“Communication, communication, communication.”
That’s how Linda Valentine, executive director of the General Assembly Council, recently expressed what she sees as a top need of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
She frequently cites, for example, a Presbyterian Panel survey from May 2005 that revealed only 15 percent of Presbyterians in the pews considered themselves to be “generally informed” about the denomination’s mission work.
It’s become almost a mantra — there’s a disconnect between the national church and the grassroots, and that to build support (both financial and otherwise), the denomination needs to do a better job of “telling the story” of Presbyterians involved in mission.
Exactly what that means, however — how to tell those stories most effectively, what technology and strategies to use in a financially-constricted environment — is still being worked out. It’s also not totally clear what impact those “good news” stories about the PC(USA) might have on the denomination’s track record of unrelenting conflict.
But what does seem worth trumpeting to many is this: There are untold stories of Presbyterians, from churches big and small, living out their faith — and really making a difference.
For example, Carol Hylkema, a General Assembly Council member from Detroit, spent time with her husband recently working on Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in Mississippi.
While she was there, three groups from the same small church in Wisconsin came down, showing up one after the other, to work on a family’s house. “That’s 75 or 80 people from a church of 200,” Hylkema said in an interview. “These kinds of stories are all over the place. … So often, we’re so busy fighting about other things or hassling about the things we don’t feel good about, that we don’t tell people” about the impact Presbyterians are making.
Already, the PC(USA) has started to make some changes.
Karen L. Schmidt of Chicago, who’s been a senior executive in marketing and sales positions, has been hired as the PC(USA)’s deputy executive director for communications and funds development — some hope she will be a catalyst for a new communications strategy.
The denomination has created a Presbyterian Communicators Network to link communications professionals working for the national church, in middle governing bodies and in congregations.
And there is an increasing drumbeat to “tell the story” — in some cases, people say, to tell the positive story before the critics get there first.
“I think it’s fair to say there’s a sense among the leadership that the true story of what the PC(USA) is doing in mission and in many areas is not reaching the people in the pews,” said John Bolt, a General Assembly Council member from West Virginia and an experienced journalist. “That the message has, for a variety of reasons, been misinterpreted or misunderstood. There are a lot of very good things being done by very faithful people, and that message is not getting out … The church’s message has been in other people’s hands, and it is time to be more assertive in telling our own story.”
The Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands campaign — a $40 million, five-year fundraising blitz for international mission work and new church development — is doing exactly that, sending out regular e-mailed updates to a list of several hundred people and to middle governing body leaders, telling stories of gifts to the campaign and explaining how the money is being used.
Emily Enders Odom, a minister who serves as communications director for Hearts & Hands, said anecdotal feedback shows “this is exactly the kind of news that we need now in terms of lifting up what is good and what is right and what is faithful about our denomination at a time when all we seem to focus on is the strife and the discord. There is good news out there.”
And telling those stories — stories that involve both large financial gifts and more modest ones, megachurches and tiny congregations — presents Presbyterians with “new models of faithfulness,” Odom said. People start to think, With God, anything is possible. If this little church can do this, if this one individual can do this, then I can step up.
But some contend that the denomination’s problems run deeper than a lack of understanding about what the PC(USA) is doing.
Some blamed the news media, for example, for misrepresenting the General Assembly’s actions in 2004 regarding a phased, selective divestiture in some companies doing business in Israel.
Some less-than-accurate stories appeared in the media, to be sure — but also news accounts that got it right. Some folks were confused. But there also were Presbyterians and Jews who understood perfectly well what the General Assembly had done, but who believed it was the wrong thing to do.
There are also people who disagree fervently with PC(USA) policies on abortion, for example, or with the report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the PC(USA). Some folks have heard the story — and knowing what’s going on does not necessarily make them feel better. The denomination has no shortage of critics.
“It is the case that many people don’t understand what the denomination is doing in mission, particularly global mission,” said Rob Weingartner, executive director of The Outreach Foundation, which is involved in mission in the United States and overseas. But it’s also true, Weingartner said, that “there are many in the church who feel that the General Assembly Council and even the (General) Assembly itself have not adequately prioritized what the church should be doing at the national level.”
Also, many congregations and individuals have jumped into mission work themselves, raising money, going on mission trips, connecting with evangelistic and relief efforts around the globe. For example, mission networks have sprung up around particular geographic areas or groups, connecting, for example, Presbyterians concerned about mission in China or Mexico or Ghana.
“I don’t hear people saying, ‘Gee, I wish I could hear more of what the General Assembly is doing,”’ said Bill Young, executive director of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. “I see more apathy than antagonism. People don’t know it’s here, but it doesn’t matter. People are doing their own thing.”
Presbyterians do want, Young said, to find ways to share “best practices” or models for training or doing mission in a particular region or context. But that may mean congregations want to hear from each other, more than hearing from a central source, he said.
“The days of a single centralized administrative mission structure — that’s really in the past,” Weingartner said. “What we see now are networked, multiple centers of influence. Having everything come out of the home office is really an old way of doing things.”
All the mainline denominations “are concerned about being out-of-touch with congregations,” said David A. Roozen, professor of religion and society at Hartford Theological Seminary and director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. “They hear congregations saying, ‘The denomination is not concerned about us, they’re not really paying attention to us.’ That’s pervasive.”
Such thinking can lead to a sense of disenfranchisement .
“One of the things congregations are saying is, ‘You’re not listening to us.’ That’s not the same as, ‘You’re not talking to us,'” said Roozen, who has done research on mainline denominations. “For the national just to send more mail and e-mail and whatever, videos and all the sophisticated stuff about what the national is doing, isn’t going to deal with the issue.”
There also may be concern at the grassroots that “what the denomination means by communication is ‘spin what we’re doing'” in a way that’s not forthcoming, Roozen said.
And the climate for communication is complicated, he said, with mainline denominations struggling financially, with endless information available online, with church-goers willing to switch denominations as it suits them, with congregations having their own stories to tell.
But some do perceive a desire for a greater sense of connection in the PC(USA). “An awful lot of Presbyterians have been proud to be Presbyterian –they’ve been proud of this denomination,” said Gary Torrens, the PC(USA)’s coordinator of governing body relations. “They don’t want the national church to tell them what to do,” Torrens said. “But they do want to feel connected, I think. … We need to be as high-tech as we can be. And we need to be high-touch — they value the personal relationships.”
David York, who directs the Hearts & Hands campaign, said one consequence of a lack of feeling connected can be “the drying up of financial resources. Certainly, there are some people and churches that are disenchanted, but in many places it’s not that.”
Instead, people aren’t likely to be involved or to give money, he said, if they don’t know the work the denomination is doing.
York has found, as he travels around the church, that “they’re glad to have the stories that we send and they’re glad to see us as representatives of the denomination … There is a hunger for this feeling of family and connectedness.”
One question on the table is what methods to use for reaching people in the pews.
Some have suggested the possibility of “good news” e-mails to pastors, which the pastors then could pass on to the session members. But do pastors want that? They often serve as gatekeepers — are they willing to pass on news from the denomination to their congregations or sessions?
Without a comprehensive plan, it’s possible to overwhelm people with too much information, too many e-mails, so “it just winds up on somebody’s desk or in somebody’s trashcan,” York said.
“To think that any one thing is a silver bullet,” Roozen said, “is at best naïve.”
