© 2006. Used by permission.
CHARLOTTE — More than 140 Scots are part of a study week focusing on dilemmas facing congregations in both the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and celebrating the ties that bind the two denominations as a mother-church and her now-grown offspring.
Under way now in Charlotte, N.C., the week-long event is being financed and hosted by the city’s four largest Presbyterian congregations, Myers Park, Covenant, First, and Sardis churches. The goal is to exchange both models for ministry and address common problems such as membership loss.
“Its really individual churches (doing this), rather than the church nationally,” said Robin McAlpine, a pastor and a member of a commission within the Church of Scotland that is studying the future. ” … This is more of an informal arrangement to take ideas back into local congregations.”
More than 50 percent of the 144-member Scot delegation are laypeople, McAlpine said.
They are searching out models for team ministry that may be modified to fit the denomination’s unwieldy network of parishes, where exhausted clergy are obliged to minister to all Scots living in geographic regions, not just individual congregations. Linking Presbyterian clergy within those regions — and cultivating lay teams — is one approach under study.
To do the work, McAlpine said, the church is trying to “recognize the gifts of everybody” — to both mobilize laypeople and to recover from a shortage of ordained clergy.
Morris Coull, a now-retired pastor from Stirling, Scotland, couldn’t agree more. Coull’s studies of team ministries in large U.S. churches in 1993 helped put this expanded project into motion. He spent time with the now deceased Frank Harrington at Peachtree Church in Atlanta — and in 2004 — with several U.S. churches, including Myers Park. —
Two years ago, he says, he was just “knocked out” by Myers Park’s 4,200-member operation. Coull and several other Scot pastors spent joint sabbatical time there. When they worried about how to tell what they’d observed here back home, it was Myers Park’s senior pastor, Steve Eason, who came up with the solution.
“You can’t go home and tell people what you’ve seen,” he said, recalling the brainstorming session two years ago when the idea hit him. If the question is: How to take this back? Then the answer is: Don’t. Bring them here. “That way, we can build relationships …
“And it all fell out on the table.”
Raising the funding to bring the Scot delegation here wasn’t a hard sell in Mecklenburg County, which has one of the highest populations of descendants of Scot-Irish immigrants.
Within one week, the (Francis) Makemie Fund, named for the founder of U.S. Presbyterianism, raised $206,000 from Charlotte’s four largest congregations — and the program was on, even supplementing airfare for the delegation. “This is the mother-church,” Eason said. “It was something people wanted to do. They wanted to give back.”
Eason himself — a Methodist convert to Presbyterianism — has ties to the Stirling church, the outgrowth of a pastoral exchange there in 1999, while still a pastor in Charleston, S.C. And, he is the author of a new book by Geneva Press, Making Disciples, Making Leaders, which is a methodology for creating and sustaining team ministries.
The week is packed.
Iain Torrance — himself a Scot and now president of Princeton Theological Seminary — opened the welcoming worship service Sunday night at Myers Park, the first of the four churches to hold evening services. William Willimon was the keynote speaker on Monday and workshops are under way Tuesday, led by both national and local leaders.
The Scottish visitors will spend Wednesday volunteering in several of Charlotte’s ministries to the needy, and, on Thursday, will be among the golfers in a charity tournament that will raise money for ministries to children in both Scotland and in Charlotte.
“It’s a slow process in Scotland,” said Coull, speaking about team ministry, but he’d like to see the model applied by pastors, congregations and sessions. Ministers are accustomed to working alone and congregations are accustomed to letting them,” he said, despite the exhaustion.
But this hands-on approach is a way to build enthusiasm. “People just learn so much connecting with other people. They can talk over coffee. And we hope they’ll form relationships that will carry over,” he said.
That is Eason’s hope too — that this alliance not be a one-time-deal.
The U.S. church, he said, has much to learn from the Scots who, like Presbyterians here, face huge membership losses. “But they show perseverance. If only eight percent of the members show up, they open the doors,” he said, praising the Scot church’s tenacity and commitment.
But leaders on both sides of this trans-Atlantic fellowship want more than work to be the outcome of the gathering. “We want relationships,” said Eason. “We want relationships both ways …
“With the Internet, we can keep up with each other in ways that we could not have done 20 years ago.”
ALEXA SMITH is a freelance writer living in Louisville, Ky.
