By Leslie Scanlon, The Presbyterian Outlook
With the hit song “Happy” serving as the soundtrack for one of the videos played, an upbeat, optimistic attitude about the future of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) permeated the presentations at the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board meeting Sept. 17.
“We are on the brink, not the brink of disaster, but the brink of vibrant and wonderful ministry,” said Linda Valentine, executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency.
Since the General Assembly blessed the 1,001 New Worshipping Communities initiative two years ago, Presbyterians have created 270 new worshipping communities in 110 presbyteries, said Roger Dermody, the denomination’s deputy executive director for mission. Half are multi-ethnic and multicultural, he said (although he didn’t explain exactly how that’s defined). “This is happening now,” Dermody said. “This is us, the PC(USA) today, and it’s happening all over the nation and lives are being transformed…It’s amazing and exciting and something we absolutely should celebrate and praise God about.”
The Young Adult Volunteer program just commissioned its largest class ever in its 20-year history – with more than 90 new volunteers, including four from South Korea who will serve in the United States, Valentine said.
The PC(USA)’s new communications strategy will include telling inspiring stories of Presbyterians living out Jesus’ command to go make disciples in all nations, said Kathy Francis, the denomination’s director of communications. “Story-telling is a key part of our newly developed communications plan,” Francis said.
Occasionally, the upbeat mood bumped into a few of the denomination’s ongoing challenges – such as during a discussion of a General Assembly directive that the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board and the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly to work together with churches “in the task of reconciliation, starting with visiting each presbytery. . . . ”
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This the reconciliation in the PCUSA. Agree with everything we do, keep your mouths shut, or else we come for your property and your ministry. And oh by the way, we want your money too. No thanks.
“Story-telling is a key part of our newly developed communications plan,” Francis said
Story telling is about it, because we all know that louisville is full of it.
Ms. Valentine certainly doesn’t lack for chutzpah, bravely declaring that a group in as steep a decline as the PC(USA) is “on the brink of vibrant and wonderful ministry.” But maybe she’s right. The last 30 years have been a golden era of church planting as a new generation of pastors/leaders recognized that the old ways of doing church in the 19th and 20th centuries don’t work any longer so they re-engineered church for the 21st century. They started churches in living rooms which today sit on 100-acre campuses with weekly attendance in the thousands. Redeemer Presbyterian (PCA) in New York City, only 25 years old, has weekly attendance of 5,000 at eight Sunday services in three locations in Manhattan with diversity by age, race and class the PC(USA) talks about ad nauseam but almost never achieves. So maybe the PC(USA) is on the verge of returning to a measure of its historic orthodoxy not because it particularly wants to but because the models all around them suggest that’s the only way to reverse its decline.
But I doubt it. My guess is that the PC(USA) has drifted too far in the direction of a vague, amorphous kind of Christianity and is past the point of no return. The newly installed pastor of a large, prominent PC(USA) church acknowledged in a sermon recently that she has heard rumblings that some of her new parishioners are put off by all of her Jesus talk. Many PC(USA) churches just aren’t all that hospitable to Jesus talk anymore and I expect the decline to continue. But I’ll be elated if I’m wrong.