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| The windmills of Lewis County, NY |
A December 20th news posting on the PC(USA) website entitled, "Church throws party for neighborhood," describes ways in which a Presbyterian new church plant in Los Angeles is seeking to engage the largely "de-churched" community around it. The basic attitude of the plant is not that it is coming into the neighborhood to save it but rather to discover where the Holy Spirit is already present in the community. The posting quotes the new plant's pastor, Nick Warnes, as saying, “Other churches came in as heroes, trying to save the pagans. We recognized the kingdom of heaven was already here; we wanted to join in with what God was doing, becoming agents of reconciliation by coming alongside the other.” In the process, this new church plant has been discovering the real needs of their neighbors and engaging in activities that open themselves to the community, including throwing a beer party at a local bar.
New church plants seem to have a distinct advantage over long-established churches in that they don't carry the baggage of all of the activities and ways of doing things that chain most congregations to their past. They can organize themselves appropriate to their situation and engage in activities crafted to that situation. Most of us are still doing things "crafted" for the world of the 1950s if not the 1920s. Perhaps one of the things older Presbyterian churches have to do is to wipe the slate clean (as best they can) and reinvent themselves as new church plants. As it is now, it happens all too frequently that old Presbyterian churches find themselves located in "evolving" neighborhoods where the local community no longer is the community of old—and these churches either have to move, merge, or they die because they largely fail to evolve with their neighborhood.
What would happen if we placed a new church plant team in churches on the verge of death and task that team with starting to build a new church in the area even as the old church dies? (See the last posting in this series, "FPC Log: Hospice for Churches (iv)." Old churches don't generally ask after the movement of the Spirit around them. They more often than not concern themselves with trying to balance their budget while maintaining a deteriorating facility and also maintaining some form of pastoral care as well as a minimal set of activities. It might just take a new church plant team to focus on the living Spirit rather than the dying institution. But, perhaps in some cases it is possible for declining churches to take their eyes off of building & budget and fix them instead on the Spirit. An intriguing thought.
