A Story to Remember This Week at General Assembly

Last fall I had the chance to attend a gathering in Denver organized by Mission to North America (MNA), the church planting agency of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), my home denomination.

By PCA standards, MNA managed to assemble a fairly diverse group of attendees, even if the differences between groups were rather apparent throughout the week, sometimes comically so. (Let's just say that you can usually locate a PCA pastor within the denomination on the basis of whether he's wearing a polo or a bowtie and that was evident in Colorado.)

That said, I thought the event was a great success and this one story explains why: Between sessions, one of my closest friends (and a fellow missional wing type) and I were able to have a long conversation with a pastor who is on the general counsel for the Gospel Reformation Network. Generally speaking I think my friend and I would both be identified as more missional wing people whereas our new friend from GRN would be in a much stricter doctrinalist group. But what we found as we spoke is that we had more in common than you might think. I also found that I just really liked the guy and enjoyed talking to him. He loves Jesus, is an interesting person, and cares about the right things. If we had more like him, we'd be a healthier church. And, just in personal terms, I would be delighted to have more friends like him.

At one point in the conversation, my longtime friend asked him to tell us about some of the pastoral questions and challenges he was thinking about as part of his ministry at a classic big steeple southern presbyterian church in the rural south.

He proceeded to tell us a story that made complete sense given his context—a multi-generational church that had been a civic center to his town's life for over a century, new growth from traditionally less churched populations, and thick local customs that were being changed and re-negotiated due to generational transitions. Everything he was facing and trying to handle with the care befitting that of a shepherd made sense and everything he said about how he was trying to care for the various parties made sense. I came out of the conversation quite confident that he was a very sensitive and astute pastor.

That said, the experiential gap between a hundred year old big steeple sociological mainline church in the rural south and my home congregation, an almost two year old church plant meeting in a public elementary school cafeteria in a midwestern state capitol and Big Ten university town is... significant. We know nothing of the pastoral challenges he is facing—or at least I, a lifelong midwesterner, do not know anything about them.

On the other hand, the challenges in our church are things more like how do you get unchurched and dechurched people in a fairly non-churched part of the country to show up? How do you manage the unique and somewhat demanding realities of a church plant meeting in rented space? How do you bring a thick community together when most of the people attending only met in the past few months and have lives with minimal degrees of organic overlap due to living in a large state capitol and being fairly busy with work, school, kids, and caring for aging parents? Behind all those problems is a deeper problem, which is that presbyterianism has virtually no historic footprint in Lincoln or Nebraska more broadly and so we come off as a bit of a curiosity, at best, to most of our neighbors, who likely don't know much about the Bible, let alone the Westminster Standards.

Some of these are challenges my friend would recognize, I'm sure, but even the challenges he recognizes would hit very different in the deep red and relatively churched rural south as opposed to a relatively unchurched, deep blue lower midwest state capitol whose dominant professional fields are education and technology.

That fact can push us one of two ways: The differences in our contexts and the different demands those contexts place on us can drive us apart because it is so easy to misinterpret contextual differences as real divisions. Or those same differences can drive us closer to our brothers and sisters as we seek to serve and love one another, which often begins with understanding where God has called each of us.

What is my point in sharing all this? We have very few national ecclesial bodies at this point. Rome certainly counts. The Mainline no longer does. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) mostly does not simply due to size. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) mostly does not either, both because of size (comparable to the EPC) and because its core geographic hubs are basically all places where the Episcopal Church remained relatively conservative for longer and then exited to the ACNA, as in the Carolinas, or places with huge legacy evangelical hubs whose later generations were drawn to Anglicanism, as in Wheaton, Nashville, Dallas-Fort Worth, or Colorado Springs. The only other exception to this rule would be found in DC and New York City, both of which are highly unique within American life. The factors that help the ACNA thrive in those two cities do not transfer much beyond those cities. In any case, there are no Anglicans in southeast Nebraska, for example, and their presence in other parts of the country outside those specific contextx mentioned above can be fairly spotty as well. For example, there is only one ACNA church in the entire Orlando metro. None of this is to criticize the ACNA at all; I am profoundly grateful for their faithful work. I am simply noting that they are not really a national denomination in the same way the PCA is.

Even the SBC is a bit of an odd duck here: It's huge, but also in my part of the country basically doesn't exist. We already are saturated with conservative independent credobaptist churches, so the SBC wouldn't really offer anything new. The only national ecclesial bodies that have a meaningful presence in the lower midwest are Rome and the PCA.

And once you see that, two things should immediately snap into place: First, there is an enormous opportunity here for the PCA simply because we have a level of resources and institutional scale that no one else (aside from the SBC) can match in the evangelical world. That is an enormous gift and a responsibility for us to steward. Second, there are significant challenges here simply as a result of geography that most other church bodies do not face and, indeed, that the PCA did not face in its earlier years when it was a predominantly southern church.

The opportunities are, or should be, self-evident: Smaller denominations cannot maintain a national campus ministry such as Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) and to the degree the PCA has a young generation (unlike many other traditionally white denominations in the US) much of that is thanks to the work of RUF. To the extent that we have a pastor pipeline for training up the next generation of ministers, that too is largely thanks to RUF.

The challenges are a bit easier to miss, I think, and that conversation above helps to explain why. Because we had the chance to meet in Denver, we could speak face-to-face and pick up on context and also ask questions based on what we were hearing. This is no longer the way we usually communicate in our church.

Most of our communication across churches and presbyteries now happens online. One of the unique challenges of online speech is that it happens in a highly de-contextualized way. I do not see a person, hear their voice, or recognize the place they are speaking from. I have only their words. And I inevitably interpret those words in light of my own experience and context. This creates a quite dangerous environment for communication because the context which shapes that person's speech is invisible to the listener and the listener's context is invisible to the speaker. Misunderstandings and worse are practically inevitable as a result.

This is one of the greatest causes of the mistrust that besets parts of our church as we head into General Assembly: We do not encounter each other in person as fellow brothers and sisters seeking to follow God as faithful presbyterians in our distinctive contexts and situations. Rather, we tend to encounter each other as avatars for one faction or another within our church and we tend to interpret one another's speech in light of the stipulated factionalism.

There are times where disagreement is warranted, of course, and even times when hard lines need to be drawn. But more generally it is best to begin with an assumption of trust and only move away from trust when a person has given you ample reason to do so.

What is the alternative to our digitally mediated factionalism? Well, one part of the answer is that we need more events like the MNA summit held last fall in Denver that allowed so many of us to meet face to face. General Assembly (GA) can be such a gathering, of course, but GA is also a business meeting and certain tasks have to get done and so business has to be given a certain priority at GA.

That said, the story itself can be instructive for us: When I actually spoke with my friend and heard about his church situation, it changed the way I read his other work online and the way I hear him when he raises certain questions, concerns, and issues. There was even one occasion where he wrote something that caused me to raise an eyebrow a bit and, because of that face to face connection we had established, I was able to text him and ask him about it. It turned out my concern was misplaced and caused by a misunderstanding on my part which, surprise!, had to do with his context being wildly different from mine.

It is now three years since our church lost two of our elder statesman, Pastors Harry Reeder and Tim Keller, in the same week. The relational trust and social capital those two men alone possessed within our church is hard to overstate. If we are to be healthy, we will need to build those reserves back up, so that trust across wildly different contexts can survive and we can continue to be a national church doing things that only national churches can do.

There is work to be done this week, of course. But I also think that one of the best things many people could do is make a point of sitting down for coffee or drinks with someone serving in a wildly different geographical or ministry context and asking them the same question my friend asked above: "Tell me about the questions and struggles you're facing in your church." If what happened with us happens for you, you'll find that you soon have a new friend and a much deeper understanding of what day to day ministry looks like in other parts of our communion.