The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Recently I achieved a highly dubious distinction. I became the oldest living member of the entire extended Miller family, including my family of origin, and I am also the oldest Miller of every all other living Miller relatives, since all of my first-cousin Millers have also died. There were four Miller sons in the Warren and Margaret Miller family, of whom I was the youngest. A few weeks ago my youngest brother died, leaving me the last of our generation to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, since a month and a half ago my daughter also died. I have never known such a year as this, and it’s less than half over.
Taking all these factors into account, I thought it would be a good idea to drive to Ontario to see my only surviving first cousin and two second-cousins on my father’s side while I, and they, are still alive in this world.
Through the centuries of its history, the various branches of American Presbyterianism are much more varied in their European origins than are the branches of Canadian Presbyterianism. Nearly every Presbyterian congregation in Canada had its inception from some variety of Scottish Presbyterianism. Presbyterians are as adept at splintering apart as most other denominations, although we are models of uniformity compared to fundamentalist or conservative Baptists.
Ingersoll, Ontario, where my parents grew up, is a rather small town. Nevertheless, it managed to spawn two different congregations of two different Scots-oriented Presbyterian denominations.
In 1889 the two churches, after several abortive attempts at a merger, finally voted to form the St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church. Either intentionally or by a shortage of historical foresight, neither congregation happened to have a pastor at the time of the merger. Therefore they called a newly ordained young man whose name was E.R. Hutt, my great-grandfather (Erastus Robert, of all unlikely monikers). He was the progenitor of my maternal grandfather, whom I also never knew, who was the progenitor of my Uncles Stuart and Robert Hutt, my mother, and my aunt, Irma Hutt, whom all of her nieces and nephews always referred to merely as “Irma.” Irma was born twelve years after Uncle Bob, and was probably as eagerly anticipated as a red-haired girl in a family whose lineage for ten generations contained no red-heads.
Anyway, as a central feature of this Familial Last Hurrah, I coerced all four of us cousins to attend church at the congregation my mother attended as a child and youth. It was going to be like Old Home Week for us in St. Paul’ Presbyterian Church in Ingersoll.
According to the published history of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church that Irma gave me over fifty years ago, Great-grandfather Hutt was the sparkplug behind the expansion of the sanctuary to accommodate all the new members he attracted to the church. It is a beautiful Victorian half-round worship space which seats over four hundred people. That may have been an issue in the Rev. Hutt’s early death. The history book of St. Paul’s states that he died of from complications of a complete nervous breakdown due to the “mental and physical” exertions of seventeen years in his first and only pastorate.
Had my three cousins and I not been there, St. Paul’s would have had only about twenty people in attendance on that Sunday. From the recollections of my childhood, youth, and early adulthood, I would guesstimate that eighty to fifty years ago, St. Paul’s must have had between four hundred and a thousand members. Even with the easily inflated memories of a child and young parson, they surely had an attendance back then of 250 to 300.
William Wordsworth began his superb poem: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood with these words: “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight/ To me did seem/ Appareled in celestial light,/ The glory and the freshness of a dream.” For me as a child, St. Paul’s reflected that poetic image, because that was where my mother went to church as a child.
The rapid shrinking of congregational and denominational memberships has been ongoing since the 1950s. I have read the numbers with increasing concern for the past sixty years. But never have I felt a personal ache in my own heart as I did on that recent Sunday in a church I have dearly loved and admired for my entire life.
St. Paul’s pastor is a young man who has been there for six years. Not surprisingly, the sermon that Sunday was about stewardship, the Christian responsibility to contribute money to the mission of the church. On the back cover of the bulletin, it said that from January through March, St. Paul’s expenses were $61,384, and their income was $43,364. If that pattern continues, St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church will soon become both insolvent and nonexistent.
Wordsworth ended his poem with these memorable words: “Thanks to the human heart by which we live,/ Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,/ To me the meanest flower that grows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” The Church of Jesus Christ is in rapid retreat in many parts of the Christian world. However, The Church will not die. As I observed in sermons through the years, the Church is like dandelions or crabgrass; nothing can kill it. Meanwhile, people of faith must keep the faith where they live, and the Church will live as long as they are alive. Despite its current immense challenges, Long live Ekklesia Christiana! – May 29, 2025
John Miller is the retired pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.