Bryan Black's Story

Two summers ago, I headed out with our Youth Choir for its annual mission tour. The return trip from Texas brought us through my hometown of Birmingham, so naturally we gave a concert and spent the night sleeping on the gymnasium floor of Bluff Park UMC, my home church. Birmingham has become a good deal more sophisticated over the last fifteen years and the church has built an imposing new sanctuary that dwarfs the one I knew as a child. But in concert, I stood facing the choir just a few feet from the baptismal font in the old Sanctuary where my parents had presented me for baptism forty years ago. They made a covenant with God and the congregation on my behalf that I would be kept in the faith. Many of the people who made the promises and lived the examples are no longer with us including Mrs. McCracken, the kindhearted woman who taught the first children’s choir I ever sang in. She wasn’t there to see me come home with my own crop of teenage singers, but her promises, my parent’s promises and God’s faithfulness revealed the power of a covenant unbroken by time and change.