Speaking of Orchards: On Church Planting
May 15, 2011
A friend of the blog and blogger himself, Rev. Josh Rowley, is in the process of starting a new ‘missional community’ for the Presbyterians, and he recently posted a quote by H. Stanley Wood in his Extraordinary Leaders in Extraordinary Times (p. 152-153)
“A way forward for new-church development in denominations that value the connecting tissue of their congregations and judicatory structures might be to aid existing churches to start new churches, including the sending of ‘home-grown’ leadership to be NCD pastors”
As it happens I was just about to post something on this very topic. My diocese of Minnesota was started by one of our great missionary bishops, the Rt. Rev. Henry Benjamin Whipple. In large part because of his efforts, Minnesota has a very strong Episcopal presence relative to most other states in between the coasts. Besides saving hundreds of Sioux who were due to be unjustly executed by appeal to Pres. Abraham Lincoln, it is said that he once floated an entire church building down a river in order to plant it downstream. If you are ever in Minnesota, do go venerate his tomb underneath the Cathedral of our Merciful Savior in Fairbault. Which, as it happens, was the parish I was confirmed in.
We are all aware of the myriad of opinions there are as to why the Mainline is shrinking so rapidly, and we shall save such speculation for another day. At the very least it must be admitted that we lack the same zeal for planting new churches that Pentecostal and evangelical churches do. While the new multi-site campus style of growth is an anti-charismatic personality cult, and is therefore to be scorned in every way, what some evangelical churches often do is have thriving congregations put resources into starting new parishes, often sending clergy and lay people to aid.
To the extent that we even do plant new churches, the Mainline tends to do so in ways that are extraordinarily expensive, centralized, slow, and conservative. And if we’re honest, we don’t naturally put effort into evangelizing immigrant populations. (Though we’ve had some great opportunities with Hmong and Karen immigrants here. We’re slowly translating a prayer book into the language of the Hmong after a several hundred Hmong Roman Catholics sought to become Episcopalians, and the first parish I attended, Messiah in St. Paul, has successfully integrated a substantial Karen refugee group.)
Now I don’t want to suggest we go around our diocese’ at all, but there is no reason that a diocese could not encourage this kind of planting and even give aid to those congregations who would do so. Does anyone know of any diocese’ or parishes in particular that are doing this sort of thing? There are many avenues that could be explored for fundraising but this seems like one of the more successful and generally healthy kinds.
“Hello Seeker-Movement, I’m the Mainline”
January 5, 2011
“The man next to you on the London-to-Edinburgh train going north, wired up to his laptop and his mobile simultaneously: issuing instructions about hiring, firing, sidelining, expanding here and reducing here, letting so and so in on the latest developments, leaving so and so out of them, making cautious inquiries concerning new development opportunities, closing down an unprofitable field before it sinks too many resources. Yes, he may well be a systems manager for an information technology firm. Or, he may equally well be a Baptist minister…” John Milbank, Stale Expressions
Or, he may be an Episcopal priest…sigh.
“Vestries need to listen to the marketplace, the broader context in which the congregation operates. I read three dozen market-based reports every day and am impressed with how much good data and trend spotting are available. Listen to people’s needs.”
A recent internet acquaintance of mine has some opinions of his own as to how “theologically open” a seminary or Christian university ought to be. Everything sounds good on the surface of his post but I must admit that I disagree with almost all of it.
There seems to be undergirding the entire post a vision of the Church or “Christianity” as a unified body. Now on a dogmatic, especially a pneumatological level, this is true in some sense (this would of course be contested by the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches) but in our lived lives it is quite simply false: We are divided by a myriad of issues from confessions to political bodies – (I am here endorsing wholeheartedly Ephraim Radner’s understanding of Christian division).
Thus it is difficult to conceive in any meaningful sense what a “merely” “Christian” seminary or university would look like. The Nicene Creed can function as a solid enough base to flesh out a basic confessional unity in most Christian contexts but when considering seminary especially, it becomes far more complicated as to whether or not such a base is truly sufficient to serve the needs of our unique churches. What hath Geneva to do with Canterbury?
The complex Christian cocktail that has resulted from the “Ecumenical Movement” as well as the utter failure of western protestantism to sustain anything like a distinct Christian confessional unity becomes clear in conversations like this. This confusion has several strains currently expressing themselves in our churches, I’ll mention four: 1) Most evangelical don’t have much in the way of any theological identity. They don’t know or recite the creeds, they don’t catechize and they don’t like homosexuals. So long as they sing modern worship choruses and preach 45 minute sermons they feel that they get along fine. 2) Many older churches such as the Mainline still maintain a sense of their historic identity but there is a significant toleration of theological diversity such that there is a widely acknowledged reality of the dissolution of a coherent evangel. 3) Also within the Mainline but also in many Emergent and certain evangelical churches there is a repudiation of confessional unity and a glorification of diversity. 4) There are the hold-the-line or buckle-down-and-fight groups.
I admit this is reductive but on a generic level I think it holds. Within churches we are bound to find any of several of these so I don’t pretend that they are watertight between groups.
I am of the opinion that theological identity is essential to evangelism, discipleship and unity. It follows, as I’ve mentioned before, that I think you should teach what you believe. This of course sounds ridiculous coming from an Episcopalian 
Now… All this and yet I agree that closing off creative and inquisitive theology can be utterly destructive. Honestly, at this point, I’m absolutely clueless as to how to hold these two things together in a balance, historic theological identity and faithful theological response. Or rather I have an idea of how it can work in churches structured according to historic catholic order but no idea how it can work between churches. Whatever the case, Methodists should pump out Methodist pastors and Lutherans Lutherans, anything else just creates a muddle.
Can We Afford Educated Clergy?
April 30, 2009
This is the question that Pastor Carol Howard Merritt (PC(USA)) asks in one of her recent posts (you can see it here, and a follow up here) As a side note, if I were in the PC(USA) and I was in a Presbytery or a place of influence, I would listen to (almost) everything she says. There are few in PC(USA) that has the pastoral sensitivity to critique both of the extreme sides of her denomination and to critically engage the “Presbymergents” (probably the largest wing of the “hyphen”-mergents) without simply buying into some of the more impatient youthfulness inherent in “Emergent” movements.
Anyway. Pastor Carol says point blank that they* cannot. *(I’m going to speak of “they” here because she knows the PC(USA) intimately, and it is difficult to speak honestly of the whole “Mainline” since there is more diversity than we think to make broad strokes, and I do not know even the educational problems in TEC and others) She says:
“The cost of undergraduate and seminary education has gone up too high, and our churches have gotten too small”
She goes on to say that there are pastors on food stamps, so how could we consider making pastors go to seminary and pay $30,000+ for an education? She asks the denomination to question honestly about the current trajectories in money and congregational size.
First I want to applaud her for speaking with such honesty. It has been said that the Mainline is still suffering from a power hangover (and Evangelicals are suffering from a power buzz-but that is changing as well). Some of us do not want to admit that we do not have the afluence to keep some schools open. I do not know the issues intimately in TEC, but I do know that we are selling buildings at some established schools and that Seabury/Western is no longer taking students.
(As another side note, this cannot be said to be a problem only of the Mainline which if often naively thought to suffer from God’s wrath on their being too “liberal.” Readers know that I believe classical liberal Protestantism is a dead end, but its influence is continuing to wain because 1) our younger crowd is not as dogmatically liberal as our forbearers and 2) Liberals are no longer on the cutting edge of theology and biblical studies as their worldview is still tied into the supposed assurity of a “modernist” epistomology. But without the work of “liberals,” we would not have the work of Wright, Dunn, Brueggemann et. al. So let’s all cut the liberals a break.)
So on one front I absolutely agree with her. According to the current modes-of-operation in the education of the Mainline, it seems that we truly cannot afford to continue to send clergy to their indebted death.
BUT . . .
Having come from a fellowship which historically (I know that this is not universally the case – I did study with the NCU uber-trio of scholars after all) scorns education and revels in anti-intellectualism I know first hand that when clergy are not educated, we can slip into strange heresies and errors (not as if education solves this problem, we have our own to be sure). Now more than ever we need people in the church (not necessarily clergy, but why not? and how otherwise?) who are able to dig into our collective history for wisdom and clarity. We NEED clergy who know the basics of Church History, the development of doctrine, the foundations of biblical criticism, theology that takes from Gregory of Nyssa and (gulp) Calvin more so that Jung and anthropologists. We need to know what we believe and why. And we cannot expect lay people to know all these things (though we should educate).
And where will our clergy be spiritually formed?
So, this for me is a starting point to begin to speak of some of my proposals for new models of education and formation which could aid in solving some of the problems developiong in the systems as we have them. My fellow Theophiliacs can tell you that I think about what a seminary can and should look like ALL THE TIME. So I want to pitch some ideas around, ideas that I don’t suppose are well developed, but ones that I hope will contribute to an ongoing conversation on the way that we can shepherd the Body.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
