Ignite the Spark! Leadership Transformation Event: August 19th

Like humans, churches have life cycles. It is a natural process, but it can be a scary thing when membership plateaus and attendance begins to decline.  Recognizing the causes will help in deciding on a course of action.  The Presbyteries of de Cristo and Grand Canyon have received a grant to aid in helping congregations to begin and continue a transformational way of life.  Transformation is the process of intentionally moving into a new reality and way of being that helps congregations envision what God is calling them to be for their community and for the Kingdom of God.  All churches are in some state of being transformed and presbyteries must have resources available to assist them.

These workshops are free to pastors and congregational leaders (limit 3 ruling elders per church, plus a church’s teaching elders) and available on a first-come, first served basis.  Registration includes a meal, workshop registration and hotel for anyone travelling over 50 miles to attend.

Our first Ignite the Spark! event will be August 19, 2016 with the Rev. Dr. Tom Tewell. This initial Ignite the Spark! event will be from 1:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m. at Northminster PC, Tucson and will include a catered dinner.

The Rev. Dr. Tom Tewell, executive director of Macedonian Ministries in Atlanta, will lead our initial Ignite the Spark! on the topic of congregational transformation. Drawing on his 35 years of parish ministry experience, Tom will provide some best practices in ministry he has gathered that pastors and church leaders can apply in their congregations.  Macedonian Ministries is a ministry that resources pastors and mid-councils throughout the U.S. and in Scotland for the sake of learning best practices that help pastor’s both broaden and deepen their leadership skill set as they in turn help their congregation’s rediscover their missional identity and vitality. Dr. Tewell is the former pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City as well as Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church in Houston. To register for the August 19 Ignite the Spark!click here.

I look forward to seeing how God will work among us,

Brad Munroe

Rediscovering Stewardship Nurturing Generous Hearts 2.0

Does your congregation wrestle with its budget? Does your Session desire to deepen or broaden your congregation’s mission budget yet struggle to pay staff? Is the “stewardship campaign” only a fall event or series?
As I travel to General Assembly, I want to point you and your congregation’s finance leaders in the direction of synod. We are privileged to host this year’s national training for synods: Nurturing Generous Hearts II. For a mere $75 per person ($50 for commuters), you get three days of conference with two nights room and seven meals in our very own backyard. No traveling east is necessary. No planes or trains, just automobiles.
The keynote speakers will be the Rev. Dr. Karl Travis, senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Worth, Texas and Grace Duddy Pomroy, co-author of the book Embracing Stewardship. In addition to our keynoters and worship led by the Rev. Shannon Webster, (who some of you may remember as the former executive presbyter of Sierra Blanca Presbytery), there will be workshops for small and large congregations, for preachers and finance committees, for multi-racial and multi-cultural communities, for creating narrative budgets and asset based budgets, for creating glad and generous giving that is an expression of our faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.
Did I say that all this is available for the low, low price of $75? I think I did. What I have not mentioned yet is that Nurturing Generous Hearts II will be held Thursday, August 25 – 27, 2016 at the Hilton Phoenix Airport Hotel just east of Sky Harbor. Oh, and registration opened yesterday at www.synod.org.

If you or anyone on your church’s Session answered yes to one of the three questions in my opening paragraph, you need to send your pastors and a contingent of elders to Nurturing Generous Hearts II. It is long overdue for pastors to become comfortable talking about money, for elders to envision stewardship as an essential component of discipleship, and for congregants to learn the joy of developing lifestyles of thankfulness and generosity as the inevitable response to living in the grace of Jesus Christ!

Stewardship is the new cool,

Brad Munroe

Westward Ho! General Assembly and Evangelism

The most exciting action taken at the General Assembly in Portland, June 18-25, will be among the least widely reported. What will absorb all the oxygen in the newsroom (and around coffee pots in local congregation’s fellowship halls) will be whatever controversial action taken by the Assembly by a 51% to 49% vote. However, in my humble opinion, the most exciting action that will be taken is the celebration and republication of Turn to the Living God: A Call to Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way.

Turn to the Living God was first published in 1991 so 2016 commemorates the 25^th anniversary of its publication. It is as relevant today as it has ever been; as true today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow (Hebrews 13:8). As the publishers write in a preface to this anniversary edition:

The church is continuing to learn how to exist in a post-modern and post-Christian society…at the same time, one-third of the world’s population is yet to be exposed to the message of our triune God’s love in Jesus Christ in culturally appropriate ways…We have an outwardly focused mission to proclaim our faith to the ends of the earth.

Turn to the Living God is quintessentially Presbyterian, acknowledging our tendency toward “restraint” when it comes to evangelism yet mining our deep well of Scripture study and confessional heritage in ways that are accessible to readers with and without seminary degrees. What is perhaps more important in terms of our Presbyterian heritage and ethos is that it breaks down the false polarity of justice vs. evangelism to show how, in Jesus Christ, they are a double-helix, our Reformed DNA. As the final section, “The Wholeness of Evangelism,” suggests, Presbyterian evangelism is “the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.”

I commend to you Turn to the Living God either for personal or communal study.* There is something for every congregation in our presbytery to like in this study, as well as things that will challenge every congregation. Where will you see yourself or your congregation and say, “Ah! That’s me. That’s us.” Where will you see yourself or your congregation and say, “Hmmm…perhaps I / we have need to grow deeper and wider in the salvation and shalom of Jesus.”

To read Turn to the Living God: A Call to Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way just google the title or follow this link: https://www.presbyterianmission.org/wp-content/uploads/Turn-to-the-Living-God-25th-Anniversary-Edition.pdf.

Seeking a Wide and Generous Orthodoxy,

Brad Munroe

Westward Ho! General Assembly and Social Witness

At the General Assembly in Portland, June 18-25, one of the big discussion points will revolve around “social witness.” I cringe when I use this term because I fear that some of you, O Faithful Readers, hear “politics” when someone from the denomination says “social witness.” Alas, I must confess that I would prefer to keep social witness and politics in separate realms for the sake of lowering the temperature of discord within our congregations, yet do I acknowledge that the biblical mandate to “let justice roll down like a river” (Amos 5:24) and to “do justice” (Micah 6:8), in our democratic republic, often necessitates their intimate conversation. With this conversation in mind, I share two perspectives that will be presented in Portland.

One perspective in the conversation about developing social witness policy comes from Chris Iosso of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, who wrote a commentary in The Presbyterian Outlook on the Middle East report:

The study team made two Christian theological decisions:First, it would avoid the distraction of devising political solutions, at which diplomats have failed for many years. Second, it would apply universal and explicitly Christian values [and] foster relationships with partners who share its values, be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or secular...

To witness to Presbyterian values for a just peace, the report hears the Palestinian Christian call fornonviolent economic pressure for freedom, dignity and a larger role for the UN/ international law.“At the same time,” the report does not absolve Palestinian leadership for “decisions ...that discourage new leadership and ... passivity....”

What I hear in Mr. Iosso’s commentary is a wrestling with what the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “Christian Realism,” which is an approach to ethics that seeks to balance the radical idealism of Gospel imperatives with the earthy realities of culture, society and political discourse. That is, how can the Church or the individual Jesus follower best seek justice in a broken and divided world where (a) there are no perfect solutions yet (b) ideals should not be abandoned? Is there a way to balance the need for realism with the call of idealism?

A second perspective in the conversation about developing social witness policy comes from Foothills Presbytery, who has proposed an overture that says, essentially, that the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy take a sabbatical from writing social witness policy for the General Assembly to affirm and instead direct their energies toward writing curriculum that will help congregations and presbyteries engage in ethical study of “both” (“both” is how the Foothills overture reads but I would argue the word “multiple” is more appropriate) sides of a debate. The value of this Foothills overture, as I see it, is that it will deepen in constructive ways the church’s involvement in social witness by helping congregants and pastors wrestle together with ethical insights with which they already agree and insights that may be new to them. In a culture of narrow-casting, where people are fed information predominantly from single source perspectives, such wrestling with multiple perspectives cannot help but deepen and nourish our ethical conversations, for it is in the wrestling with God and one another that we are given a new name (Genesis 32:24-28). The constructive critique of this Foothills overture is that it may diminish the denomination’s prophetic witness by avoiding a single, monolithic word from the highest council of the church. It will be interesting to see what the Assembly does and how the commissioners wrestle with God and one another!
 

We shall overcome some day,

Brad Munroe