Post: Readers Respond

Bakers Respond

Barbara Swanson sends greetings from Belgium where she tested and enjoyed Bonnie Sparrman’s recipes for Swedish cardamom bread and buns in the Spring/Summer 2015 issue of Pietisten.

Readers Respond

Every time I get an issue of your great paper, I wish my Dad (Frederic E. Pamp) was still alive to enjoy it. He was for 50 years a Covenant minister and son of C.F. Pamp, a pioneer of the Covenant. I know my Dad would have been writing interesting letters to the editor — he was one of the rebels — trying to get the Covenant to move on and yet keep to its heritage. My husband was a Covenant minister for 10 years before we saw the light and became Presbyterians! I still cherish the many friends I have and have had in the Covenant (we both graduated from North Park in 1946 — me from Junior College and he from seminary).

Fred Pamp, who started the Edgewater (Chicago) Church while in seminary (class of 1910), served first in Omaha (Neb.), Salina (Kan.) and in Boston (where he got his Masters in Theology at Harvard — which branded him a modernist) and retired in the 50s from the Evanston church. In his retirement he started the Orlando church. When he retired his pension was $50 a month from the Covenant — he used to joke he was a dollar a year man. His love for the Covenant never ended. He had many chances to leave, but that was beyond his thinking or feeling. I know that Dad’s generation did much to keep the Covenant true to its roots.

–Lois Pamp Swanson, Sacramento, CalIF.

What a delight to spend a hot summer afternoon reading the Spring/Summer 2015 issue! Several of the authors were acquaintances from 60-plus years ago at North Park Junior College. I especially appreciate the tributes to Alyce Hawkinson who, as a fellow teenager, accompanied me on the train from Chicago to Kansas City for Thanksgiving, 1952. Jim Hawkinson was an acquaintance long before North Park because he often visited our Haddam Neck (Conn.) Covenant Church when he was an intern at Middletown Covenant. Whenever I experience the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” I think of Jim and Alyce and their faithfulness to God and His work.

I was impressed with Tom Tredway’s examination of third generation “Swedishness.” I am grateful for my ethnic heritage. However, it was that very clinging to ethnicity that made it difficult to attract and retain non-Swedes to the Covenant Church we served in the mid-fifties. That was also a powerful force in my husband’s decision to transfer ordination to the United Methodist denomination.

Royce Eckhardt’s commentary on hymns brought some chuckles. I remember well the “dropping pennies” song from my pre-school Sunday School class at Immanuel Covenant in the Bronx. I also remember my little brother coming home from Haddam Neck Sunday School singing, “Climb, climb up sunshine mountain, faces full of glue” [instead of “faces all aglow”].

Arvid Adell’s article was extremely helpful as he led us through our adolescent experiences of “being saved.” From my perspective of 80 years, I shudder at the psychological pressures that were placed upon us impressionable youngsters at Bible Camp. I even returned to my home one summer convinced that my own parents might be among the “goats” when Judgment Day occurred. At any rate, it’s reassuring to have matured enough to realize that we have a Parent God who loves ALL His/Her children and who welcomes them by various paths. I really appreciate Arvid’s statements that “God has unconditionally chosen each of us,” and that it is God’s affirmative love which saves us. I also am grateful for his pointing out that “Certainty isn’t faith.”

–Janet Christianson Johnson, Concord, Mass.

Many thanks to Arvid Adell for his thought provoking article, “The Theology of Being Born Again” (Spring/Summer 2015). I must also thank Arvid for guiding me through a dilemma that only a pastor/philosopher could navigate. Upon my receiving a heart transplant, I suddenly was gripped with an uncertainty. Did I need to ask Jesus into my new heart or did he transfer over? After all, the old heart into which He had come when I was 16 years old had been removed. Was my born again status a given as in transfer of membership or did I need to go through the conviction/repentance again? I presented this troubling issue to my friend Arvid for his advice, and he thoughtfully reminded me that Jesus did say, “I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Matt.28:20). Even with the reassurance from this seasoned theologian, I re-upped anyway. Now I have, with certainty, been born again, born again.

–Bob Bach, Angels Camp, Calif.

Thank you to Tom Tredway for his “An Asterisk to Hansen’s Law” (Spring/Summer 2015). It puts together many of the thoughts I have had from growing up in the Swedish immigrant community of Trade Lake, Wis.; attending Gustavus Adolphus College; teaching at the universities in Gothenburg and Lund, while faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; and translating and editing, with a friend, the Louis J. Ahlstrom book, Historical Sketches, about the pioneers to Trade Lake, including my great grandparents, who, as Baptists, left Sweden in 1869 for religious freedom in the United States. To embrace all this, I, with Tredway, am definitely one of those steering “toward religious-political-economic combinations regarded as heretical in some quarters.” I often think of the character of the old nurse in August Strindberg’s play, The Father, to whom the protagonist says “The moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven’t the true faith.”

As an asterisk to this letter, a quick thank you, too, to Royce Eckhardt for his very enjoyable “Strange Songs and Holy Humor” in the same issue. To his list of entertaining typos, I add the bulletin’s song announcement for the offertory at a Lawrence, Kansas, Lutheran church in the 1960s: “Jesus Priceless Treasurer.”

–Carolyn Wedin, Frederic, Wis.

Some Covenant friends told me about your publication. I guess it is ok if Free Church people join? My grandfather did pastor a Covenant church in Kansas in the 1920s, though most of his life he was a Free Church pastor. We in Texas did contribute to the Pietism movement by sending Gustaf F. “Texas” Johnson to preach in Swedish America. As you can see [in the article in The Austin Statesman, 20 July 1928], he did come back to preach to thousands at the Swedish Tabernacle in Austin on the grounds of Texas Wesleyan College (the Swedish Methodist-founded college) and was called in the article the “Waldenström of America.”

Of the 10,000 Swedes who settled around Austin between 1870-1910, over half were Mission Friends from Sweden. The Methodist church knew these Mission Friends wanted nothing to do with the state church of Sweden, so they sent a Swedish Methodist minister to establish some 20 Swedish Methodist churches in Texas. They were large enough to establish a Swedish college in Austin called Texas Wesleyan. [In the 1930s, it merged with and transferred its name to a Methodist women’s college in Fort Worth.] I look forward to your publication.

–Jim Christianson, Austin, TexaS

Congratulations on almost three decades of superb publishing. Royce Eckhardt’s article, ”Strange Songs and Holy Humor,” gave me some chuckles. It reminded me of the time my mother, our church organist, met with a bride-to-be. Discussing wedding music, the young woman said she would like to use the hymn “I’d Rather Have Jesus.” Keep up the good work.

–Allan Johnson, Portland, Ore.

You guys are doing a great job with Pietisten. How great to have this contact with people and ideas that I appreciate and admire. The Covenant is fortunate to still have this influence.

–Lewis Moon, Rockford, Ill.

First of all, I want to thank you all for picking up the reins of Pietisten these past few years. I know that Phil, especially, was much relieved and pleased to be able to hand off the editorship and publishing responsibilities!

The past six years have seen me enjoying being a Pietist in the Episcopal Church and I have reveled in its weekly liturgical consideration of Scriptural texts which I have found to be devout, open-minded, Spirit-filled and inclusive–in the way that the Covenant should be and once in large measure was, owing to its wonderful Pietist heritage, but which has, alas, seen fit to align itself ever more passionately to the ranks of American conservative evangelicalism. Eric Hawkinson’s “bluebell” of a Pietistic Covenant, blooming precariously by the roadside, has surely been crushed and destroyed by those very wheels which the Covenant so willingly and enthusiastically aligned itself with. This grief has become too much for me and it was good for me to finally part company.

I hope that you will find both satisfaction and fun as you continue to write and publish.

–Peter Sandstrom, Minneapolis, Minn.