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A Brief History of Presbymergent

May 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Over on my blog, Pomomusings, I just completed a 3-part series entitled, “A Brief History of Presbymergent.” If you’d like to read the entries, you can begin here with Part 1.

Below is an excerpt from Part 3 of the series, and offers some thoughts and hopes about the future of Presbymergent.

I’m not entirely sure where we go from here. But I’m confident in the amazing group of folks who self-identify as part of the Presbymergent community. I’m hopeful that there will continue to be ways that people find to “hack the Book of Order” and be able to do new and creative ministry in a time of mainline decline. I’m hopeful that the denomination may begin to realize that they need the loyal radicals and work harder to find ways to support those of us who want to try new things. I hope that there will be groups who are not afraid of failure and committees who are not afraid to put their trust in younger pastors. I pray that more and more seminarians will feel confident enough to continue asking “WHY?” when professors at our seminaries teach us the same old things and tell us what worship is “supposed” to look like.

“Welcome to Presbymergent. What’s the first rule of Presbymergent? You do not talk about Presbymergent.”

Sure there will probably be some organization at some point…sure we’ll have to talk about our goals and discern more what our purpose is in the church that is emerging. But for now…maybe we don’t need to talk about Presbymergent – maybe we just need to be Presbymergent…maybe we just need to be out there, engaging the world, being the church and perhaps the rest will follow.

I’d love for you to check out the series and let me know your thoughts.

Filed Under: Presbymergent Tagged With: , ,

presbymergent Coordinating Group

May 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Presbymergent has entered into a new phase with the creation of the presbymergent Coordinating Group. About two months ago, we wrote about how we were looking to create a Coordinating Group for presbymergent. After a few weeks of allowing people to self-nominate themselves, and checking in with those who have been active with presbymergent since the beginning, we have formed the presbymergent Coordinating Group. It consists of 36 folks right now, both men and women, pastors, youth pastors, denominational staff, seminarians, theologians and many others.

We look forward to the challenge it will be to both live in an open-source world, and also honor our denomination’s call to doing things decently and in order – and seeing how that plays out for leadership in the 21st century. We are very excited to see how this new group will guide the continuing emergence of presbymergent.

Filed Under: Leadership, Open Source, Presbymergent Tagged With: , ,

presbymergent leadership ~ Coordinating Group

March 11, 2008 By 26 Comments

As many of you know, presbymergent began as the brainchild of just two individuals. A year later, we are a full-fledged community of several hundred ministers, lay-persons, writers, evangelists, youth directors, web-developers, theologians, seminarians, artist-musicians, and more. Until now, “presbymergent leadership” has consisted primarily of the seven website editors, and whomever happened to step forward and help at our various regional parties and gatherings.

While this leadership arrangement has enabled us to do much, we’re at a point where we need to be more intentional about leadership — not in a hierarchical, bureaucratic sort of way, of course, but rather for the sake of accountability, transparency, communal stewardship, and plain old “getting things done.”

To this end, we’d like to form a Coordinating Group to steer and guide our community over the next year, as we seek a balance between living in the world of “loosely networked generative friendships” as well as the world of “decently and in order.”

The Coordinating Group is open to anyone who is both Presbyterian and actively exploring what it means to be Emergent. It might be a transitional group, or it may evolve into something more permanent. Regardless, we’re looking for people willing to make a one-year time commitment to participate in several intentional developmental conversations (through a Google Group, some conference calls, and hopefully face-to-face interactions) about the continuing “emergence” of presbymergent. We should add the warning that the Coordinating Group is not intended as a “prestige” thing nearly as much as a “roll up your sleeves and work with us” thing.

If you’re interested in helping to further develop our community in this way, you can reply in the comment section to this post, or else send an email to presbymergent@gmail.com letting us know. We’ll reply to everyone as soon as we’ve given sufficient time for people to take the plunge … step into the fire … umm … volunteer.

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Is There Such a Thing as An Emergent Clerk of Session?

January 17, 2008 By 6 Comments

Once again, I’ll dip into the presbymergent brain trust with a question about the changing dynamics within my own congregation.

I love my “wee kirk,” which when I arrived back in 2003 was a group of about 17 stalwarts, the last folks standing in a suburban congregation that began it’s archetypal mainline deathspiral back in the 1970s. We’re now at about 45 attendees, a mix of Anglos, second generation Korean-Americans, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and African-Americans. The majority of my membership is now under the age of 30.

This year, my session composition is finally changing to more fully reflect the makeup of my church, with half of my leadership now comprised of young professionals…again, under the age of 30. My dear stalwarts are pleased with this, and are eager to hand over the reins. I am both pleased and a little concerned, because while I have total confidence in the thoughtfulness and gifts of my new church leadership, I’m not quite so sure about how well we’re going to mesh with the demands of church record keeping and bureaucracy.

In the near term future, I’m going to need a new clerk of session, and to be quite blunt, I don’t want to inflict the expectations of that hallowed office on any of my new members. My current clerk is worried about it, because she recognizes that it’s going to be nearly impossible for any of my new leadership to do all the things that she currently is required to do without quitting their jobs.

I’m going to be unable to honestly persuade anyone to take on that mantle because I don’t think it’s one that ultimately *needs* to be taken up. Yes, we need to keep good records for our own planning. Yes, we need to maintain standards of accounting transparency. But I need my folks working towards our vision for revitalization and in-the-trenches evangelism, not pouring their energies into paperwork. We don’t have that luxury.

So my question is: have any of y’all managed this kind of transition? Any tips? Any pointers? Any sympathetic ears in Presbytery?

Or should I just resign myself to telling my folks that all those exceptions on our Session records are just a way of telling us how exceptional we are…

Filed Under: Leadership, PC(USA), Polity Tagged With: , ,

Living In Two Worlds: Existing/Emergent Leadership

November 27, 2007 By 5 Comments

I was on my knees in the sanctuary of the church where I am currently serving as Associate Pastor (the only pastor as of now, since the senior pastor departed), and I probably should have been praying. Instead, I was muttering a few choice words at the iron that was smoking in my hands. Nothing I learned in seminary prepared me for the horror that comes with “candle wax removal.” It seems quite simple at the outset. To remove candle wax from the carpet you simply heat an iron, take some rather thick, absorbent paper and then iron the wax until it melts and sticks to the paper—thereby removing it.

It’s not that simple.

The iron was too hot on that fateful day and I lifted a rather large chunk of the carpet along with the huge wax spill that had occurred the night before during our emergent worship gathering. Try as I might, I could not hide the blemish. It remains there still—a reminder of my inability to properly Martha Stewart my wax issue, and as a warning on where not to place candles that you don’t want tipped on to the floor.
Lately, though, I have come to see the burn in the sanctuary carpet as a symbol for something else: The tenuous, tumultuous relationship between the existing and the emerging church…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Churches, Emergent, Emerging Worship, Leadership, Presbymergent Tagged With: