Editor's Note: Union Seminary-PSCE dedicated a portrait to James H. Smylie on May 3. Dr. Smylie is a frequent contributor to the Outlook in addition to being professor emeritus of church history at Union/PSCE. We happily share the following excerpts from the dedication tribute offered by Dean Thompson, president and professor of ministry at Louisville Theological Seminary. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of James Smylie.
The purpose of this event is to celebrate the fruitful ministry of James Hutchinson Smylie, teacher and scholar for the church in the field of church history. Specializing in American church history and American Presbyterianism, James Smylie has served God for one-half century by serving ministerial students, pastors, local congregations, his denomination and his academic guild with remarkable effectiveness and energy.
He was born in 1925 in Huntington, W. Va., where his father was pastor of Second Church. He was educated at Washington University, St. Louis, B.A., 1946; and at Princeton Theological Seminary, B.D., 1949, Th.M., 1950, and Ph.D., 1958. He served as assistant minister, First Church, St. Louis, 1950-1952, where he met Elizabeth Roblee in the summer of 1950. They were married in that church in November 1951. Then they moved to Princeton Theological Seminary where Jim taught during and beyond his years of doctoral study, 1952-1962.
Energy will follow need and interest. So even though, from a practical standpoint, you could start anywhere and build toward a balanced program, your most pressing needs will be a reasonable starting point.
Many congregations, for example, are concerned about declining membership. Mainline Protestant denominations have been losing members steadily since 1964, when Baby Boomers began to graduate from high school. Partisans have used that decline as a weapon against whatever they didn't like. In fact, growth had come too easily in the two decades after World War II, and we just weren't geared up to retain current members and to recruit new members.
In the midst of our heartache and loss, we have been absolutely overwhelmed too with a new sense of church.
The Rev. Dr. Leonora (Nora) Tubbs Tisdale joined the Yale University Divinity School faculty in 2006 as the Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics. Before going to YDS, Dr. Tisdale served for four years as Consulting Theologian at the Fifth Avenue Church in New York City. She also served as Adjunct Faculty at Union Theological Seminary. Prior to that she taught Preaching and Worship at Princeton Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now Union-PSCE). She began her ministry as co-pastor with her husband of an ecumenical parish of four churches in central Virginia. Dr. Tisdale is married to the Rev. Dr. W. Alfred Tisdale Jr., a Presbyterian minister. Outlook Editor Jack Haberer recently talked with her about the subject of preaching.
Editor's note: "Preaching is what God does, and we have to learn and re-learn that" (William Willimon). Chris Brown, a student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, covered a three-part lecture series delivered by William Willimon at PTS on April 27 with the theme, "God's Activity in Preaching." The lectures, titled "The Miracle of Preaching: Preaching as God's Word," were presented as a part of the seminary's annual J. Hubert Henderson Conference on Church and Ministry. Willimon, who is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church and author of nearly 60 books, spoke with natural humility and humor to the pastors, alumni, and seminarians in attendance. His message, however, contained a powerful challenge to preachers: "In order to be a preacher, you have to keep practicing miracle."
c. 2007 Religion News Service
c. 2007 Religion News Service
Big Sky, Mont. -- Go outside.
Sometime today, walk out into the fresh air and just be for a few minutes.
And look up. There, hopefully, you will find sky.
Sky is good and natural and sometimes, even on a cloudy, grouchy day, even if you catch just a peek of it between skyscrapers or by craning your neck from the bathroom window that faces the alley, really quite beautiful.
Marveling at creation is easy to do when you're sitting where I am now, in an Adirondack chair on the porch of a cabin in the mountains of Montana, listening to the rush of a spring-swollen river. I can hear the occasional cry of two hawks that have been chasing a smaller bird around the hills all afternoon. I'm in place called Big Sky, and it is aptly named. They filmed "A River Runs Through It" here. This is perhaps the most beautiful place on earth, or at least as much of it as I've seen thus far. All of western Montana is like God showing off: "Look what I can do! Look what I can do!"
Sometime today, walk out into the fresh air and just be for a few minutes.
And look up. There, hopefully, you will find sky.
Sky is good and natural and sometimes, even on a cloudy, grouchy day, even if you catch just a peek of it between skyscrapers or by craning your neck from the bathroom window that faces the alley, really quite beautiful.
Marveling at creation is easy to do when you're sitting where I am now, in an Adirondack chair on the porch of a cabin in the mountains of Montana, listening to the rush of a spring-swollen river. I can hear the occasional cry of two hawks that have been chasing a smaller bird around the hills all afternoon. I'm in place called Big Sky, and it is aptly named. They filmed "A River Runs Through It" here. This is perhaps the most beautiful place on earth, or at least as much of it as I've seen thus far. All of western Montana is like God showing off: "Look what I can do! Look what I can do!"
c. 2007 Religion News Service
I call our Church Wellness Project a "best practices guide to nurturing a healthy faith community."
The concept of "best practices" is widely accepted in many fields, but often is resisted in churches.
Briefly, the concept means that some methods and processes are better -- more effective, more productive, more likely to achieve desired ends -- than others.
In medicine, for example, complicated surgical procedures tend to follow widely accepted best practices. In sales, best practices include prompt response to inquiries, consistent follow-through on commitments, and tracking interactions with prospects and customers.
This month our congregation celebrated its 30th anniversary. We did so with a joyful banquet on Saturday night and a celebratory worship..
A reporter asked me this morning prior to worship: "What will be the first words that you speak to your congregation on..
I am delighted to be joining you for a weekly look at "Church Wellness."
In this column, we will consider the best practices for doing the basics of nurturing healthy churches. I have no axes to grind, no denominational or doctrinal "shoulds" to pursue. My only aim is to help your congregations be as healthy as they can be. That means focusing on the key factors affecting church health:
· Membership development
· Leadership development
· Communications strategy
· Spiritual development
· Young Adults ministry
· Listening church
· Metrics
If every other area is getting new leaders, why not the racial-ethnic ministries or the women's ministries of the General Assembly? They both are welcoming one and the same new leader. Rhashell Hunter is the newly-arrived director for Racial-Ethnic and Women's Ministries for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s General Assembly Council.
On Easter Sunday, Hunter preached her final sermon as pastor of the Community Church in Flint, Mich., a congregation of about 130 members, where she had served for nine years.
She grew up in the manse; father Charles H. Hunter is a Presbyterian pastor. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts, theatre, journalism, and teacher education. While pursuing a theatre career in New York City, she volunteered in an inner city soup kitchen. Soon she sensed a pastoral call and went to McCormick Theological Seminary, where she earned an M.Div. Later she returned there and earned a D.Min. with a focus in preaching.
c. 2007 Religion News Service
When Rhonda Kelley reads the Easter drama in her Bible, the professor of women's ministry feels God's affirmation of her as a woman.
"Jesus really valued women and always reached out to women," said Kelley, who teaches at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is co-editor of The Woman's Study Bible.
Women figure prominently in the Gospel lessons that culminate in Jesus' resurrection. In roles unusual for that period, they travel with Jesus and then are witnesses to his crucifixion and burial. And women, including Mary Magdalene, are the first to learn that his tomb is empty.
c. 2007 Religion News Service
Anne Lamott is the kind of Christian who makes a lot of other Christians nervous.
I think it's because she's honest.
She's honest about her sins, her foibles and her faith, and she makes no excuses for any of them.
She's wide open about her less-than-perfect faith walk, about being a single mother, a recovering addict, a bleeding-heart liberal, neurotic, insecure, and wickedly funny. Lamott has chronicled her wacky and (sometimes) wild adventures in faith in books such as Traveling Mercies, Plan B, and most recently the wonderful Grace (Eventually).
She makes a lot of people who also call themselves Christians nervous -- and sometimes even angry -- because Lamott should, they think, either keep her imperfections to herself or stop calling herself a Christian.
The novel The Devil Wears Prada is a serious study of the power of labels to define a person's worth. Author Lauren Weisberger was formerly assistant to the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour. Thus, the novel is based on Lauren's earlier career with its addiction to fashion. The addictive ingredient is the glow, lure, and status of the designer label: Versace, Chanel, Christian Dior, Gucci, Manolo, and most supremely, Prada. The measure of a person is the label. Why the devil herself (the magazine editor in the movie version) wears Prada!
The Lenten season has come and gone again. Let's face it. It was a tough decision--what we agreed with ourselves to relinquish for Lent.
Chocolate always seems to muddle the question. How to keep going and stay sweetly resolved for forty days while wandering a dessert wilderness. Why not tomatoes? After all, they're seedy. And it is so much easier to stay away from such flagrant bursts of flesh. To soften the blow of denial, one pastor shared recently, "Don't even ask what happened the Lent I tried giving up caffeine."
Whatever happened, we're back onto salsa and desserts with a relish, weighing in heavy on the thought that time of reflection on passion and hymns of refrain are over for another year. The good news is Christ has risen indeed!
Recently, I went to an indoor water park with my daughter. After a cruel, cold winter and spring in the D.C. region, I haven't seen my legs in months, and when I looked down, I noticed that a have multiple bruises in a neat line above my knees. I pressed on a brown spot, felt the dull ache of confined pain, and wondered how the small injuries occurred. I couldn't remember, couldn't figure it out.
It may sound strange, but the experience reminded me a lot of being a pastor, especially when ministering to people under the age of forty. Some of them, when they enter the sanctuary, don't come in with fresh and flawless skin, they have these bruises, sensitive places where they've been hurt, often by religious organizations. Inside our church and outside of it, I've seen the discoloration appear. Recently the marks have surfaced with the repeated and adamant claim of young Christians who say, "We're not like them."
It is a year since Leslie Scanlon in May 2006 reported our denomination's deepest budget cut and the most extensive reordering of..
As I watch the slow disappearance of brothers and sisters who believe that the new wine in them demands new wineskins, I..
The film "Amazing Grace" is coming or has come, to a theatre near you. A high-minded friend who has seen the film told me that it was a "must see." He also told me that the film's music was the tune of what has become our country's unofficial national hymn: Amazing Grace, or, as the tune is also called, New Britain. This hymn was, until the 1930s, sung to a variety of other tunes. Had it not been married more recently to the tune to which it is usually sung today, it might have never made it to the charts.
Parent tears ' My tears have been my food--day and night.' Psalm 42:3 Feed us OH-God on the tears of our sorrows..
Stephen Prothero has confirmed statistically what we had perceived anecdotally. His book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't says that Americans are biblically illiterate. George Barna's Growing True Disciples: New Strategies for Producing Genuine Followers of Christ reinforces that assessment. It's no wonder that publication after publication today calls us to re-think our approaches to adult discipleship and the Christian Education that enables such discipleship to develop.
The challenges facing our work in adult discipleship parallel the challenges facing the entire ministry of our congregations. In our high velocity society, we can ill afford to follow the traditional practice of simply repeating last year's program. We need to experiment with ministry designs aimed at developing adults as Christian disciples.
The Church in North America finds itself in a culture that is no longer Christian. Those attending church are getting older while younger people increasingly stay away. The "dropout rate" for college sophomores raised in the church is astronomical (by one count 90 percent). Furthermore, the received wisdom that these adrift youngsters will find their way back to church and faith as parents seeking baptism and nurture for their children no longer bears itself out. (Jim Singleton calls this the "Little Bo Peep" strategy--"Leave them alone, and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them.") They aren't coming home!
Increasingly the word "missional" is used to describe both the situation in which the church finds itself, and the strategy for us to follow in this "post-Christendom" era. Eddie Gibbs gives a succinct definition: "Missional refers to those congregations who see Western culture [because it is no longer Christian] as a field ripe for mission engagement, thus acknowledging that the period known as Christendom is over." In the congregation I serve as Associate Pastor for Adult Education I have the challenge to reshape one of our denomination's largest adult education programs in light of these realities. Here are some reflections on the issues we face and the steps and changes we're beginning to make.
How many church members know what paintball is, and how many churches have a paintball ministry?
One answer is families in the Santa Ynez Valley Church in Santa Ynez, Calif., and their church. When members started playing paintball, they had no idea it would turn into the church's most highly attended outreach ministry.
"About two and a half years ago my sons were wrapping up the school year and we wanted to do something to celebrate," relates the church's paintball coordinator Jack Drake. The Drakes decided to play paintball and figured it would be more fun if they got a group of people to join them. After passing out some fliers around school and church, their anticipated group of 15 became a group of 40 who traveled the two hours to the commercial paintball field. They had so much fun that day they decided to make their own paintball field, closer to home.
What's it take to build an effective Christian education program these days?
That question is being asked in virtually every Christian education committee in every church everywhere. Curriculum publishing companies are asking it as well. Their answers could help congregations become centers of vital Christian education.
That first question is the biggest: So how do you build an effective Christian education program these days? The one word that arises repeatedly is relevance.
The following publishers provide a variety of age-appropriate curricula for use in the churches:
Akaloo by Augsburg/Congregational Ministries Publishing
Bible Blitz® by Group Publishing
FaithWeaver® by Group Publishing
The Kerygma
Living Inside Outâ„¢ by Group Publishing
We Believe: God's Word for God's People by Congregational Ministries Publishing
Workshop Rotation Model Sunday School by Potter's Publishing
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