LOUISVILLE – In a time when the narrative of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is one of decline, what is the story of Presbyterian identity?
“We might do well with being less obsessed with what is” – with sliding membership, congregations leaving for other denominations, smaller churches, less money, said Bill Golderer, convening pastor of Broad Street Ministries in Philadelphia and pastor of Arch Street Presbyterian Church. Instead, he suggested, show some curiosity and a willingness to step into the unknown.
Presbyterians are “so good at building institutions. We’re very good at looking at what is and assessing and evaluating it.” Maybe a better question is a revelatory one: “Who is it with God’s help you hope to become? What is yet to be revealed about who we are?”
At the annual Moderators’ Conference, as the moderators of the PC(USA)’s presbyteries and synods gathered in Louisville Nov. 8 for a weekend of training, Golderer and others encouraged the moderators not to be overwhelmed with the task of leading a stressed denomination at a difficult time.
“Who will define for us who we are as God’s covenant community?” asked General Assembly moderator Neal Presa, who convened this gathering along with vice-moderator Tom Trinidad.
Keynote speakers Golderer and Theresa Cho, who is associate pastor of St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, provided a mix of practical and big-picture tips for the mid-council moderators. Among them:
Assessment. Presbyteries are like kim chi, said Cho, a Korean American. Some who like this fermented Korean vegetable dish prefer to eat it early on – when it’s fresher and milder. Some love it stronger and stinkier. Like the various stages of kim chi, Cho said, each presbytery has its own flavor and is distinctive.
Cho, a former moderator of the Presbytery of San Francisco, told the moderators “it’s vital for you to assess where you are at” throughout the year, both individually and as a presbytery. She moderated a presbytery that hadn’t had an executive presbyter in years and was so polarized that it had created a committee called the Detox Team.
Preparing to lead that, Cho had to assess her own skills and abilities; her hopes, expectations and limitations. Why was she picked to be moderator – even though, when she took the job she’d only ever moderated a handful of session meetings? She has been in leadership at national church events, and being racial ethnic, a woman and relatively young, “I killed three birds with one stone,” Cho said.
She reminded the moderators that “you are called to this specific moment and time, for a specific place, with these specific skills.” Identify those – and play to those strengths.
Community. As someone who grew up a Pentecostal evangelical and chose to become Presbyterian, Cho said she appreciates Robert’s Rules of Order and the merits of an efficiently run meeting. But “presbytery meetings should be about building relationships,” she said – and parliamentary rules offer sometimes underused tools for creating community, such as opportunities to take a break from motions “and just talk about the issue at hand.”
Cho also encouraged the moderators to find ways to show welcome and offer hospitality. At the second presbytery meeting she moderated, “I knew the toxicity level was so high,” Cho said, that she made a special effort to be welcoming. She loves to bake – that’s part of her package of skills and strengths – so she baked and decorated 200 sugar cookies, each in the shape of a cross, and packaged each with this message: “Tasting the sweetness of God’s grace, take a moment to pray for the presbytery meeting. Cookie prayerfully made and decorated by Moderator Theresa Cho.”
Cho’s young son drew a picture of the Presbyterian cross, and she made that into a postcard. She distributed those and at a presbytery meeting had each person write a prayer on the back and hand it to someone else for whom they were praying.
She encouraged the moderators to consider developing a practice and discipline of praying for the churches in their presbyteries. Drawing on her own gifts, Cho made 200 origami crosses for the members of her presbytery – each with 26 origami pieces, which means folding 5,200 origami pieces overall. How did she accomplish this? “As I was going through these meetings, I would be making these origami pieces” as the business proceeded. And as she did so, “I was praying consciously and unconsciously for my presbytery. You need to find your own discipline and your own reminder of how you are constantly praying for your presbytery. There is something in that discipline and that practice of prayer that is important.”
Chaos. Introduce a little chaos, Cho recommends. “You have an amazing opportunity to take a risk,” she told the moderators. Try some new things – to spur the imagination she recommended a book by Gever Tully called “50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do,” and asked for four brave volunteers from among the moderators. She then invited them to lick a 9-volt battery to see what electricity tastes like – one of the exercises from that book. Their verdict: Kind of fun. The anticipation was much worse than the reality.
Korean cooks wash the rice at least three times before cooking, Cho said. Each time, “it goes from cloudiness to clarity,” she said – not really being cleaned, but being cleansed. Watching the water, “in that moment there’s a sense of your soul being cleansed, and each time clarity coming forth. Change takes time. And you may not actually, like Abraham, be able to be recipients of the goodness of that change. But you’ve been called to be part of this particular sliver of the church’s life. And God is calling you to this particular sliver, to be part of that process.”
Don’t forget that you are not alone, Cho told the moderators. “It is daunting and it is a lie when you believe you are standing up there alone. You are not . . . This is a community, and you are called to a particular task in the midst of this community.”
Presbyterians worried about decline and budgets and conflict “forget that there is something amazing that we may not understand is happening, but it is there,” she said. “All we have to do is be able to faithfully say `yes’ in this moment.”
Revelation. Golderer urged the moderators not to forget that they live within a still-unfolding story. A leader with integrity “is someone who sits inside the great mystery that God is still in the business of revelation,” he said. The language of church decline says essentially that “this is what is. That has no power in my life. Because we are people who know what it is to look at the starkness of reality. It doesn’t get more stark than Holy Saturday.”
Instead of being a people deeply invested in “what is” – in the statistics and concerns of today – Golderer said he wants Presbyterians “to be astonished about what God is about to reveal in our midst,” revelations that may be both joyful and challenging. “God has the power to redeem and to save us. Do we really believe that?”
A while back, Broad Street, in support of a photographic project called “Everyone is Photogenic,” offered to make photographs of people dancing. When Golderer opened the door that morning, he was amazed to find a line of 700 people waiting – dance students, people in traditional Native American dress, people of all ages and degrees of experience.
Among them, at the end of the line, was an elderly man wearing a morning coat and top hat. His wife was wearing a ball gown and teardrop earring and was sitting in a wheelchair. The man “leaned in to her and said, `Are you ready?’ He picked her up and pulled her close. The only picture we have of them is cheek-to-cheek. He said, `This is how it’s going to be forever.’ ”
That man was looking into the future, Golderer said – seeing what is ahead. “Who needs us to proclaim the gospel of what is?” he asked. “We need people who are prepared to proclaim the gospel of what is ultimately so. Because the world needs it, and you are God’s people who have been summoned to do it. So let’s do it, and I will pray for you all along the way.”
