ST. LOUIS – So the 2020 Vision Team has come to Big Tent to listen, to hear what Presbyterians have to say about a question General Assembly co-moderator Jan Edmiston frequently asks: “What is breaking God’s heart in your community?”
And also: “What lifts up God’s heart in your community?”
And this: What do you think God might be calling us to do?
Those are among the questions the vision team is asking on a survey of Presbyterians (one of three surveys it’s circulating – with the others for those close to but not part of the church, and a third for those outside the denomination). At the request of the 2016 General Assembly, the vision team is trying to craft a guiding statement for the denomination – and on July 7, some of its members held a “listening session” to see what Presbyterians at the grassroots level might say.
One of the first things they discovered: Presbyterians at the top level of the national church are definitely interested in the 2020 Vision Team and what it might say. Those who showed up for the first of two listening sessions included a pretty high-powered group:
- The two General Assembly co-moderators (Edmiston and Denise Anderson), who came to help the vision team in its listening work;
- Tony De La Rosa, interim executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency;
- Barry Creech, director of policy, administration and board support for the Presbyterian Mission Agency;
- The directors of communication for the Presbyterian Mission Agency (Kathy Francis) and Presbyterian Foundation (Rob Bullock);
- Jim Rissler, president of the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program; and
- Others from the denomination’s national staff.
In part, this turnout may reflect an array of factors, including curiosity about what the vision team is thinking; a desire to be informed (this is only the vision team’s second face-to-face meeting); and the tension that’s circulating in the national staff about what changes may be sailing their way from potential realignments being considered in the structure of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
A trio of groups which the 2016 General Assembly authorized are hard at work – the 2020 Vision Team; the Way Forward Commission; and the All Agency Review Committee – with all three due to report to the General Assembly in 2018.
There’s no shortage of anxiety in the national staff about what those groups might recommend – and also no scarcity, indeed at the grass roots, of concern about what lies ahead for a denomination that has lost millions of members over the last 50 years and is stressed financially from top to bottom.
During the listening session, Karen Sapio, a Vision Team member who is a pastor from California, described the team’s task as “the most amorphous” of the three groups at work, with the other two focused more directly on structural concerns.
Joshua Narcisse, an elder and theological student at Yale Divinity School, described the Vision Team as diverse in age, geography and ethnicity. “We’ve got almost all the boxes checked,” he said.
“We wanted a group that was predominantly under the age of 40,” said Edmiston, who along with Anderson selected the vision team members. “We just wanted people to be able to talk about why the church exists in the 21st century.”
Most of the listening session – 1.5 hours long – took place in small groups, with team members at each table taking notes. The conversations around those tables were amorphous as well.
Some spoke about the idea of a Presbyterian connectional system – the way it used to be and what it’s become.
One man from Missouri said he’s watched Presbyterian ministers lead congregations out of the PC(USA) to more conservative denominations, something he described as “not Presbyterian at its heart. … We are one church, called to do one thing. I don’t think we’re doing it very well.”
Gordon Raynal, the stated clerk of Foothills Presbytery, said that in previous decades connectionalism emerged from “a clear institutional sense. If you went to a Presbyterian church, your kids went to (church) camp. Many of them went to a Presbyterian college. Connectionalism was a real thing tied to institutions.”
Now, Raynal said, connectionalism is built more around programming – “Let’s see if we can do programs together. … What we have are a bunch of special interests, special causes. … It’s not central, it’s not unified.”
Some churches rarely send elders to presbytery meetings, another man said, and “I think we have congregations that feel no connection at all.”
Many local congregations feel disconnected from the General Assembly, Raynal said. “The General Assembly comes up with a three-year plan. By the time someone in Poughkeepsie hears about it, it’s six years later.”
In a divided political environment, “it’s winner take all, and we vilify anyone who disagrees with us,” said another man. “We don’t trust our government, we don’t trust our police, we don’t trust any authority, including the church.”
At another table, a pastor from Kansas spoke of the difficulty of getting people to address issues of injustice – based on race, gender or economic inequities – when they see those as issues coming from “another world, another place,” not as local concerns. Part of the work of Presbyterians is to frame those matters as moral issues, he said – issues of concern to all people of faith.
“How we treat our kids regardless of income is an incredibly important fight for everyone,” a woman responded, nodding her head. But having those conversations requires both a “safe place” and courage, she said. This Big Tent has the theme of “Race, Reconciliation, Reformation,” but “how do you handle that if our rural church doesn’t want to deal with it?” she asked.
At a third table, folks were talking about the changing roles of mid councils, and about the difficulty of maintaining a connectional system with increasing diversity.
“Do Presbyterians still want a connectional church?” Creech asked. “Or do they want to be congregational?”
At yet another table, the participants were sharing stories of how they came to be Presbyterian. “Why choose this denomination,” asked Justin Botejue, a Vision Team member and elder from Washington state – who shared his own story of how his immigrant family was lovingly welcomed and cared for by Presbyterians after coming to the U.S.
Another man said that at a session meeting one night, people went around the table telling why they’d come to that particular congregation. One said they knew right away – for them, that Presbyterian church felt like coming home. “You fit in. You feel like you have a place.”
