None of Us Are Sinner Emeritus
An interview with Bruce Larson
October 1, 1984
Bruce Larson is back in the pastorate now, after twenty-one years of traveling, speaking, writing, and serving as president of Faith at Work. He has thus put himself on the receiving end of his own exhortations about fellowship and community in the church. Seattle's well-established, block-long University Presbyterian Church is the scene where Larson is working out what he urged in such books as No Longer Strangers, The One and Only You, and The Relational Revolution.
LEADERSHIP wondered how the man who invented the phrase relational theology would view the current state of church fellowship. How far have we come? Have we made progress over the past three decades? Are we closer to one another, more honest, more caring? Senior Editor Dean Merrill went to Seattle to ask.
You grew up in a solid church in Chicago. When did it first dawn on you that Christians were missing something in the area of fellowship or intimacy?
I was a student minister at a little church up on the Hudson River-I'd go up every weekend from Princeton, where I was in seminary. I met my wife in that church, in fact. "Fellowship" consisted of a monthly meeting of the women's association and an occasional men's breakfast, where you had a baseball or football player come in and give his testimony.
Then one weekend, I found out some shocking news: a teenage girl in the congregation had left town to go to her older brother's. She was pregnant. I said to the dear woman who told me, "Could I go and see her?"
"Oh, no," she replied. "You're the last person she wants to know what's happened."
Suddenly it hit me: That's what's wrong with the church in our time. It's the place you go when you put on your best clothes; you sit in Sunday school, you worship, you have a potluck ...
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