Sometimes it’s tedious even for me to read the news of the church that the Outlook publishes. It gets to sounding like a refrain of biblical apocalyptic. To paraphrase Matthew’s take on Jesus’ own prophesying:
You will hear of schisms and rumors of schisms. For congregation will rise up against congregation and affinity group against affinity group. There will be membership attritions and heresy proclamations in various places. They will hand you over to administrative commissions, and will defrock you, and you will be hated by your presbyteries. Many will require you to violate your conscience, to hate whom God loves, to jettison the truth, and deny the power of grace. Many will fall away, and they will betray one another and file disciplinary cases against one another. False teaching elders will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.
It gets depressing. And given that we’re now diving into a new year whose very date — 2013 — carries its own tone of foreboding (if skyscrapers avoid having a 13th floor, and some airlines have no seats numbered “13,” why not skip it and just jump to 2014?), you’re smart to be bracing yourself for this first edition of the year. (Aren’t you glad you survived the Mayan apocalypse?)
A few weeks ago, this editor took his jaded eye and skeptical ear to a two-day gathering to test the initiatives being promoted by the 1001 New Worshiping Communities (NWCs). Invitations to the event, “Get in the Game,” looked like a come-on to join in a happy-clappy pretend-game that all is well in Presbyville. The gathering was happy, all right, but it didn’t pretend all was well.
In fact, Vera White, the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s (PMA) associate for the 1001 New Worshiping Communities Initiative, launched the event by reciting a checklist of things going wrong in the denomination.
But she also outlined the vision, planning and strategies being engaged to launch 1,001 NWCs. ’Twas substantive.
She introduced the two regional trainers/coordinators for church innovation, Craig Williams (Northern California) and Shannon Kiser (Northern Virginia). Shannon outlined the need to develop a healthy mission plan in one’s own culture, to identify potential NWC planters, assess lead planters, develop internships for seminarians, identify hotspots and partner churches, etc. She shared some of her experiences in pastoral-educational ministry (see page 13).
Philip Lotspeich, the PMA’s coordinator for the Office of Church Growth, pressed the missional point of the initiative. “The big picture is making disciples. It isn’t about replacing departing churches. We’re called to make disciples. That is the great commission. It’s about an intentional journey of following Jesus Christ. When that happens, when we make disciples, the hungry get fed, the naked get clothed.”
Roger Dermody, the PMA’s director of mission, reminded participants that national diminishing membership statistics “fail to account for some other things going on, like the launch of racial-ethnic congregations and small-group Bible studies,” thereby doing a double disservice. That is, we’re leaving racial-ethnic communities out of the count, and we’re missing the benefit of hearing the good news of what God is actually doing.
Especially telling from my perspective were the testimonies of what God is doing that were shared by those engaged in launching NWCs. Most striking was the report of Helen Taylor Boursier, organizing pastor of Community Fellowship in New Braunfels, Texas, who shared how her multicultural, multilingual, rural congregation has organized not one but four weeks of Bible school classes for neighborhood children — tossing aside popular curricula and doing direct, hands-on teaching and learning. The photos of the children were worth many thousands of words.
The event prompted me to consider that other kind of biblical prophecy – the kind that offers divine promises – like Matthew’s continuation of Jesus’ apocalyptic predicting: “But anyone who endures to the end will be saved. And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations … ”
Now that’s news worth reading.
