Just a half-hour’s ride from the concrete and steel of New York City, Stony Point Conference Center welcomes Presbyterians to the Hudson River Valley. But its serene appearance shrouds a season of turmoil as it struggles to formulate a future for significant mission.
Decades ago, the center reverberated with the sounds of would-be mission workers getting trained for the overseas work that lay ahead. The training was enriched by the conversations enjoyed with experienced mission workers residing at the Center while on furlough from the field. Interspersed among the Presbyterians were mission workers from other denominations as well. The cross-filtration of traditions, cultures, and ethnicities filled the air with scents akin to a farmers’ market.
Mission training and worker itineration gradually decentralized, so the center quieted, and was even shuttered in the early 1970s.
Jim and Louise Palm pressed to reopen the center, and in the late 1970s were appointed to lead its reorganization. They focused on offering retreat, conference, and meeting space for Presbyterians and their friends. The Center provided the oft-needed getaway for national staff and for denominational committee meetings, given its proximity to the headquarters of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A. in the city. The Interdenominational Center at 475 Riverside Dr. was the center for other denominations as well as the National Council of Churches, so Stony Point’s facilities and services were kept busy.
With the reunion between the UPCUSA with the Presbyterian Church U.S. in 1983 and with the transfer of their respective headquarters from New York and Atlanta to Louisville, the need for Stony Point was questioned again. Identified along with the Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina and Ghost Ranch in New Mexico as one of the three national conference centers serving the whole Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), its support was written into the denomination’s budget. But it lacked the regional constituencies that the other two Centers had cultivated, given its earlier emphases.
The 25-acre campus is under the leadership of Executive Director William H. Pindar. On any given weekend, one could hear the voices and music of Ghanaian Presbyterians, hymns of a Baptist group from an inner city church, and impassioned conversations between German and American delegates engaged in working for world peace in a transatlantic dialog. And amid this international flavor, children from the Village of Stony Point would come on the weekdays, attending the day care center housed on the campus.
However, income has not kept pace with expenses. Apart from providing accounting, legal and a few other services, the General Assembly budget has phased out all direct funding for the program over the past three years (of a budget of about $1.5 million, the GA used to underwrite about $200,000). And Stony Point again has found itself a center sorting out its mission.
The board invited the PC(USA)’s former moderator and spouse, Rick and Kitty Ufford-Chase, to help them cast a vision for the next chapter of the Center. What emerged was a plan to form an ecumenical order for peace, justice, and discipleship. Tapping into the wave of interest in what’s being called “the new monasticism” (see Outlook cover article, Nov. 26), the board adopted a vision that hopes to form an intentional community of permanent and short-term residents, who will help maintain the property and service the conferences and retreats they will continue to host. While many of those events will be planned by the groups who book the site, these residents will offer educational resourcing and facilitating.
As in the case of the Scottish island retreat at Iona — an image they have held forth throughout the planning process — the center will be a place of spiritual nurture and feeding. A Labyrinth, situated a couple of hundred yards from the main area of activity, provides a tranquil site for prayer and contemplation. Nearby, in a copse, a stone and glass Meditation Space invites sojourners to spend quiet time communing with God, lifting up their innermost thoughts and concerns. The setting and vision “speaks to a deep hunger to connect our work in the world with our spiritual lives,” commented Rick Ufford-Chase.
Given the long-time multi-cultural engagement within the church and interfaith dialogue with other faith communities, Stony Point is well suited to fulfill this vision. But Ufford-Chase acknowledges it will require much of its participants. “People want more demands placed on them than is asked for in their typical church experience — both for folks into the church and folks disenchanted with the church,” he elaborated. “What you’ve got to do is to raise the bar and make it clear that it’s hard to follow Jesus.”
Time will tell if the vision will materialize. For one thing, the General Assembly Council will need to endorse the plan before it can be implemented. But perhaps there will be an “Iona on the Hudson.”
