The New Church, Money, and a World Full of Endless Need Part 1

Sometimes we can learn how to move forward by looking back at where we've come from. Joel looks back at the history of the General Church of the New Jerusalem and its founding families in Bryn Athyn, PA. By looking at the origins of the organization Joel looks to the future, proposing some ideas about how to keep things moving forward. -Editor.

Part 1: Where We Are and How We Got Here

Let’s talk about something that people don’t seem to like to talk about, at least not in public—the New Church and money. The tradition I grew up in, the General Church of the New Jerusalem and the town of Bryn Athyn, is, by any objective measure, quite wealthy. The history is quite telling. Bryn Athyn, the General Church, and the Academy were founded as a utopian town, church, and school system at the end of the 19th century thanks to the largesse and generosity of John Pitcairn. For a long time the Pitcairn family continued to exert a large degree of control over the town and church in a sort of benevolent feudal way. These were of course different times, times when class was more distinct in an America still living in Old World shadows—time when noble minded patricians were expected to bridge the gap between rich and poor, between the aristocrats and the laboring classes, by acts of civic minded giving. So while the so called “robber barons” made enormous fortunes off the backs of immigrant labor, special access to land and resources, and elite clubby connections—men like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Hearst, and Pitcairn—they also built parks, endowed schools, and funded all kinds of public projects.

From the beginning Bryn Athyn was an idealistic town, cut off from the rest of the world by invisible cultural walls, as it quietly prospered in its bucolic location about ten miles outside of downtown Philadelphia. The Pitcairn fortune helped establish many valuable church institutions and uses: the building of the Academy and the Cathedral being the most notable. This was the golden age of Bryn Athyn and the General Church. Though feudal and culturally isolated, Bryn Athyn was also cohesive and productive. The schools flourished. The Writings were heavily studied. Generations grew up with a deep affection for the Academy and the New Church which they passed on to their children.

Perhaps a sociological perspective as much as a history lesson is the observation that somewhere in or after the 1970s, Bryn Athyn, the Academy, and the General Church seemed to stagnate in a way. Because of its invisible walls and cultural isolation, Bryn Athyn was always about 20 years behind the rest of the world in terms of changing social trends and thought. Thus feminism really came to Bryn Athyn more in the 1980s, 20 years after its fierce engagement as part of the fomentation of the 1960s. If Bryn Athyn’s “Golden Age” was around its inception at the end of the 19th century, by the 1970s it seemed the pure social impetus that founded the town and its institutions had given way to a more quiet geniality. Perhaps Bryn Athyn was going through the inevitable cycle that the Arcana Coelestia says churches always go through, from spring and morning to winter and night.

In my lifetime, the last forty years, certain vociferous debates have at times raged in the town: most notably over ordaining women, and even lately about homosexuality. My argument is that Bryn Athyn at its founding was a radical thing. Back at the end of the 19th century the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church was immense. You had to be very brave in 1893 to belong to this strange little religion that was neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant. But over time, even as the world itself has become more and more New Church, traditional Christianity, and with it the western world, has become more and more vastated. So, ironically, even while the rest of the world has seemed more receptive to some general New Church truths, Bryn Athyn, the Academy, and the General Church have seemed to be spiritually treading water at times. In any closed system eventually entropy will take over and things will become old and stale, and in many ways that has seemed to happen to Bryn Athyn, the General Church, and the Academy. Even though the church has endlessly talked about evangelization, we never seemed to have found a way to do it. The “circle the wagons” mentality that might have been not only valid but even essential in 1893, by 1953 was probably more of a knee jerk reactionary posture. By 1993, this kind of inward-focused-closed-minded viewpoint was killing the church. The gap between the quickly changing world and what a sleepy Bryn Athyn and General Church had to offer it just kept growing, as globalization became a dominant force in the world.

The money, traditions, and institutions of Bryn Athyn allowed it to sit comfortably back in both a material and a cultural sense, even while the world has been spiritually on fire for the last forty years. In short, Bryn Athyn and the General Church failed to come “out of the wilderness” as the phrase goes. In the Book of Revelation, the Woman Clothed with the Sun (The New Church) is hidden in the wilderness for time to protect her. But eventually this truth needs to spring forth into the world to fight the good fight and help people. It is similar to how Jesus needed to grow and learn, but eventually he had to begin his public ministry—or how his disciples became apostles eventually and were sent out into the world to preach the gospel (the “good news”) even though some of them would die as martyrs in their own public ministries. There is a time to learn and a time to serve. There is a time to prepare and a time to go forth.

While Bryn Athyn and the Academy were ripe with interesting ideas and doctrinal research in their early years, in the last forty years not much original doctrinal work has come out. While in many ways Bryn Athyn, the General Church, and the Academy have become less judgmental and rigid on an array of issues, particularly sexuality, in other ways these institutions have become less vibrant and interesting—less “distinctly New Church” as the old phrase goes. In Bryn Athyn, you seem to now have about four sub churches (the Cathedral, the informal service, Creekside, New Church Live) or even more. Kempton also seems like its own bailiwick. While these sub churches serve their members, it seems like there is no longer a center to the General Church. Like, if you took away the family ties, the money, the traditions, and the institutions, these sub groups do not even believe the same stuff anymore—in short, they really are different churches even though there has not been a formal schism. I also lived out West in California for the last decade.

To me, the liberal General Church congregations west of the Mississippi also feel like practically different churches than the more traditional societies back east. I could not speak to how the whole thing looks from the overseas perspective. Diversity in a church is wonderful, maybe even essential if you want to keep growing and thriving. The Arcana Coelestia beautifully cites this situation with the ancient churches, where doctrinal differences did not divide because charity was the first thing of the church. But this is not what I see happening with the General Church. Whatever you want to say about charity, I think the doctrinal differences themselves, what people actually believe, may be too far apart for the General Church to still have a center. But maybe more fundamentally, I think the General Church is way too inward focused. I think in order to grow and prosper it would need to be much more orientated to the massive natural and spiritual needs of the other seven billion people on the planet, not just its own small constituency.

Joel Brown

Joel is a native son of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania.