The Rev. Rebecca Luter and the Rev. Chris Peters will stand for Co-Moderators of the 227th General Assembly, the fourth team to announce their candidacies.
Peters is the Senior Pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. Luter is the head pastor at Farmington Presbyterian Church in Germantown, Tennessee.
Last week they told Presbyterian News Service the story of how they found each other. Once she’d indicated an interest in standing, Luter “kept getting a 2 a.m. wakeup call from the Spirit,” she said. The excuse she offered was she didn’t have a list of GA commissioners, but a friend provided her with one.
She shared the list with trusted colleagues and made a spreadsheet of the names of commissioners her network shared with her. “Consistently, Chris Peters’ name came out of those conversations,” Luter said. A friend contacted Peters to gauge his interest.
“I was home on a Saturday and got a text from this person asking if I was interested in potentially standing for Co-Moderator,” Peters said. He and his wife have a 3½-year-old child, “and I didn’t know about this,” he said. But he and Luter talked on the phone for about 90 minutes, “and we had a cohesive perspective of what it would look like to stand together,” Peters said. A friend advised him to “just say yes,” Peters said, “and it was clear the Spirit was leading to a yes. In a short timeframe, I reached out to Rebecca and said, ‘I’m in.’”
His wife is a clergywoman, “and we both felt right from the top there was no anxiety” about standing, he said, “particularly from my spouse. I thought, we have a good voice for our denomination. I’m honored and excited. We’ll see what comes out of General Assembly.”
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“I told Chris I am humblewhelmed,” Luter said, coining a phrase. “Both of us felt tapped and nudged in this way. It’ll be up to the Spirit whether we are elected, but I know we were called to stand.”
She said they’re both committed “to hearing the voices of all the people of the church and not coming to the role of Moderator with an agenda, but an openness to hearing where the Spirit is leading.” They’ve chosen “prepare to emerge” as their tagline. Luter’s son, a student of graphic design, is creating their logo. “This is his in-kind donation,” she said.
“I am reticent to turn this into an election,” Luter said. “God will use this standing, however it turns out.”
Peters was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and fondly recalls attending Montreat youth conferences, where his parents were youth group leaders. He went to college at the University of South Carolina-Columbia and “found my people” at the Presbyterian Student Association, now UKirk South Carolina.
He’s a graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary and was part of the Company of New Pastors program. In 2014, he was called as Associate Pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Fairhope, Alabama. He co-led a delegation from the Presbytery of South Alabama to Guatemala, and in 2020 answered the call to lead Westminster Presbyterian Church. As the pandemic abated, the congregation renewed its connection with the Covenant Network of Presbyterians and continued its work as an Earth Care Congregation. He and his spouse, the Rev. Lauren Peters, met in seminary. She is a certified coach who provides ministry leader coaching and congregational consulting.
Luter studied at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, then went on to Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Her early ministry unfolded in a large United Methodist congregation in Germantown, which she served for 14 years.
She was called to Farmington Presbyterian Church in 2014 “in a moment when the congregation was discerning its future,” she said. Under her leadership, the church stabilized, renewed its mission and expanded its outreach.
She’s a graduate of Leadership Germantown, has served on the local hospital’s community board, and was appointed to the Germantown Municipal School Board in 2018. She’s been Moderator of the Presbytery of the Mid-South and has been a commissioner both to the Synod of Living Waters and General Assembly.
A two-time breast cancer survivor, Luter said she brings to her ministry a profound resilience and a lived understanding of faith in the face of adversity. She and her husband, Chris, a high school theatre educator, are the parents of two college students pursuing careers in the arts.
Both Luter and Peters said they have received endorsements from their respective presbyteries and congregations.
“Our feelings are in lockstep,” Peters said. “To me, this is a Spirit-led thing. It’s about seeking leadership in the church to help us emerge into the next step of our polity and our structures so we can be a church that lives well in the world. We are both humbled and open.”
“Change is hard for all of us, and yet God is calling us into something new,” Luter said. “Including people and making sure their voice is heard is important, and listening is really important in this time.”
Those who have declared their intention to stand as Co-Moderators of the upcoming Assembly are the Rev. Marta Pumroy-Cordero and the Rev. Dr. Kristopher D. Schondelmeyer and the Rev. Dr. Frances Lin and the Rev. Dr. Sean Chow, the Rev. Dr. Barbara Barkley and Rev. Dr. Bill Myers of West Virginia. The Moderator Election is set for July 2. Whoever is elected will officiate the 228th General Assembly in 2028.
By Mike Ferguson, Presbyterian News Service
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