Whether you are a new or a veteran youth fellowship advisor, you might benefit from considering a fresh perspective on ministry with teenagers ages 11 through 18.
Pray for the youth and their leaders
Several years ago when the church I served needed youth fellowship advisors, I asked renowned youth ministry expert and Columbia Theological Seminary associate professor Rodger Nishioka, "How do you recruit youth advisors?" I expected him to give a complex formula for training and nurturing advisors. Instead, he answered simply, "You pray for them."
Do teenagers pray? Absolutely. But will they talk about prayer? Will they pray together in public? If not, what can youth workers do to encourage meaningful group prayers?
Trying to do effective events with prayer is one of the great challenges of youth ministry. We have had some success breaking down the Lord's Prayer and having the youths re-write it, segment by segment, in their own words. Some young people have shared, years later, how meaningful an activity this was. But this was, more or less, an intellectual exercise. What about the spiritual side of prayer?
Within our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) there are two different conversations happening simultaneously. But these conversations are not talking with each other. The reality of these two different conversations popped up in my mind as I read through the March 5, 2007 issue of The Presbyterian Outlook.
One may be called the orthodox conversation. This has a lot to do with the institutional disease of our Church. In the Outlook this conversation was highlighted in the article A time to act: NW vote begins movement toward EPC. The New Wineskins is a consortium of about 150 congregations working together for the renewal of the Church with a specific ideal of theological orthodoxy in view. Several of the New Wineskins congregations are negotiating with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The EPC is a small Presbyterian denomination -- about 200 congregations and 70,000 members -- formed in 1981 when a number of our congregations broke with the northern stream of our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The New Wineskins folks are so disgruntled with our PC(USA) that they are either (1) advocating comprehensive reform within our church or (2) expecting to leave our denomination and possibly join the EPC.
If you want to reach, welcome and serve young adults, you will need to do some things quite differently. Being friendly and sincere won't be enough.
Five specific areas need addressing:
1. On-line tools to engage and to build community:
· Web site -- have a good one, comparable to the best sites that young adults use and consider normal. Ask young adults which sites they are visiting -- the list changes constantly -- and see how your current site measures up.
· Be prepared to communicate electronically -- e-mail, instant messaging, blogs -- not by postal mail or meetings.
By action of the General Assembly, we Presbyterians have been promised a new hymnbook by the year 2014. This announcement has produced a groundswell of popular indifference to the project, setting the stage for a publishing blunder of semi-epic proportions, if what is produced turns out to be yet another paper-and-ink creation in the venerable tradition of Johannes Gutenberg. Even the prospect of a companion e-hymnal, suitable for projection on a screen or on the wall of your sanctuary, will not prevent a classic case of the wrong product at the wrong time.
Consider how far we have come since the introduction of our present blue hymnbook in 1990. Think of how many people are now getting their daily news not from a printed page but from a screen. Given the current pace of technology, it is more probable than possible that the church in 2014 will have neither books nor paper bulletins in the pews.
Presbyterians have a history of generosity toward their pastors. Some of that generosity has worked its way into constitutional mandates. The Book of Order stipulates that all installed pastors shall receive an adequate salary, in accordance with local presbytery guidelines, plus a month of vacation and two weeks of study leave each year. Those of us who serve as the church's pastors are genuinely grateful for these bottom-line requirements. All too easily, however, minimum standards become the finish line rather than the starting point.
A similar thing happens with church member pledging. We are asked to pledge in advance our guaranteed minimum we'll give to the church, and this becomes our giving goal for the year. I have discovered in my own giving that my pledge, which should be the beginning point of my giving to the church, all too easily becomes my finishing point.
Do you ever think, "I've got to write this"? But other times, "I get to write this!" Sometimes duty takes over: Sunday's sermon, pastor's column deadline, insistent e-mails. How can we move through got to into get to?
During a writing funk, two things occurred to me. First, if I find bits of grace in the grit of duty, then obligation morphs into invitation. Second, even if my words get rejected, what matters is whether or not I've written myself an inch closer home to my true self and God.
Writing can help us appreciate ministry. Preaching, teaching, and soul tending extend an invitation to pen our way home and out into the world's need.
The death of the Rev. Bryan Clinton Childress of Willis, Va., on December 19, 2006, was not a surprise. He was, after all, 85 years old, and had been in poor health for some time. His pastoral life, spent entirely in Appalachia, was not remarkable in terms of great achievements, but it was a sincere witness to Christ and the meaning of a life dedicated to him.
I met Bryan nearly 50 years ago in Pendleton County, West Virginia. I was the summer student minister of a field of six preaching points in the area of Circleville and Seneca Rocks. My work was under the supervision of the Rev. Dale Jones, who gave devoted service to those churches and chapels before he returned to teaching the deaf at the school in Staunton, Va. Bryan came to conduct a revival at the Seneca Rocks Church, and I was present for several of the evenings he held forth in that beautiful stone church. I was sophisticated in those days, and wondered about this rather rough-hewn mountain man, who came with his accordion and uncultured voice to proclaim the Lord's message to the gathered folks.
Here are three guaranteed ways to discourage lay ministers:
1. Give them an assignment, and then take it back because they aren't doing it your way or because you are anxious.
2. Ignore their work as if it were trivial.
3. Allow leaders to become buried in "background noise" from those who natter, gossip, and complain.
The first is easy to correct. As the saying goes: Don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer. Don't give people work to do if you cannot trust them to follow through.
It would be presumptuous of me to think that I could speak on behalf of the millions of Presbyterian Christians in this country. Still, from the window of being a member of the Presbytery Pastoral Care Network and a pastor for almost forty years, I would like to offer a word of thanks to the ordained ministers of the Presbyterian churches across this country. For the past eight years, this network has been trying to offer support and encouragement to pastors in the exercise of their demanding profession. Both as a pastor myself and from the perspective of that board, I would like to say thank you to those of you who are hard at work in your congregations.
...America is at war.
Its volunteer army is easily recognizable here in southern Mississippi.
It is revealed in tapping sounds from inside a house
that most outsiders wouldn't see
as worth the effort to rebuild (but it has a family and stories!).
It gives itself away in ragged formations of matching T-shirts and
unmatched ages,
seen everywhere along the coast....
A few years back, I visited a prominent, moderate-to-progressive downtown church in Atlanta that shall go nameless. Now, at the time I was the pastor of a New Church Development, and the friend I was with introduced me as such to one of their elders.
"Well, welcome to our church. Is it different worshipping with us?" he wanted to know.
"Pardon me?" I said, with a confused look on my face.
"Is it different worshipping with Presbyterians?"
Which do you want first: the good news, the better news, or the bad news about e-mail newsletters?
Okay, the good news. An e-mail newsletter will save you a lot of money. No paper, no printing costs, no folding and stuffing, no postage, no competition in the mailbox with vendors who are sending mailers far more compelling than yours.
If that isn't enough inducement to drop the familiar printed-and-mailed newsletter, here's even better news: e-mail gets read. Most postal mail gets discarded before being read, including the church newsletter. Even though people are furious about spam, they do comb their e-mail for personal items. A well-designed e-mail newsletter can fit into that must-open niche.
Editor's note: A regular feature of the Outlook's annual theological education issue is a report on seminary life from the president of one of the seminaries associated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). This year we bring you insights from the president of San Francisco Theological Seminary.
Leadership is receiving renewed attention these days in vigorous and creative discussions taking place across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Influential voices throughout the denomination are increasingly pointing out the urgent need for seminaries to help the church to develop more resourceful, radical, and responsive patterns of ministry formation.
Reformed and Presbyterian Christians have always been "big" on the doctrine of providence. This is the Christian view that God is involved with the world and has not simply created the world and stepped back, leaving it to run on its own or by pure randomness. As they used to put it, "God is not an absentee landlord!"
Reformed folks have seen God's providence as having three parts.
· Preservation: God upholds the creation;
· Cooperation: God works with all created beings;
· Government: God guides all things toward the ultimate divine purposes.
But I suspect it is the last two of these parts we focus on most, if we think of God's "providence."
"During such times as these, the Book of Confessions keeps the PC(USA) centered in Jesus Christ .... The question remains whether the PC(USA) will honor its own, confessional heritage, recover its identity, and vigorously confess the gospel in our time."
New members come to churches in many ways, but the most common by far is visiting on a Sunday morning. If you want your church to grow, you need to think through every detail of receiving visitors on Sunday.
Here is a checklist to guide your planning...
The Swearingen Compromise has collapsed, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is struggling because of it.
When the General Assembly appointed the Swearingen Commission in 1925, it had been struggling with the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy for decades. After Harry Emerson Fosdick preached his "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" sermon from the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church in New York City in 1922, the controversy came before the General Assembly in 1923 and 1924 in the form of a proposal that the General Assembly direct the Presbytery of New York City to require Fosdick to conform to the theological standards of the Presbyterian Church. Fosdick resigned from the church in 1925, but the same issue returned to the 1925 Assembly because New York Presbytery had licensed two candidates who did not believe in the Virgin Birth. The appointment of the Swearingen Commission helped that Assembly avoid a significant rift.
In recent years, many have felt that the conversations occurring within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have had a maze-like quality. Leaders in the church are operating in crisis mode. The issues are complex: restructuring, loss of members, conflicted congregations, sexual misconduct, New Wineskins, and mission funding, among others. Mission co-workers, pastors, elders, the elected and called leadership in Middle Governing Body work and at the General Assembly Council are all searching for answers.
However, at a typical meeting of the church, whether at General Assembly or at a presbytery, we do not have the time to discern answers to the questions we are asking. Decisions must be made, and the urgent presses us on. Doing the same thing and expecting different results means we will keep losing members and nothing will change. In a time like this, how can we create spiritual practices, ongoing conversations, and learning communities that allow church leaders to walk, listen, talk, and pray together?
In 18 years of parish ministry and twelve years of church consulting, I have yet to meet a pastor or lay leader who didn't want to be effective. They want to do the job right. They want to have healthy churches. So often, however, they haven't been shown where to start and how to proceed.
One sign of this is a basic and thoroughly flawed paradigm that seems active in many churches: clergy ought to provide what they want to provide. If they feel called to promote a certain activity or educational pursuit or liturgical focus or pastoral emphasis, they have a right to do so.
I was in the elevator at the hospital in Rockford, Ill., taking the commuter from fourth floor to first floor. I had completed my visit, prayed with my patient, and was now on my way to the next visit at the next hospital.
In the elevator was one other person, a woman with a weary and weathered face that indicated that much life had been packed into her forty-something years. I gazed mostly at the floor as you do when it's just two of you in the elevator. But I also noticed that she seemed agitated, rocking back and forth on her feet, glancing this way and that, mumbling to herself.
My pastor's radar picked up the signals: I can't stand it, can't stand it. I'm going to explode. I glanced up to see tears, not tears of sadness but of joy. "It's too much, too wonderful. It's incredible!" By now she was mumbling not only to herself, but to me.
Accurate measurements are critical to a congregation's wellbeing.
Numbers represent people. A change in membership count means the congregation is serving more or fewer people. A change in Sunday attendance means greater or lesser impact on people's lives. A change in non-Sunday participation means something is at home, or at work, or in how church matters to people.
In trying to understand such numbers, you are taking a big step in understanding your people and in understanding your congregation's effectiveness.
Editor's Note: A shortened version of this article appears in the September 3, 2007, print version of The Presbyterian Outlook.
Items in The Presbyterian Outlook over the past several months continue to suggest the need for a review of where we appear to be heading after the events of 2006 and some thoughts that might help to determine whether the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is headed in the right direction. The latest item was Leslie Scanlon's report on the activities of the Form of Government (FOG) Task Force in the June 25/July 2 issue. Two other items were in the May 14 issue. The first (p.13) was a plaintive cry by Ross B. Jackson to encourage everyday Presbyterians to make what he called some "root" changes (Making Disciples - What Presbyterians NEED to Read.) The second (p.32) was a letter from Dawson Watkins suggesting that positions taken by Louisville be better supported with facts. These gentlemen are obviously as concerned as I am about the dearth of biblical evidence offered for positions taken by both officials and laymen and women of the PC(USA).
Every denomination handles the content of spiritual formation differently. No less diverse are practices within denominations. We can find many ways to pray, many ways to worship, many ways to read Scripture and to make our peace with God.
Unfortunately, various schools of thought have tended to proclaim their ways the best, indeed the only, ways to approach God. From that assertion have flowed endless bloodshed and, even now, extreme intolerance.
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