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

Westward Ho!: General Assembly Heads to Portland

The General Assembly will be in Portland this year; my flight is booked three weeks from today. As I look forward to our “Presbyterian Class Reunion,” (so-called because pastors who attend invariably reconnect with seminary classmates with whom they have not spoken in years, as well as colleagues from previous pastorates), I do so with a combination of hopefulness, anticipation and dread: hopefulness because there are initiatives on the Assembly’s agenda that I think can suggest a new path for our life together that avoids dichotomous, win-lose conversations; anticipation because those who attend the Assembly are shown the many ways the God who is sovereign in love through Jesus Christ is at work to bring joy and justice, salvation and shalom; and dread because most people will only hear about the three or four (maybe one or two) most controversial issues and define the entire Assembly based on this limited view.

As I look forward with hopefulness, anticipation and dread, I would like to share the words of the Rev. Clay Allard from Dallas, who wrote an opinion piece for The Presbyterian Outlook. Clay’s counsel on engaging the Assembly also works for engaging one another in our congregations:

·         Stay connected when it hurts. The easiest thing to do is withdraw when the assumptions of the majority inflict pain on the minority. We can only hold on if we have committed time and attention from one another.       We must stay attentive to one another even when we know that attention will bring pain, discomfort and struggle.

·         Respect, even when it feels like respect is not due or returned. We can only be responsible for our own attitude and self; that said, others can call out of us disrespect and dismissal when they say things with which we adamantly disagree. Division is fed by disrespect; love is killed by it.       Make sure if there is a crucifixion occurring that there isn’t a hammer or nails in your hands.

·         Give up outcomes as a way to understand the path. God does not owe us a mapped route to where God wants us to be. Sometimes God’s call leads us to actions that seem frustratingly slow/counterproductive/useless. Remember that God’s ways are not our ways, and persist in the path you are called to be on – even when it seems to be counterproductive. God loves us – God doesn’t give a serpent instead of a fish, or a rock instead of bread. Trust that.

·         Work for an audience of One. If pastors are (as someone once said) dogs at a whistlers’ convention, we need to know God’s whistle best. It is difficult to make people unhappy, to disappoint them, to be rejected and disrespected. But if Jesus Christ is happy with me at the end of the day, I know I’ve done well, no matter what those around me may think or feel. I’ll have to live more intimately and eternally with Jesus Christ’s opinion of me than I will with anyone else’s – even my own.

When the saints go marching in I plan to march with ‘em,

Brad Munroe

Ignite the Spark!: Preview of Coming Attractions

Last week I introduced the Ignite the Spark congregational transformation events that will be connected to future presbytery meetings and which will be funded by a grant from the General Assembly. Our initial Ignite the Spark! will feature the Rev. Dr. Tom Tewell from Macedonian Ministries in Atlanta on Friday, August 19 beginning at 1:00 and continuing into the combined presbytery meeting on Saturday, August 20. I would like to take this opportunity to preview our fall presenter, the Rev. Dr. Ray Schullte.      

The Rev. Dr. Ray Schullte is the executive director of the Center for Parish Development in Chicago. The Center works with congregations across denominations through online training programs for church members and distance coaching for pastors. At the fall meetings for both Grand Canyon and de Cristo presbyteries, Dr. Schultte will preview and overview the Center’s online offerings that include courses in vision discernment, missional practices, leadership development and generosity.

What excites me about the possibilities of our partnering with the Center for Parish Development is that they will allow our rural congregations to participate in Ignite the Spark! even if church members are unable to attend a Friday workshop. I am aware that our rural churches sometimes feel left out; I was once pastor to a rural church. Therefore, the leadership who helped plan the Ignite the Spark! congregational transformation events was intentional in designing something that can be accessed remotely, which the Center’s offering can both through the online modules as well as the coaching hours for congregational leaders that are available.

 The only down-side to our partnering with the Center is that participation in the online training programs is limited due to cost. We estimated that a percentage of our congregations will choose to partner with the Center and so designed the Ignite the Spark! budget accordingly. Registration will be on a first-come, first-serve basis; however, because this part of the Ignite the Spark! program is designed especially to offer help to our congregations located farther from the metro area, there will be preferential registration for rural congregations. More details will follow in the fall so stay tuned.

One last invitation: in talking with Ray Schultte of the Center, he invites three churches in the presbytery to preview the online courses and get involved even before the Fall. He would like to be able to point to specific churches within our presbytery who are using the online courses and interacting with their coaching staff. If you would like to be a part of this pilot program, please contact me at bradmunroe1963@gmail.com.

Jesus got a hold a me and he ain’t lettin’ go,

Brad Munroe

P.S. Here is a link for the Center: http://missionalchurch.org/online-learning-modules/

Congregational Transformation: Leaning into Renewal

Last week I attended my third (and final) year of the General Assembly sponsored Executive Leadership Formation program. Scary to say, but I am now a trained executive leader, a graduate no less! (Does this mean I am supposed to know what I am doing?)

One of the open space workshops was a conversation about congregational renewal and revitalization. What struck me in this conversation of presbytery leaders, all of whom were pastors of churches before taking their new position, is that there is no silver bullet, no magic formula for congregational renewal. The closest any of us came to having a magic formula was the leader from Illinois who claimed to have a magic wand that could transform a congregation. “Unfortunately,” he added, “I can’t find the right size batteries to make it work!” And so we are left to wonder and to work, to ponder and to pray.

The best ideas that were offered centered around the notions of discovering one’s connection with one’s community; to connect with one’s community in mission service that creates friendships and establishes connection, sharing, service and invitation. Churches seeking to engage renewal and revitalization through community mission found renewed energy in a shared sense of purpose with one another and an utter reliance on God’s help as they engage the twists and turns of interacting not on our own turf and terms but in the midst of the lives of our neighbors.

The best ideas that were offered centered around the notions of discernment and dialogue. A consistent story was that renewing and revitalizing churches were taking the time to engage one another in conversations about core convictions, theological values and how they get expressed in a congregation’s life together and in their mission. As well as spending time together in prayer, especially as leaders, these churches also entered into dialogue with God’s Holy Spirit. Stories were abundant about how the plan that church leadership intended was transformed by people, problems and opportunities God brought into their midst.

The best ideas that were offered centered around the notions of experimentation. It was striking to hear how many pastoral leaders expressed the need to lighten our grip on the idea of mission alignment (i.e. the idea that our mission and vision drive our staffing, our structure and guide us toward our internal ministry and external mission) for the sake of mini-experiments which seek to explore possibilities for God’s call upon a congregation. Several stories were told of congregational energy and vitality being renewed by a church’s giving permission and creating opportunities for members’ ideas and passions to be put into practice.

Do you desire to think together, pray together and discuss together ways your congregation can lean into renewal? Then mark your calendars for our first, “Ignite the Spark” event sponsored by funds received from General Assembly through a presbytery transformation grant (Friday, August 19 beginning at 1:00 and continuing into the next day, Saturday, August 20, at our combined presbytery meeting). Our keynote speaker will by the Rev. Dr. Tom Tewell, former pastor of Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church in Houston, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Houston, and now executive director of Macedonia Ministries in Atlanta (registration details to follow). I look forward to seeing how God will work among us!

Jesus got a hold a me,

Brad Munroe