I’ve got a series of busy days ahead. Today is the beginning of the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. For most of my life I have been active in the conference where I have lived and served. I began attending conference annual meetings when I was a high school student and continued to do so through my college and seminary education. As a pastor I felt that active participation in the conference, including serving on conference committees was part of my job. In the congregations I served, participation by lay people in conference gatherings increased during the years that I served. Now retired, our conference requires clergy to attend the annual conference as part of the requirements of maintaining our standing as ministers. This year, however, we will be attending online as opposed to in person because of many other busy activities in our lives. Today, in addition to the conference meeting, I have a doctor’s appointment that would be a huge inconvenience to reschedule. When I inquired, I learned that rescheduling would mean a minimum of a three month delay in seeing the doctor. While I am not dealing with an emergency, the delay would be an inconvenience for me.

In addition, I am booked on a 5 am flight on Sunday Morning that will take me to Cleveland, site of the national offices of our church, for a three-day retreat and development conference for a major new initiative that our church is making in resources for children in the church. This is part of a project that has been a lifelong passion of mine and I am honored to have been invited to participate.

Since we are human and have limited energy it makes sense for us to forego the two and a half hour commute to Seattle to attend the conference annual meeting in person. There are distinct disadvantages to attending online and we do not plan to make it our regular mode of participation but it is what we are able to do this year.

In preparation for the busy days ahead, I was packing for my trip to Cleveland last night. For most of my career, decisions about what to wear were not a challenge for me. Ministers wore white dress shirts, suits and ties. Later colored shirts became more common, but suits and ties remained the usual dress for professional activities for clergy. For much of my career I wore ties every day except days off from work. Times have changed, however. Our congregation is a much more casual place. There is one pastor at our church whom I have never see wear a tie and who wears jeans and t shirts most Sundays. The congregation also is generally dressed causally for gathering of the congregation. When I began to serve the congregation as an interim minister, the lead pastor commented that she had told her father, who is a similar age to me, that a suit was “too much.” “A sport coat might be OK, but ditch the suit and tie.” So I was careful not to wear suits and ties when I was serving the congregation. Most Sundays I wore long sleeve shirts with collars, but left my collar open and did not wear a jacket. I couldn’t quite bring myself to wear t shirts for worship, but I definitely dressed casually.

When I retired, however, I decided that I would give myself permission to be one of the “old” people in the church. On Sundays, I dress up for church even though almost no one else does. I have some nice suits and quite a collection of bright bow ties and I enjoy wearing them. I don’t worry about whether I fit in or am adopting the common fashion of others. I don’t have anyone I need to impress. I just dress the way I want to dress on Sundays. And for the meetings in Cleveland, where I’m fairly certain I will be the oldest participant, I decided to pack dress shirts and ties for each day. I know that I’ll be the only one to dress that way. It doesn’t bother me. I’m glad to be myself. I don’t have any need to not be the age that I am. And I don’t have anyone to impress.

One of the advantages of being a senior in a gathering like the one I will be attending is that I have memory of the past. I carry a fair amount of institutional memory for this gathering. Our task will be to design the process of producing a new set of educational curricula for the church. I will be the only participant who has actually served in a curricula development project in our church. In fact, I have served in several. I was an editor for the denomination’s first educational resource to be produced in a digital format. And I’ve written hundreds of lessons for paper resources. This new curriculum won’t be like anything we’ve done before. It will involve online learning, webinars, and digital resources. But a bit of experience is valuable enough to the project that I was invited to participate. I have no intention of trying to revive the past, but there are times when it helps to have a good rearview mirror when moving forward.

I recently read about a study conduced at the University of Nevada that compiled data from over 20 years of study on the practice of walking backwards. The research has been used to increase hamstring flexibility, strengthen back muscles, reduce lower back pain, protect athletes from injury, benefit suffers of osteoarthritis, and assist in stroke recovery. Range of motion in hip and knee joints is reduced when walking backwards, ankle joints are strengthened, and plantar flexion movement is increased.

People have touted the benefits of backward walking for a long time. During the 19th Century, the activity of “retro-walking” was an eccentric hobby. In the summer of 1915, 50-year
-old lPatrick Hamon walked backwards from San Francisco to New York City to win a wager of $20,000 - a huge sum at the time.

I have no intention of reversing the direction of travel for our church. But I do think that I can provide some benefits as we move into a bold new future by being able to remember the path that brought us to the point where we have found ourselves.

I suspect that most others will hardly notice how I’m dressed. I can be a temporary reminder of the past as they focus on imagining new paths for the future.