To Make Something Good Together in the World

From The Potomac Almanac, 30 Mar. 2017 (and The Sounds of St. Francis, 3 May)

Shortly after we moved to Potomac, our eldest son joined the local Cub Scout pack, 773, which is sponsored by Potomac United Methodist Church.  The pack our son had joined near our former home in Virginia was newly established, with just a handful of kids and a rather harried group of parent volunteers always scrambling to pull things together.  It’s been exciting to be part of a much larger pack here, with a really talented and committed group of leaders and an impressive variety of activities.

We were expecting that the Pinewood Derby at the pack here in Potomac would be pretty special.  But nothing we had seen yet quite prepared us for the event that unfolded a few Saturdays ago in the United Methodist Church’s Parish Center. 

The Pinewood Derby isn’t quite as old as scouting itself, but it goes back over sixty years, when a scoutmaster in California decided that his charges weren’t quite ready for the then common project of constructing cars out of soapboxes to ride in down a hill themselves (these were the days before soap came in plastic wrap and people worried much about liability insurance).  The scoutmaster’s idea was to have the boys to whittle or cut a car out of a small piece of pine, to nail on some simple wheels, and then to race the cars down an inclined track.

The Gift of Limits

“God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty…That no flesh should glory in his presence.”  I Corinthians 1:25, 27

A few days after I accepted the call to serve as your rector, I met up with Kathleen Alexander for some orientation to our new home.  Just before I left, she told me that she had some reading material for me—and I’ll say she did.  She presented me with a stuffed jumbo-sized three-ring binder entitled, “The New Century Project,” circa 1998.  This was followed by a tall ream of printed sheets.  These were the collected comments from your rector search survey and a transcription of all that had been written on newsprint sheets posted around Saint Francis Hall at a big parish meeting held just about a year ago.

I went home and dutifully set to work, and I read it all.  And as you would expect, there was a great deal of continuity.  At the beginning and end of nearly two decades marked by great change, the people of Saint Francis placed their central focus on faithful Anglican worship, beautiful traditional music and inspired preaching.  Then and now, you wanted to learn together, to grow in your relationships with each other, to form the young, and to serve the poor.  Of course, many of the people who were leading the projects and making the comments were the same, a remarkable thing in a part of the world where everything often seems to be in flux.

But there were also great differences.