ATLANTA — Think of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as a lemon-colored rotary phone in a cell-phone world.
Useful in its time. Not right for now.
That was the image that Vic Pentz, senior pastor of Peachtree Church in Atlanta, used to kick off the first-ever gathering of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship (https://www.presbyterianglobalfellowship.org) — an entity that he acknowledged is brand-new, is still taking shape, that no one is exactly sure how to describe.
But more than 800 people from 42 states have come to this meeting at Peachtree — ready for something different, wanting to “move beyond the old model of mission, which is simply sending great gobs of money from the West to the rest,” Pentz told the opening night gathering on August 17.
So he thunked the yellow rotary phone down on the pulpit — and there it stayed, a visual clue as to what some say is not working with the PC(USA).
Pentz and others announced the creation of the Global Fellowship in May — saying they were not leaving the PC(USA), but want to encourage a new way of connecting congregations that are committed to mission work. The invitation to be involved actually came from more than a dozen “inviting congregations” (https://www.presbyterianglobalfellowship.org/Default.aspx?pg=invitingcongregations).
And Pentz made it clear that the fellowship is trying to “demonstrate a hopeful way of being Presbyterian in the 21st century” — a new approach that some evangelicals who are distressed by the direction of the PC(USA), some of whom are outright embarrassed by their denomination, may consider essential.
The fellowship’s supporters include leaders from several key renewal groups in the PC(USA). Michael Walker, executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, was among a small group that began meeting last winter to brainstorm.
The fellowship has said it “will seek wisdom, support and other resources” from groups already involved in mission, such as Presbyterians for Renewal (https://www.pfrenewal.org/ ), the Outreach Foundation (https://www.theoutreachfoundation.org/) and Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship (https://www.pff.net/ .)
And it is encouraging targeted financial giving — “to invest our financial resources only in those local and global mission efforts that we believe are biblically faithful and accountable, within the Presbyterian family and through other partnerships into which the Lord calls us,” according to a covenant that people at this gathering are being asked to sign.
During the opening session, Pentz and some of the other organizers of the fellowship began to lay out the underpinnings for the vision — starting with the idea of a global Christian church that’s exploding in growth and vitality, and with the lemon-colored rotary phone, that symbol of the old, outdated way of doing things in the mainline churches in the United States.
NEW PHONE, OLD STORY
The world is demanding “that we put up or shut up,” Pentz told the gathering — mainline churches no longer can expect loyalty or some kind of preferred status.
Put off by hypocrisy — by lukewarm commitment of churchgoers, by pastors who stray sexually, by Christians whose marriages fall apart as easily as everyone else’s — “what they are saying is, `Show us something real. Show us how your gospel is good news for us,’ “ Pentz said.
And if the churches can’t do that, he said, the people will not come.
The PC(USA) has in recent decades been “among the most powerless branches of Christendom,” Pentz said. But the churches in places like South Korea and Brazil and East Africa “are on fire in ways we can hardly imagine here in the West,” he said, with some of those churches renting stadiums to find places big enough in which to worship, while in Scotland old Presbyterian churches are being turned into bars and discos.
Some in the PC(USA) contend the church shouldn’t offer an “antiquated message” to a world of pluralism and diversity, Pentz said. They don’t want to hear the old standards, that “Jesus is the one way to God” or that the Bible sets the standards for sexual ethics, he said.
But the Global Fellowship wants to pair the good news of Christianity with new technology and a sense of international connection, Pentz said.
“We say ‘yes’ to the new phone with the great old message,” he said.
And the room exploded with applause.
OPEN THE CLUBHOUSE
Steve Hayner, another of the fellowship organizers and a professor of evangelism at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., used the image of the institutional church as a clubhouse for insiders.
Over time, the early evangelical church became less of a movement and more of an institution, Hayner said. “Instead of moving into the culture, the church compelled people to come in, and the church became kind of a clubhouse,” with baptism as the rite of initiation.
“The clubhouse, the church, saw itself as the repository of God’s grace,” Hayner said.
And Western Christians saw evangelism as filling up “little Thermos bottles of grace,” which were “taken from the heart of Christendom to the heart of darkness.”
When the church in the West — the old mainline institutional church — began to fail, the church bureaucrats responded by reorganizing, writing new mission statements, trying to figure out what the culture wanted and doing a better job of marketing to become more like the culture, Hayner said.
Instead of really changing, he said, “It’s like trying to polish the rotary dial phone.”
But while the mainline churches cling to the past, the global church is alive and thriving — with 27 million people a year converting to Christianity, with more growth in the 20th century than the previous 19 centuries combined, Hayner said. India has 15 million Christian believers, China 85 million, Africa 90 million.
What can Presbyterians in the U.S. learn from the global church, Hayner asked?
For one thing, realize that the purpose of the church is to join God’s mission in the world, not to focus on the clubhouse. “The action is out there, it’s not in here,” he said. “God didn’t just stay in heaven and say, `Y’all come!’ in his best Southern accent.”
Churches need to consider what they do not only on Sunday mornings, but on Tuesday afternoons, Hayner said — to think about how to evangelize in neighborhoods, offices, schools and shops. Korean Presbyterians go out two by two on Saturdays, knocking on doors to meet their neighbors, he said.
But Hayner admitted that he sometimes shrinks from the opportunities he has to share his faith. He’s learned to pray: “Help me to see what you are doing. Let my heart be broken by the things that break your heart. Help me not to duck” when he’s given a chance to talk with others not already in the clubhouse.
In the Southern hemisphere, churches are growing because they know that a commitment to evangelism is “not just a program, but an identity” — it’s part of who they are, Hayner said.
He also said that “the task before us is not getting everyone in the church to agree with our point of view — it ain’t going to happen.”
But what does need to happen is for Presbyterians “to turn our faces from being an inward church to being an outward church,” Hayner said — to be Christians “afire with the love of Jesus, and to walk into the world with that every day.”
