Presbytery bans regular meetings, searches for new mission strategy
The Layman Online, April 29, 2005
The Presbytery of San Joaquin in Visalia, Calif., will meet on May 7 – an event that merits some attention because the presbytery voted in January to hold zero regular meetings during 2005.
Well, May 7 is not a regular meeting, and thus it’s exempt from the meeting ban. Furthermore, it’s a called meeting with a short agenda and not much hype.
But why is San Joaquin boycotting regular meetings and when was this prohibition established?
It came at the conclusion of a special called meeting on Jan. 22, when a group of seven lay Presbyterians on the presbytery’s Mission Agency team gave a report to the presbytery.
They said that, as a team, they had met with Presbyterians once a month for 15 months. According to an explanation on the presbytery Web site, the team determined that “many people felt like the regular presbytery meetings were not helpful or relevant to their congregational life, and simply a rubberstamp of what committees have already done.”
Furthermore, the presbytery said, “The team learned that the presbytery’s membership and finances have been declining at a dramatic rate and that many congregations did not feel connected to each other or to the presbytery.”
“One person at our meeting stood up and said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results,” the Rev. Dr. Clark D. Cowden, evangelist presbyter for the presbytery, said. “We have to be willing to try something new, if we hope for a different outcome.”
The prohibition against regular meetings didn’t shut down the presbytery. Its committees and commissions authorized to act on behalf of the presbytery still handle their duties. And three “called” meetings are expected this year.
In the meantime, the presbytery has decided to enter into a “missional discernment process” to figure out what it ought to be doing. The process will involve clusters of lay leaders and pastors who will train Presbyterians “to lead critical missional conversations in their congregations.”
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time,” Cowden said. “This missional discernment process is designed to help us make adaptive changes, where we can attempt some new missional experiments that do not come in a pre-programmed package, but come from the people of God themselves. We don’t know what we will come up with by the end of the year, but we believe something significant will emerge from the people of God. We believe if we can carry forward the best of the past, and join the best of our churches together, that we can change the soul of the valley forever. That is our passion.”