Sometimes it happens organically -- a small church and a big church form a relationship and start working together.
But now there are new efforts in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to try to cultivate intentional partnerships between bigger congregations and smaller ones, to explore ways they can work together in mission, both overseas and close to home.
One long-standing partnership between a big congregation and a smaller one is the local mission partnership between Second Church in Indianapolis -- a suburban church that stands more than 4,000 strong -- and Westminster Church, an inner-city congregation that's dropped to just 22 active members.
The partnership goes back to 1980, when Catholic, Baptist, and Presbyterian congregations in the neighborhood -- a low-income area just east of downtown -- decided to hold Vacation Bible School together. That led next to the idea of creating a summer-long program for area children, "a safe place to be," said Donna Studevent, a member of Westminster since 1982. She is an educator who trains substitute teachers and now is Westminster's clerk of session and commissioned lay pastor.
Baseball is often rhapsodized as a religion in America. It makes sense then that Yankee Stadium is a stomping ground for popes.
The only two who have set foot on U.S. soil have celebrated Mass in the Bronx, in the most famous sports arena this side of the Colosseum.
On April 20, Pope Benedict XVI was set to become the third.
The crisp, hot, late afternoon sunshine in Nicaragua is perfect for playing baseball. Who might want to play?
We notice that the construction crews seemed to finish up the day's work with a bit more energy and gusto; several of them asked me as the work for the day wound down, "Baseball?" Just that one word, with their deep Spanish language accent, and the interrogative lilt rolling up at the end, turned a word into a question. "Si," I would readily reply, wondering what I was getting myself into.
One colleague calls it "Amnesty April." Others call it "data cleanup" and "data scrubbing."
Whatever the name, this month at the church I serve we will initiate a thorough cleanup of our membership data. That may seem a small and mechanical matter, but I think it cuts to the heart of what we do.
LOUISVILLE -- The mission budget being proposed for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for 2009 and 2010 does not call for layoffs, but would use $7 million in reserves to balance the budget.
The proposal, which the General Assembly Council will vote on this week -- probably April 25 -- also calls for an increase in the number of missionaries who would serve the PC(USA) in the next two years.
And it would restore the denomination's Environmental Ministries office, which was eliminated in a major round of budget cutting in May 2006. At least two overtures coming to this year's General Assembly have asked for that -- with one from Mid-Kentucky Presbytery, for example, saying that the office was eliminated "at a time critical to sustaining the planet and life on earth as we know it."
The cost for restoring the office is estimated at $100,000 a year.
The council will vote this week to approve a proposed two-year budget that it will send on to the General Assembly for consideration in June. Concern about Presbyterian presence in global mission work definitely will be part of the discussion.
LOUISVILLE – (PNS) With the announcement that Bruce and Lora Whearty will begin their mission service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in August, the Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands (MIJHH) celebrates the deployment of its 24th and 25th new mission co-workers since the campaign was launched at the 214th General Assembly (2002).
New York, 18 April (ENI)--Pope Benedict XVI has met privately and prayed with several survivors of sexual abuse by clergy during his visit to the United States, in a move that is believed to be the first time a pontiff has met with abuse survivors.
The unannounced meeting on 17 April, reportedly at Benedict's request, was held at a chapel at the papal nuncio's residence in Washington.
Bernie McDaid, an abuse survivor who was at the meeting, said in an interview with the CNN television network that he told the pope 'it wasn't just sexual abuse, it was spiritual abuse. And then I told him that he has a cancer growing in his ministry, and needs to do something about it,' said McDaid, who was abused by a cleric as an altar boy.
John Allen, who writes on Vatican affairs for the National Catholic Reporter, described the meeting as 'an unexpected and essentially unprecedented move'.
LOUISVILLE -- The Presbyterian Publishing Corporation (PPC), official denominational publisher of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has announced changes in roles for several staff, most of which are effective immediately.
Marc Lewis, PPC president and publisher-elect, said, "These changes are intended to recognize achievement and to align staff in roles that both fit their skills and talents and result in improved effectiveness for PPC overall. It is PPC's practice to employ staff, as possible, in roles that individual staff find meaningful and satisfying while contributing to the overall success of the organization."
LOUISVILLE -- The co-founder of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)-backed Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is to be among those testifying before a U.S. Senate committee today (April 15) about conditions facing farmworkers in the growing fields of southern Florida.
CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez, a former tomato picker, and investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, are among the witnesses expected to appear at the hearing of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
The CIW, an Immokalee, Fla.-based group of farmworkers, receives support from the PC(USA) and other faith groups.
The hearing, in Washington, D.C., beginning at 10 a.m. comes after U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) visited Immokalee in January to urge support for the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food, which is working to persuade Burger King and other food industry leaders to raise tomato workers' pay.
OXFORD, OHIO -- The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States has said that a Virginia court ruling in favor of 11 breakaway churches that want to keep church property is a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution, which guarantees the separation of Church and State.
The court ruled on April 3 that the Virginia congregations that broke away are covered by a state law written during the U.S. Civil War era. The statute says that any congregation that "divides" remains under the control of the majority, as does property entrusted to it.
In a statement, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said if the statute means what the court held, "it plainly deprives the Episcopal Church and the Diocese, as well as all hierarchical churches, of their historic constitutional rights to structure their polity free from governmental interference and thus violates the First Amendment and cannot be enforced."
Recent studies indicate that only about half of our church members grew up Presbyterian, and many of these left our Presbyterian congregations during their teen years only to return later as they begin to establish families. As a result, an understanding of our Presbyterian heritage and the tenets/themes of our Reformed faith is not part of the background or memory of most of our members.
As folks make a commitment to the ministry of teaching children or youth, they often come to the task with a sense of call, a love for young people, a desire to pass along the stories of our faith, and an earnestness to teach with creativity and age appropriateness. However, many are unaware that being Reformed implies particular things about the ways that we teach the children and youth in our care. To that end, we look to the major tenets our tradition to consider how they inform our teaching.
LOUISVILLE -- Rob Bullock, of Orlando, Fla., has been selected as the director of mission communications for the General Assembly Council. He begins his new post here April 14.
In this new position, Bullock will oversee the development of strategies and messaging to communicate the full work of the denomination's mission arm, with the goal of engaging Presbyterians at all levels of the church in that work.
"There are so many great things happening in the PC(USA)," Bullock said. "If we are going to find a way to unite as a denomination and fulfill all that God is calling us to do, we need to share those stories, to remind ourselves that we can do so much more together than we can individually, so that we invest our lives in the connectional work on which our denomination is built."
LOUISVILLE -- The Board of Directors of the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation (PPC) has unanimously elected Marc Lewis as president and publisher-elect.
The board's appointment is subject to approval by the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which meets in San Jose, Calif., in June.
Lewis, 58, a graduate of the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University, brings a career of denominational publishing experience to the position. His mother was a Cokesbury bookstore manager in Nashville, Tenn., and Lewis' first endeavor in the industry was to open a new Cokesbury store in Memphis, Tenn. Lewis and his wife, Clare, are members of Springdale Church in Louisville.
CNN will serve as the exclusive broadcaster of a presidential candidate forum on faith, values, and other current issues at Messiah College near Harrisburg, Pa., on Sunday, April 13, at 8 p.m. (ET)
CNN Election Center anchor Campbell Brown and Newsweek editor and Newsweek.com election anchor Jon Meacham will moderate what is being billed as The Compassion Forum, which will take place nine days before the Pennsylvania primary.
A major topic of discussion taking place in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A. today is the ordination of women. The issue is one of the primary driving forces for congregations leaving the PC(USA). These congregations are moving to the Presbyterian Church in America and other denominations that do not ordain women as ministers, elders, or deacons. Other congregations are considering such a move for the same reason.
I have seen the dream. Three times. And since it takes two or three witnesses to confirm, I now believe it to be true. The APCE folks are pointing the way to a vital, healthy future for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The energizing and edifying General Assemblies of the future may well resemble the APCE conferences of today.
This past month, I attended my third-in-a-row conference of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators, a gathering of 1,000+ leaders from around the PC(USA) -- plus counterparts from the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church in America. For the third time in a row the conference I attended overflowed with authentic worship, superior skills enrichment, warm fellowship, and thoughtful ideas engagement (see p. 9).
Power plays and political maneuvering were conspicuously absent.
How can this be? How do they avoid the political wrangling that overwhelms General Assemblies?
San Diego Presbytery in an effort to recast the way it sees its reason for being -- has declared that "we are no longer primarily a governing body," and that "we are a relational community and that we are becoming a mission agency."
The presbytery also has voted to affiliate with the Presbyterian Global Fellowship -- becoming the first presbytery to do so, as one step in an effort to form a "missional identity" in a post-denominational setting.
The library at Princeton Theological Seminary -- home to one of the largest collections of religious material in the United States, with more than 1.1 million books and other items -- will begin making some of its books available online starting in about a year.
Princeton has struck an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to digitize some material that is out of copyright, generally meaning works published in the United States before 1923. While the seminary's agreement with Microsoft prohibits releasing specific information on the number of volumes involved, Donald Vogt, the seminary's collection development librarian, described it as "many thousands of volumes," that then will be available to users around the world.
Recovering from a great disaster challenges a congregation's quick reflexes and endurance, according to Greg Hughes, pastor of Malibu Church in Malibu, Calif.
"Up until this point it's been a sprint," admits Hughes. He and the church made international news as the first structure to burn in the October 2007 wildfires that wreaked havoc through the Malibu area last fall. "Now we've got to start pacing ourselves -- we are now in the marathon stage," says the pastor. Almost six months after the fire, the story of Malibu Church is one of both perseverance and exhaustion, of challenge and opportunity as the staff and the congregation work to grieve over what has been lost and dream toward what is yet to come.
Joyce MacKichan Walker was honored February 15 as Educator of the Year by the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators at its annual conference in San Diego.
Walker, a 20-year church educator at the Nassau Church in Princeton, N.J., was ordained in 2007 as a Minister of Word and Sacrament to serve as minister of education at the church.
Much hand wringing and pessimism -- maybe fatigue? -- is evident as we seek to engage our congregations in vital, faithful, effective Adult Christian Education. Also evident are the attempts to understand how and why things are different. Contributions from those versed in demographics and sociological realities have been useful. People who study leadership and systems theories have provided keen insights into our current situation and challenges. Generational theory has been a powerful lens through which to evaluate our context and relationships. Examining postmodernity and its effects on educational ministry can be helpful as well.
This article offers some of the ideas presented at my workshop, "Brain Research Comes to Sunday School," at the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators conference in February. The good attendance at this workshop is an indication that Christian educators want to learn about brain research and ways it might help them be better teachers. In Our Spiritual Brain, Barbara Bruce wrote that religious educators need to know how the brain functions and how to translate that information into better, more usable lessons to help students continue their journey of faith.
"There you go, God, here is some Play-Doh for you," a four-year-old announced, placing a blob of yellow Play-Doh on the table and then scooting an empty chair next to her own so that both touched. She continued to roll and mash the Play-Doh, every so often adding a bit more to the handful for God until her mom arrived. As she said goodbye to one of the adult leaders, she held up her hands closed tightly together and whispered, "All you have to do is hold your hands like this and God is with you. God likes coming to Sunday school with me and he's holding my hand now to go to church with me." Although resembling the imaginary friend of a young child, God truly existed in the heart and mind of this young child. A few years later in a kindergarten through fifth grade Sunday school group talking with the leader about fears, her connection with God gave her the confidence, despite being one of the youngest in the group, to share with the others, "I know God is always with me even if I can't see him and when I am afraid at night I just talk to God."
Consider the following familiar scenario. A pastor takes a new call in youth ministry. He begins enthusiastically, on fire to gather young people into Christ's fold. Youth ministry begins to flourish over the course of the next two years, and then suddenly he resigns. The youth are devastated. The congregation is at first bemused, then shrugs its collective shoulders, and re-gathers itself for another mission study, another search committee, and hopefully a better match. Perhaps the next associate pastor will last a little longer.
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