I am writing this on Tuesday, August 25, 2025, an appropriate day to reflect on 25 years of posts to an internet platform. Yes, exactly 25 years ago I sent the first of what would become the weekly E-pistle to the  members of Park Presbyterian Church in Beaver PA. We were just a little over two years into our time in Beaver. Not all the members received email (do you remember something called WebTV?) and those who did had to use some awful dial-up modem to get online but it was a start. Those were the days.

Blogging was to 2000 as podcasting is to 2025. Back then every pastor thought he needed to be a blogger. Today they want to be podcasters. The worldwide web is littered with the dry skeletons and decaying corpses of what were intended to be pastors’ blogs – and podcasts.

I wonder if my greatest success as a blogger has been in my persistence. I have posted week in and week out for 25 years. I took the E-Pistle with me when we moved to Langhorne on the other side of Pennsylvania, and for twelve and a half years it was the LPC E-pistle.  And now for five years of retirement in Indiana, “Observations.” Over a thousand, maybe 1,500, posts. Or maybe my greatest success is in the grace of readers, who for 25 years, week by week, have read what I post. Perseverance of the saints, they call it.

Happy anniversary to me.

Various subspecies of the posts have come and gone in these 25 years. Twelve rounds of the “Guatemala Diary,” “Summer Sixty” in June through August of 2014, and “Lockdown Devotionals” in the spring of 2020, to name a few. Early on, though, the posts took a form they would keep until retirement. The first section of each post came to be called “Before the Throne of God Above,” and in it I listed some of the prayer concerns of the congregation. The second section was “This Week” and included calendar highlights from the life of the church. The final section was what has become “Observations,” what I describe as “thoughts on living life faithfully and fully in our ‘not the way it is supposed to be” world.’”

In preparation for my celebration of this august occasion, I have read through the archives, nearly every one of those posts. I thought I might create some sort of greatest hits album, but that didn’t happen. Oh, some of things I wrote were quite good, if I say so myself. Some are prescient and insightful, some clever and even humorous. And none were so bad or inappropriate that I cringed when I read them.

But what struck me was not so much what I wrote in my “observations,” as the chronicle of week-by-week in the life of ordinary congregations. We marked births and deaths, weddings and baptisms. We announced adult classes and Vacation Bible Schools, mission trips and service opportunities. We prayed for the sick and the grieving and published sermon titles and news of fellowship gatherings. I have forgotten too many names and too many events, but what a good reminder of the richness of being together in Christ’s church.

I have been haunted, however, with a certain sense of discouragement by an early post, and with the same sad feeling brought by several other announcements from the record of twenty years of ministry.

November 7, 2000, was election day, though it would be over a month before George Bush would be declared the winner of Al Gore in that famous hanging chads election. On November 6, 2000, a young couple in our congregation gave birth to their first child. There was much celebration, and on Friday, November 10, 2000, I wrote:

. . . things often look different from a divine perspective. Maybe from the vantage point of Kingdom History, November 6, 2000, will turn out to be a much more significant day (than election day). The Psalms tell us that our sovereign God already has great plans for (Baby), plans that (Father and Mother) and our family of faith may help come to fruition. So, let’s also remember to pray for (Father and Mother and Baby). Let’s pray that Park Church will continue to provide a witness to God’s love that will be a part of Baby’s life in the years to come.
We don’t know who will be president on January 21, 2001. But we know who will be Lord, and we know we can trust him – Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)

By the time I had been called from Beaver to Langhorne less than eight years later, Baby had been joined by two siblings, each of whom had been brought to the waters of baptism. But Father and Mother and their three wonderful children were rarely seen in worship or in the Sunday school halls of Park Church. The waters of the outward sign had dried long ago. There were no signs of inward grace.

I did a little social media stalking. Baby graduated from a prestigious university a couple of years ago and, according to LinkedIn, has launched a successful career. There are no indications of a life-sustaining faith in the one into whose love she was baptized, however.

There may be a hundred or more baptisms announced in the pages of my 25-year-old blog. Certainly as many names of confirmation class students. Of those babies and youth I know or know about, too few are growing as disciples and nurturing their faith (the exceptions to that rule are so encouraging, however). Did the people of the churches, and their pastor, fail to fulfill their vows to pray for those baptized children and confirmed youth?

This is not meant to be a discussion of the theology of baptism or the efficacy of prayer. I’m just wondering.

Maybe the best I can do is paraphrase my words from nearly 25 years ago. We don’t know where their journeys may take those baptized children and confirmed youth. We can’t be sure of happy outcomes. But we know who will be Lord wherever they go, and we know we can trust him – Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)

Happy Anniversary to me.