There’s a Starbucks between my daughter’s school and my church, and this week I decided to spend an hour there each morning writing my blog posts and doing some reading before proceeding to the office. Today I’m at another Starbucks waiting for my car to be serviced down the street.

Five consecutive mornings at Starbucks produced four really great conversations with people from the church who just happened to be there at the same time.

I know it’s a corporate behemoth. I know the coffee isn’t great. But for a network of spaces in North America where people spend time in a conversational frame of mind, can Starbucks be beat?

How is Starbucks not a net asset for people working to build community?
The 25 year old me would cringe to hear it, but Starbucks is an important community gathering space that people in ministry avoid and scorn at a loss to the people who are already there.

I sat down at the long central Starbucks table with all the electrical outlets and the wireless charging stations, placed my hot cup of Cafe Verona blend on the tabletop, and reached into my laptop bag to retrieve my Chromebook and begin composing The Best Blog Post Ever.

Then a friend I hadn’t seen for a long time passed my table with her coffee, said, “Hi,” and sat down. We talked for 45 minutes, every one of which flew by. I drained my cup as we got caught up and shared important developments in our lives and work.

The Best Blog Post Ever was never written. It fell victim to a meaningful face-to-face conversation.

I will always kill a blog post for a conversation. Always.

The Rev. Frank Spencer, President, Board of Pensions of the PC (USA)

The Rev. Peter C.S. Sime, Vice President, Assistance, CREDO & Fund Development, Board of Pensions of the PC (USA)

Dear Rev’s Spencer and Sime,

I write one month after my experience of a CREDO conference to express my gratitude to you both for your support of that program and to lift up the value I found in it.

That Teaching Elders in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have an asset like CREDO at their disposal is surely a great strength of our church, even if it is poorly understand by the likes of me and my colleagues. Despite our confusion at a CREDO invitation arriving, unbidden, in the mail, though, the opportunity to spend a week intently focusing on our physical, vocational, spiritual, and financial health with highly skilled (paid) faculty is a transformational career development for many of us.

CREDO renewed my confidence in the PC (USA) as a connectional church. No doubt congregations and leaders need to be planting and cultivating new relational networks both within our denomination and outside of it for connectionalism to thrive in an era such as ours, when the connectional infrastructure–be it shared mission giving or the presbytery docket–feels rusted and full of holes. But CREDO is an experience of our existing infrastructure working powerfully to create community among diverse Teaching Elders, not because they share geography or a theological viewpoint or went to the same seminary, but simply because they are part of the same part of Christ’s body, the PC (USA). That feels very, very valuable.

And yet CREDO is not a vacation. The work required of participants–and even participants’ families–is a major part of why it works. The vocational surveys, the health screenings, and the financial homework that I completed before the conference all had me asking serious questions before I arrived, and the CREDO faculty were ready to hear and speak to those questions in a variety of formats. I found the one-on-one consultations with faculty the most valuable, but their plenary addresses and workshops supported those consultations with helpful context and theoretical background.

Finally, CREDO welcomes Teaching Elders into a very brief season of spiritual reflection supported by daily worship planned and led by thoughtful and creative people. That is a pearl of great price, and I am deeply thankful for those leaders.

I also have great gratitude for my congregation and my Head of Staff, who fully supported the time away CREDO demanded, at a busy time in the church’s life.

Many thanks to the both of you for your work to support CREDO within the PC (USA) and for the particular benefits that accrued to me from my participation.

Sincerely,

Rocky Supinger

I have described Eugene Peterson, the author of the popular Bible paraphrase The Message, as a writer who never met a cluster of words he couldn’t hyphenate. Consider his paraphrase of Psalm 1:

How well God must like you—
    you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon,
    you don’t slink along Dead-End Road,
    you don’t go to Smart-Mouth College.

That hyphenating tendency signifies one of Peterson’s signature traits as a Christian speaker and writer, and that is a relaxed grasp of the conventions of faith, especially the conventions of pastoral ministry.

I have never been a Peterson fan. Check that. I was a Peterson fan while I was considering pastoral ministry, during those several months when I was talking with peers about it, praying fervently about it, and reading everything from Buechner to LaMott pertaining to Christian vocation and call, including Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor, a book that my pastor at the time enthusiastically endorsed.

Here’s an emblematic quote from that book:

How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?

The Contemplative Pastor argued for an approach to church leadership that privileged solitary contemplation and reading over administration and the running of programs (I seem to remember the book urging pastors to spend hours every day reading, in particular, Dosteyevsky).

That worked for me. Long stretches of meditative reading and writing is what I longed to be doing. It’s what I imagined seminary must be. But once I started seminary I was relieved of that fantasy. And then, once I started working in churches, first as a seminary intern and then as an ordained Minister, I realized first hand just how out-of-step with Peterson’s vision of pastoral ministry the real world of mainline Protestant pastors was.

In those circles, The Contemplative Pastor was treated with a mixture of distant admiration (stressed out pastors whisping, “yeah, that would be nice”) and outright scorn, as if Peterson’s posture was not just unrealistic but unprofessional. I quickly become one of those who relegated Peterson to that chorus of voices I did not wish to listen to.

It’s been 11 years since I was ordained, and in that time I have served two churches and got myself involved with all kinds of work in presbyteries, synods, and other networks of church leaders, all while regarding The Contemplative Pastor as a model not for me. I have spent a decade in perpetual motion, learning the art of schedule juggling. I’m tired.

I think I want to give Peterson another chance.

Luckily for me, a very thoughtful colleague just yesterday left a copy of Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor, on my desk.

Children’s Times are a worship staple in lots of mainline churches. Both Presbyterian churches I’ve served have had long histories with inviting kids up to the front of the sanctuary during worship and treating them to a lesson or a story.

While the Children’s Time is a focal point for a lot of congregational nostalgia, it is also the one moment many churches have of explicitly welcoming children, so it deserves to be done well, and that is easier said than done.

[Excursis: creative, smart people like Adam Walker Cleaveland and Theresa Cho are experimenting with and sharing new tools and insights to help churches welcome children]

My colleagues and I recently changed a couple of things about our Children’s Time that we hope will allow us to improve the church’s welcome of children of all ages and developmental abilities.

First, we moved it from after the Passing of The Peace to before. When it followed the Peace, it was the first part of worship’s second movement, Hearing And Proclaiming The Word. It preceded the choral anthem, Scripture readings, and the sermon. So it needed to be based in telling a Bible story. That suited me fine, because my training was to gather the kids, tell them a story, and then get out. No props, no metaphors, no Q&A: just the story.

That’s the way to go with elementary-aged children, but our kids’ ages have skewed younger over the past several months, and trying to tell a four of five minute story to preschoolers is a different animal. They want to move. Restraining them produces tantrums, but letting them roam the chancel is distracting–if the substance of your activity is sitting passively and listening to a story.

But moving the Children’s Time forward in the service makes it part of The Gathering, the first major part of worship that also includes greetings and announcements and The Call to Worship. That part of the service handles improvisation and movement a lot better. And that’s the second change we’ve made: we’re building in movement.

We don’t feel like sitting and listening is developmentally appropriate for most of the kids we having coming forward now, and so we are building our welcome of children in worship around an invitation to move, either by standing and then sitting, by clapping their hands or stomping their feet, or even by getting up and relocating; last Sunday we moved from the chancel steps to the communion table and back again.

This movement also involves the adult congregation. Most of the movements we do with the children are simple enough to be repeated by the adults, and so we explicitly invite them to join in. That has the added benefit of transforming the Children’s Time even further, turning it from a moment for grown ups to passively watch (and even judge!) children into a chance for them to connect with and welcome kids into the church.

One of the benefits of being an Associate Pastor in my context is getting to watch a skilled colleague plan worship in a way that honors the Reformed tradition and promotes vibrant interaction. This is true of worship she designs, say, in the middle of summer, just as it is of services that are more prescribed, like World Communion Sunday.

Yesterday my colleague knocked out not one but two terrific liturgies to lead us into the experience of world communion, one for our congregation and one in collaboration with the Indonesian congregation that shares our worship space. Everything was thoughtfully and deliberately put together, and both liturgies did all the things you want World Communion Worship to do: speak several languages, trace the history of the occasion, and call for the church’s involvement in the most God-forsaken corners of the globe. My colleague is a pro, you guys.

How is it, though, that this particular tradition, embraced by the majority of Protestant denominations in the middle of the last century, actually achieves its stated aim? Does it?

My colleague very helpfully explained to the congregation yesterday that this particular practice of urging Christians of every denomination to share communion on the same Sunday arose during the dark days of the Great Depression, and that it really found its footing within the protestant ecclesiastical establishment during World War II, when the exercise felt like the church’s way of “holding the world together.” No doubt that was powerful: American churches whose European fore-bearers in the faith were killing each other coming together to witness to Christian unity.

Two things about this practice today, though. 1) We don’t live in that Euro-centric world anymore. The parts of the world that most urgently need held together are places like Syria and Umpqua, Oregon. The forces tearing humanity apart are no longer European super powers heaving bombs at one another’s capitals but random gun violence, human trafficking, and mass migration.

2) Christians of different traditions showing their unity (“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love . . . “) is not the witness to the gospel that it once was. It feels to me like the non-Christian world has made its peace with denominationalism, so Methodists and Presbyterians and Lutherans breaking bread together hardly registers. I mean, these are fine distinctions, aren’t they? Most people who aren’t in church can’t parse the Catholic/Protestant distinction, and many more see no reason to distinguish between Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism.

The American cultural landscape today features organized religion on one hand and individual spirituality (or not) on the other, not necessarily in conflict with one another, and with neither proving particularly effective at stopping mass shootings or sheltering the huddled masses. In that game, you don’t get points for hugging your own teammates.

How might World Communion Sunday, then, but transformed into something that pushed the church to share communion (and not only as a sacrament) with people who most desperately need it, and not, as the tradition’s originators intended, with other Christians?