First Presbyterian

We didn’t call them prayer meetings, but that’s really what they were. Along with our Session members, roughly twenty five various leaders of various ministry groups within the church met over two consecutive Wednesday evenings in June. We didn’t talk that much about prayer, but that’s really what we were doing. What we talked about were two other perhaps more interesting subjects – imaginative ideas about what we might do together as a community of faith over the next year, and specific times, dates and seasons we might put on an all-church calendar - dates when we plan to put those ideas in action. The thought arose that ideas and calendars go together like spirit and truth, like soul and body, like breathing and running. Separately, each can be respected and nurtured in and of itself, but they are ultimately meant to be joined together. One way I imagine the connection between the two is to think of calendars as being the pyres on which the fires of our ideas are lit.

In the course of our June conversations, we decided that we first need to find ways as a congregation to prayerfully open ourselves to imaginative ministry ideas from one another, and then learn together how to join with and support each other in these initiatives. We also realized that until an idea is put on the calendar it is just an idea and needs to be respected and guarded as such. But eventually, for the idea to grow into an expression of our witness, our ideas get lit by being put on the calendar. This is what this planning process is all about, and we’ve made an excellent start together in June. Like tomatoes thriving in a closely tended garden, our prayer is that a culture of intentional listening to the Spirit among us will produce increasing opportunities for mutual participation in Christ’s mission – sprouting for all of us in unexpected places.

This is a much more grass-roots, bottom-up, organic approach to ministry and mission in and through Christ’s body, rather than a corporate, hierarchical, completely centralized top-down approach. It is a new thing we’re doing, a new song we’re singing, and we’d like to invite you to prayerfully consider becoming a part of it. Very simply, we have set ourselves a simple goal – to put together a fairly comprehensive church calendar for an entire year in advance. This is harder than it sounds, and it may take us a while to figure it out. But it is also more exciting than it sounds. As we set out to ask what’s going to happen this coming year, the questions inevitably arise as to what might happen. What about those things that weren’t on the calendar last year? What about those things that we don’t know how we’ve always done them – because we’ve never done them before!

Our church has many wonderful traditions which shall continue as long as they have life. God is also moving among us in new ways, and asks only that we open our hearts to new leading – what Darrel Guder calls the ‘continuing conversion of the Church.’ As the prophet Isaiah tells us, the God who in the past ‘made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters,’ does not rest on these laurels. “See, I am doing a new thing!”, the Lord says in chapter 43, “Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland…to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.”

So what can you do? Watch. Listen. Love. Pray. Believe. Calendar. Go.