For those of you who are not Presby-geeks, I apologize for the series of posts that are about to follow… the short story is that Beau Weston wrote a paper for the denomination, which stated that we needed to Rebuild the Presbyterian Establishment.
I’m part of a group who responded to the paper. I joined the esteemed voices of Jose Luis Casal, J. Herbert Nelson II, and Cynthia Holder Rich, who are from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and positions in the church.
I’m white, and I’m a pastor. So as I thought about what I brought to the conversation, I figured that the one thing that I had going for me was that I was young (okay… so I’m 38… which means I’m really stretching this “young” label). I write about ministering to men and women in their 20s and 30s, so my responses center around that viewpoint.
Weston discusses my paper on his blog:
Merritt takes it for granted that the niche of the entire Presbyterian Church is to draw people like her – “writing as a woman who grew up a conservative Baptist and converted to Presbyterianism.” Her strategy for contextual evangelism is “in this particular time we can especially minister to those who are leaving politically conservative evangelical megachurches.”
Welcoming people who are leaving the Evangelical movement is not the core of my outreach strategy, it’s just one sentence from the paper, tacked on to a pleading hope that we “broaden our focus, from not only welcoming those who ‘know what it means to be Presbyterian,’ but also to inviting and accepting men and women from a variety of backgrounds.” So it seems a bit unfair to boil my position down to me wanting a church chock-full of people who look like me.
But, that’s okay. Pastors in growing churches often draw people with similar struggles and hopes. And, I suppose the same could be said for a certain latte-sipping academic white guy, who wants to make sure that the establishment is rebuilt with tall-steeple church pastors and executives. I mean, the last time I checked, most of those types are… well… white guys.
All snarky jabs aside though… reaching out to recovering fundamentalists isn’t a bad strategy. The fact that a new generation of Evangelicals is leaving their congregations goes far beyond my ministering from my small context and experience.
The Emerging Church movement is full of people who grew up Evangelical, and now they’re questioning what they had been taught. Sometimes EC gatherings feel like a Fundamentalists Anonymous group. UnChristian documents the negative attitudes of a new generation toward Evangelicalism. Christine Wicker reports a study that suggests that roughly over 1,000 people leave the Evangelical Church every day.
I’m not happy about this trend. It makes my heart ache, because most of those men and women are leaving Christianity, and leaving for good. So please don’t read this as some sort of sheep-stealing vitriol. (And, yes, I realize that there are PCUSA types who are Evangelical…)
It is just that my experience of the Presbyterian Church was different from the conservative Baptist Church in which I was formed. The leaders of my denomination showed me grace when I had been told that women could not be ordained. The church was there, giving me encouragement, education, and mentors to guide me. They taught me how to be a leader, even as a 22-year-old woman.
Not only that, but so many men and women surrounded me, as I wrestled with my faith, telling me it was okay to doubt, because my eternal salvation did not rely on my personal conviction from one moment to the next. I was held in a community of grace, and God could handle any question that I might spew at God.
It was such good news to me… and I have seen that it’s good news to so many others.
We have a strong and vibrant history of social justice and spiritual traditions. We have a connection with God and the world for which so many people long. And if I’m looking at the future of my beloved denomination, I’m not betting that efforts to rebuild its establishment is going to do much good. The world has shifted too much from the 1950s. We need a new strategy.
And focusing our efforts to reach out to a new generation–a generation who is ethnically diverse and longs to make a difference in the world–that is what gives me hope for vital ministry.
Tribal Church 
It’s riotous that his criticism of you is that you want members like yourself when his entire paper is an extended meditation on how every successful minister will be just like him. In fact, I think that is precisely the greatest point of weakness in his horrible idea – that it leaves everybody but WASPish men out. The last thing the whitest, richest, most educated denomination on the planet needs is to retreat ever more into our narrow conclave until we vanquish the last few sparks of relevancy and vitality remaining to us.
Great answer Carol!
I have read your full paper and Weston’s response and he totally ignored your main thesis and nit-picked by pulling sentences out of context, as you aptly described above. I guess his nose was out of joint because you demonstrate why his generation of leaders should not be first in line to lead our denomination today.
As a member of the generation that won’t be around in 20 years (or less), I am thrilled the church is in hands like yours. As you said near the end of your paper, “The world needs us to be the church, the Body of Christ, imitators of the one who gathered young men and women of lowly estate, transformed their lives, and turned the world upside down.”
For those who haven’t read your paper, here are a couple of other really important things you said:
To turn around “this long pattern of dismal decreases (of membership)..We can do what growing churches do: we can love our neighbors, care for our communities, and tell people about the good new of Jesus Christ…(we can) envision a church that ministers from generation to generation.” And you follow this with good suggestions of how to do this. For example you note:”In the Presbyterian Church (U>S>A>), we have hundreds of pastors who would like to start congregations. What if we made it our goal to support them in their dreams and visions?”
Your biggest challenge for the PC(USA): “Out of all the things that we can do, sharing leadership and giving real power to a new generation may be the most important.” You emphasize that this means encouraging and supporting a leadership made up of a diverse representation of gender, ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic class.
You said lots of other good stuff and I hope many will go out and get your paper and read it.
Janet
Wow.
Being a newcomer to this conversation I am pretty surprised by the (early) responses both on this blog and on Beau’s.
I have just read Beau and Carol’s papers today (thanks to this blog post) and my first thought at reading the two papers was, “What a great conversation about the potential future of the church!”
Why the antagonism?
Beau thinks that the way to get the best leaders into the most influential positions of our denomination is to leverage the experiences of people who have significant experience and success in leading and growing our congregations. And if that that means calling a lot of white guys (and it will) so be it.
Carol thinks that the best way to get the best leaders into the most influential positions in our denomination is to intentionally call and develop leaders who represent the full diversity of our congregations, even if they are not “influential” or “successful” by classical definitions. And if that means calling some folks who are less experienced and knowledgeable about the church (and it probably will) so be it.
This seems like exactly the kind of conversation we ought to have. It challenges our assumptions (maybe we do need committees on representation, YADs, and Synods, but at the pace the world is moving, I don’t think it hurts to check) and it articulates competing views regarding the vital question of how we move forward from smart folks who are worth hearing from.
Thanks Beau and Carol for your thoughtful (and thorough) presentations.
Sam
since I am of your generation, I guess it would make sense that I gravitate more to your point of view. I am suspect of all attempts to reclaim Christendom, which is what “reclaiming the Presbyterian Establishment” sounds like. I, quite frankly, am sick to death of the Presbyterian Establishment. But that includes grasping for a false diversity. Don’t get me wrong, I love the diversity that finds its way to our churches. And what I see on the ground is that churches are eager to include those of different backgrounds. What I also see is that the very intellectual freedom you embraced assumes a level of sophistication and education that not all people have. Will Presbyterians become more racially and ethnically diverse? Of course, but my guess is that those individuals will still tend toward educated backgrounds and working professionals. I guess what I am saying is that a focus on loving our neighbors and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom sounds like our mission. Satisfying artificially imposed multi-culturalist expectations sounds like putting the end before the means.
Carol:
As a barely 30, African American who is still hangin on with the Presbies, I applaud your effort to keep the focus on ministry to the emerging generations and the creativity and leadership (all gifts of the Spirit) in our ranks.
Matthew:
I like what you say here about the non-artificial, one might say, more organic way of embracing social diversity in the Church. What I believe makes that difficult, and what I’m striving to help change is the the strategic assumptions made about people of different economic groups and ethnic minorities. My hunch is that most Presbies encounter social diversity in their mission and outreach programs, and when they do so those groups are often on the receiving end of the church’s ministry. That assymetry prevents us from learning how to see one another as equals and as unique members of the body of Christ. We also make assumptions about how churched these groups are as well as about the kind of worship, service or spiritual life they seek. We need the Spirit led motivation to ask, invite, learn and inquire within these groups in a concerted, non-pressured way.
As a minority in graduate education and the corporate workplace I can say for certain that many of us our spiritual seekers and for similar reasons as Carol cited and more, have left childhood church (if we ever had it) behind. For starters that demographic could use more study and attention from Presbies.
Carol,
I love that you think our denomination should focus on planting churches, the PCA has an almost singular focus in this area and it has served them well.
While it is true that younger Evangelicals do change their religious affiliation, they do so in far less numbers that mainline Protestants. Weston’s point is well-made that the PCUSA has been better at driving out Evangelicals than reaching out to disaffected ones. The re-churched of ex-Evangelicals are a mission field, but a much smaller one (at least percentage wise) than the mission field of ex-mainliners, who walk away from the church in droves.
Also, do you agree that perhaps the common thread running through the 5 papers is that we need more powerful and robust Committees on Representation? Is this really the solution? Couldn’t we gain broader participation (a much better word than representation, which to me smacks of quotas) ethnically and culturally by reaching out to existing new immigrant churches, as well as already existing non-majority white congregations that would be theologically sympathetic to presbyterianism (i.e. broadly Reformed and interested in a connectional church structure)?
More powerful Committees on Representation will only give us more of the same, they won’t broaden the horizons of this denomination beyond what we already are. I think my suggestions (reaching out not just to individuals but whole congregations) might actually make us look more like the transcultural church envisioned in the New Testament.
And when it comes to new churches we need to plant, plant, and then plant some more.
I agree with Sam that “our denomination is to intentionally call and develop leaders who represent the full diversity of our congregations, even if they are not “influential” or “successful” by classical definitions.” (And of course I agree with the parts were he agrees with me). Developing those leaders means developing their skills and authority in this world and in the church.
The Presbyterian Church is not the whole Church. The mission of the entire Church Militant is to reach the whole world. The ecology of American denominations means that the Presbyterian Church has specialized in reaching that part of the social structure that uses its education and worldly influence to be stewards of society. The future of the Presbyterian Church requires that its leadership be more racially diverse, and have more women, than it did in the past. I think the way we get there is by focusing on the people in the social structure, of all races and ethnicities and of both sexes, who use their education and worldly influence to be stewards of society.
Beau,
Reading that last comment about how we get to diversity, I would generally agree. Start with what you know, start with those with whom you have familiarity, affinity and with whom you are less prone to indulge in the always troublesome patron/client relationship. For example, if your leaderships only engagement with social diversity is through a mission program, that’s borderline patron/client. That being said, there are plenty of ethnic minorities and women within the US who value education, scholarship and social involvement. There are many more who are either unchurched or not content with their faithwalk. BUT, given the history of exclusion in mainstream US institutions that has only relented in a serious way over the last few decades, the kind of leadership ethnic minorities and women exercise will look and function differently than that of Presbyterian past. It cannot be cookie cutter because these leaders come out of a different context.
The existing PCUSA establishment must prepare itself to deal with that shift. It must discern how the influx of women and ethnic minorities will transform (hopefully enhancing) our theological, ecclesiological and cultural perspective. The same process has been painful in the larger cultural streams of recent history. The way to avoid those pitfalls is avoid catering to our niche at the expense of submission to the person of Jesus and the Missio Dei.
A final thought: if the Presby heritage of interest in education and social engagement is a true gift of the Spirit, no gift of that magnitude should be left under the bushel basket. But I’ve seen some churches do just that as their “gift” becomes an excuse to be insular, self serving or patronizing. Instead, we need to continously discern with prayer where the boundaries of those gifts are and not unilaterally or prematurely demarcate them. Its God’s sovereignty after all, not ours. Whats more, perhaps God is in the midst of granting us new gifts for service. Can a Presby be charismatic or missional? We will need the help of the larger body of Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants and Pentecostals to better understand where we fit in. Because they socially weave in and out of these categories, women and ethnic minorities may be some of our best bridgebuilders in that effort.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh……a little reformation is a good thing……
Has anyone really looked at that word, reformation. Look at it RE….FORM…ATION. Basically doing something again in a new way with old material; OR doing something in a Old way with NEW Material.
What we believe as Presbyterians is that everyone has a place at the table. Our body of Christ MUST look like what God intented, and we interprit that everyday. I like that we discuss who is in the leadership position of RE-FORMING this body, but understanding this and doing this are two serprate action, hence the ATION in the word noting action/movement.
I learned the hard way as new youth pastor at a small church, never decide for the group when the group has not been told or given a choice or chance at input. that was a long year.
Carol is right on task, as well as our seminaries. One has argued to me that we have TOO MUCH diversity in our seminaries from San Francisco to Louisville to Princeton to Columbia. Well that diversity is defining the foot from the eye, and the leg from the arm. As a Christian Educator I see a richness in that kind of journey.
In Short, we as faithful Presbyterians will ALWAYS be having this discussion….always!!!!!