A Time for Holy Disatisfaction
After six decades of ministry, an eminent churchman assesses the health of the body of Christ.
January 1, 1983
After six decades of ministry, an eminent churchman assesses the health of the body of Christ. David Elton Trueblood was born, as he likes to say, "in the last month of the last century" (December, 1900). That tells you something about his mind; it is always taking note of things others miss. He has a ready explanation for why he retired from teaching philosophy at Earlham College promptly at age sixty-five: "So people wouldn't ask me why I didn't." Other octogenarians in Richmond, Indiana, may have trouble remembering their Zip Code (47374), but not Trueblood: it is, he notes, a palindrome. He has decided not to write any more books; thirty-two is enough. They include such notables as The Predicament of Modern Man, The Company of the Committed, and The Incendiary Fellowship. But these later years are not for reposing; he is still the active president of Yokefellows International, his beloved order of laity and clergy who commit themselves to interior discipline and exterior ministry in the world. Trueblood maintains his lifelong habit of being in bed by ten each evening in order to maximize the next day s early hours. That is why LEADERSHIP editors Dean Merrill and Marshall Shelley arranged to interview him at nine o'clock on a bright October morning in his library, next door to Virginia Cottage, his home on the Earlham campus. From sixty years of teaching, writing, and preaching (he was recorded as a Quaker minister when Warren G. Harding was president, and served as chaplain at Stanford for a decade), he talked about the well-being of the contemporary church.
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