Where do you go to find the greatest innovations? One place to look is among the young. That’s the way it was six years ago when a group of mostly Gen-X pastors formed the New Wineskins Initiative. Fueled by youthful energy, they dared to ask not only “Why?” but also “Why not?”
They diagnosed the failure of our connectional system to really connect pastors and elders among congregations. They imagined a church where informal networking could lift 21st century Presbyterianism to a new level of collegiality, accountability, and transforming ministry. Many of their brainstorms needed refining, as well they acknowledged, but their ideas were hope-filled.
Those ideas now have been refined into a set of proposals (www.newwineconvo.com/Strategy_Team_Report.pdf ) being recommended for action at this week’s convocation, in Orlando, of the renamed New Wineskins Association of Churches. What have they developed? A 155-page apologeia for secession, supported by a recitation of exaggerations of our denomination’s demise.
That apologeia hyperbolizes both the theological flaws and official status of the Trinity paper that was received–not adopted, nor approved–at the 2006 General Assembly. It remonstrates against the adopted PUP report for “effectively abandoning ordination standards,” while ignoring the revival of rigor in ministerial examinations that has resulted from PUP. It also sings the praises of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), while overlooking the fact that PUP’s adoption means that the PC(USA) now examines candidates in the same way that the EPC does.
The NWAC report does offer a hopeful vision of God’s “new thing,” proposing steps to “cross over the Jordan into the Promised Land.” What new thing awaits? Membership in the EPC, a homogenous fellowship that now has about three churches per state. If all 141 NWAC churches secede to join them, they will then have about six churches per state.
Talk about a disconnected church! As one former PC(USA) pastor friend reveled to me eight years ago, “Jack, you’ve got to join us in the EPC. You can run your church however you want, and you’ll long be retired before anybody in the denomination notices.”
Where do you go to find the great innovators? How about presbytery leaders? That’s the last place many of us would look. Well, take a close look.
A week after the meeting of the NWAC, presbytery and synod representatives will gather in Albuquerque at the Future of Middle Governing Bodies Conversation, called by the recently formed Task Force on the Viability of Presbyteries and Synods. These regional church leaders will be addressing connectional breakdown concerns. They also will be discussing the reality of diminished funding, and well they know that necessity–not youthfulness–is their mother of invention.
They will hear about inventions and innovations being implemented on the ground. Examples? Salem Presbytery in North Carolina has closed its central office and dispersed its staff to three scattered churches, to build collegiality among each area’s congregations. Three western presbyteries are sharing staff; three Georgia presbyteries are launching 40 racial-ethnic fellowships; the “fab five” presbyteries in central N.Y. are working in partnership. Living Waters Synod has launched “Living Waters for the World” (see article, p.11).
They also will hear of presbyteries building trust through retreats and the formation of theological reflection groups, pastor-theologian groups, clergy cohort groups, covenant groups, and lectionary study groups. They may even hear that some presbytery committees have become communities of mutual support and congregational partnership.
One plea to the presbytery and synod leaders. Please do not produce a new structure to solve the ills of the church. Structures can evolve to coordinate efforts, but they won’t generate innovation. Indeed, restructuring exacerbates distrust, it replaces old bureaucracies with new ones, and it exhausts the change agents themselves.
Those are some lessons that the NWAC folks would do well to learn from the presbytery leaders.
From where will inventiveness for the future come? Of necessity–who is the mother of it all–it will come from folks committed to being Presbyterian, you know, people organized into presbyteries, each of which by definition is a collegium of ministers and elders in a local area who share responsibility for ministry in that area. Nobody is likely to come up with any innovation to improve on that.
–JHH
