, let’s not break those ties.

Pastor Art