HANSON – The members of First Congregational Church in Hanson took a look back at the church’s first 275 years on Sunday, Aug. 27 as they look ahead to what the next 275 years might bring.
After the regular Sunday services, the congregation gathered in the Fellowship Hall for a roast pork dinner, and conversation over shared memories, before the second half of the program took place.
The church welcomed three new members – Jacob Searfoss and Joanne and James Levine – during the morning services, which member Phil Clemons said was “always a great time in the life cycle of the church.”
Smith’s sermon, dealing with how making adjustments has been essential to being “the Church” for 275 years.
“There’s a change taking place in the church landscape in America,” he said. “The role of the older, more established church fellowships – once called mainline denominations – is receding.”
As mainline denominations are the heritage of First Congregational, Smith, quoting a former pastor, said the church is open to appropriate change and well-suited to it by its guiding conviction that wherever two or more are together Jesus is among us, enabling us to adapt to those changes all around.
“Change has always been part of the Christian journey,” he said, advocating the use of the church’s 275th anniversary to consider the path to the future. “We can learn from our predecessors.”
He noted how less than 300 years after Christ had died on the Roman Cross Christianity had become the official faith of the Roman empire.
“We would do well to learn how they reached a pagan world, creating a community that provided unprecedented equality, regardless of social status, nationality or gender,” he said.
That message of learning from the past, was visited by Pastor Susan Webster Gray in her sermon after the fellowship hall dinner, on the significance of the 1774 Election Day Sermon of First Congregational’s first pastor The Rev. Gad Hancock, who criticized the “Devine Right of Kings” in the presence of Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Gen. Thomas Gage.
Ministers at the time were among the most educated in the colonies at the time.
“These sermons were life-changing to those who read and heard the spoken word,” Gray said.
Founded in 1748 during the Great Awakening, the First Congregational Church in Hanson, it’s pastor Hitchcock had been invited to Boston and “ignited a key spark that helped ignite our American Revolution,” Smith said earlier that morning.
“Civil authority is the production of combined society – not born with, but delegated to certain individuals for the advancement of the common benefit.”
Gray spoke of how the Election Day sermon is currently used by institutions of higher learning, including Hillsdale College in Michigan, as important because it presented the First Principals – the principles of freedom, equality and self-government.
“If I am mistaken … all America is mistaken with me,” Hitchcock had said.
While America had to fend off the British again in 1812, but a greater attac came from within, Smith noted.
“It is difficult for us to imagine now that our nation’s founders had not settled thre issue of slavery at the beginning,” he said. From abolition of the slave trade to emancipation, to removing the deceitful practices that have allowed prejudices to continue, “makes, indeed, for a long road to freedom.”
In the 20th century, the work has become a task of building the nation’s moral core.
“The wisdom gained from our past history has helped us to guard the flock during times of crisis,” he said, including the COVID pandemic. “Will we ever forget drive-in Easter? Live-streamed worship? Zoom-based Bible studies and church meetings?”
Challenges continue, including the distortions of the truth of Jesus, Smith sermonized.
“We are not an historical organization,” he said. “We have a history, but even more so, we have a present mission.”
Three guiding thoughts should guide the church into its third century, Smith said: We belong to each other; we care for one another; and together, we testify with the word of God’s grace.
Select Board Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett attended the event, presenting a proclamation from the board of Sunday, Aug. 27 as First Congregational Church in Hanson Day, as well as a citation from the General Court sponsored by state Rep. Josh Cutler, D-Duxbury and supported state Rep. David DeCoste, R-Rockland.