For the Rev. Dr. Alton B. Pollard III, inaugurated about six weeks ago as the 10th president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, there’s one thing seminary faculty and students can say without reservation: “There is something incredibly profound about being people of faith.”
“We recognize every individual we meet as someone of dignity worthy of respect — unless they decide to show us otherwise,” he told the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, on Monday during “Coffee with the Clerk,” broadcast weekly via Facebook Live. “As long as we recognize with humility our need for grace and mercy, I think God is willing to do something with us.”
However, “until we decide that all human beings without exception have been imprinted with the image of the Divine, none of these issues that stand before us can be addressed. If you think there is a hierarchy of human beings” — people who are smarter or look and smell better than others — “then we aren’t able to address the inequalities that are so rampant in our society and around the world,” Pollard said.
“If I am a person of faith,” he said, “I have to be ready to take on issues in such a way that it brings great respect to the image of God and demonstrates that every person who lives on the face of the Earth deserves to be here. We can’t affirm the infinite worth of every person until we affirm the Infinite.”
Nelson told Pollard he’s seen pastors enter their first or second call “with a great deal of energy, only to find out there are persons with a controlling edge in that church who have no desire to see it move beyond where it is. This is a great discouragement to those people who go into ministry with a great deal of excitement, and many have walked away from ministry.”
Pollard said the simple answer is to “teach and preach Jesus.”
“When you begin with the life, witness and death of the Nazarene, you recognize that if you say you have been called according to God’s purpose, you can’t expect to have on rose-colored glasses going into ministry,” Pollard said. “We spend a lot of energy preaching on the entertaining aspects of Jesus — the positives, without sharing the whole biography of who the Son of God is. When you share that whole biography — the beginning of his witness, when he is no one, to then end, when he is on the cross with thieves on his left and his right — he still uttered, ‘You matter, if you so choose.’
“No one is beyond the pale of what is possible with God, but in our preparation for ministry, if we don’t show women and men that the road won’t always be easy, then we have no one to blame but ourselves for setting up women and men for failure. People have said, ‘You are pretty intense!’” Pollard said. “I see it as knowing how much God requires of us.”
Asked by Nelson about the future of the Church, Pollard said he was thinking of a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”: “And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.”
“When I dig into the Good Book, I don’t remember Jesus saying, ‘I came to give you a comfortable life,’” Pollard said. “We are born, we rise, we go through our life cycle and then we decline. In our sunset we come face to face with our mortality, and if we are blessed, we experience immortality.
“Institutions are no different. Because they are built with human hands, there is nothing we can do to ensure they endure. But what does last is the church of God, comprised of people, who are the building blocks … We must always keep our focus on humanity, what Howard Thurman called “the sound of the genuine.”
“People are at the center of the ministerial equation,” he said. “I will be shocked if God says, ‘You had the largest church on the planet. Come on in to the Kingdom!’ I want God to say, ‘Well done,’ because I took care of the least of these. Because I am part of the least, they never became foreign to me.”
Pollard expressed support for the PC(USA) march set for 1 p.m. June 12 from the Presbyterian Center to downtown government offices. The march, part of the Hands and Feet Initiative, is being held to bring attention to the injustice of the cash bail system.
“This is a commitment for us as well,” Pollard told Nelson. “This is a justice matter, a matter that begins with the recognition that people placed on the bottom of the social order have been left without voice … I applaud the PC(USA) and those who are ready to stand fast and to stand firm. It’s long past time.”