NASHVILLE — Gradye Parsons, director of operations for the Office of the General Assembly, laid down the challenge from the very start of the first-ever National Elders Conference of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) August 29-31 with the theme “Elder as Spiritual Leader: Reclaiming the Call.”
“We want to create a bunch of dangerous elders,” Parsons said, elders “who know what the ministry of being an elder is about and want to claim that ministry for their own.”
The 330 elders attending the conference faced a number of encouraging and challenging speakers on the facets of their ministry.
Elders should be worship leaders, according to co-presenters Melva Costen and Rhashell Hunter. They thanked the elders in attendance for “saying yes” when pastors call on them to lead out in church ministries.
Worship, witness, and service are inseparable, Costen said. “We live as we worship, and we can’t lead without realizing that.” She is one of the denomination’s foremost authorities on worship, the recently-retired Helmar Emil Nielsen Professor of Music and Worship at the Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta.
Hunter, director of the PC(USA)’s Racial Ethnic and Women’s Ministries program area, advised elders to enjoy the times they’re asked to preach. “Good preaching delights in God,” she said.
Elders need to be serious pray-ers. Poet Ann Weems thinks Presbyterian elders must do something that King Lear’s daughter said she couldn’t do: heave their hearts into their mouths. “How can we heave our hearts into a statement of faith?” she asked. “We heave our hearts by voicing astonishment at the wonder of God’s grace.”
She defined prayer as “a yearning after the heart of God. We just open our hearts and the Holy One waits.” But when we do pray, it ought to be something worth praying.
“I am concerned,” Weems said, “that in our prayers we confess rule-breaking instead of heart-breaking.”
Elders need to be Bible teachers. Freda Gardner couldn’t attend the conference, but her manuscript exploring effective Bible teaching was presented by Valerie Small, manager of General Assembly nominations and moderatorial staff services for the Office of General Assembly. Gardner is professor emerita of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary and in 1999 was General Assembly Moderator.
She recalled educator Parker Palmer’s definition of what constitutes good teaching: teachers “create a space where truth can be known.” Elders who teach can use good teaching techniques to the unique message of Scripture. Gardner said she likes Harvard University chaplain Peter Gomes’ definition of the Bible found in his book, The Good Book: It’s “the living Word from the living God for a needy people.”
Elders need to be on mission. Love. Go. Guide. Corey Schlosser-Hall wants Presbyterian elders to use that job description to help the church take a turn toward mission.
Schlosser-Hall, an elder and executive presbyter of North Puget Sound Presbytery, picked the verbs from the greatest commandment and the great commissioning — love and go — and added “guide” to the list of elder duties, as in guiding a ship through reefs.
Elders should be courageous and far-sighted uniters.
The conference ended Aug. 31 with a passionate speech on leadership and inclusiveness by former Mississippi governor and Presbyterian elder William Winter.
Winter, a longtime member of Fondren Church in Jackson, cited examples of courageous elders working within their congregations.
After a century of strife, the northern and southern Presbyterian churches reunited in 1983. “So many had struggled to reach the Promised Land of unity,” Winter said. “Now, at a time we should feel gratitude and contentment, what do we find: ripples of discontentment spreading ominously across our denomination.
“If we persist in this course,” he predicted, “we will wind up in more little groups telling ourselves only what we are comfortable hearing.”
Winter called on Presbyterian elders and others not to be “haunted by fear, mistrust, and alienation, retreating into cultural enclaves to get away from people with funny names and different skin color.”
“We have to recognize what some of us white southerners had to learn more than 40 years ago,” he said, “that no one is free until we are all free.
Mike Ferguson, a Presbyterian elder, is a reporter for the Baker City Herald in Baker City, Ore.
