PCA Conversations

We are spending a few Wednesdays in a row exploring the topic of parish—the where and who of ministry. We’d like to discuss together the importance of place to the mission of the local church. To what extent should a circumscribed geography be determinative of a local church’s calling and culture? Does a theology of place matter? Indeed, what’s the place of geography in the mission of the church?

What you will read over these few Wednesday posts is a real discussion that occurred between pastors from around the country in very different places. They serve as church planters, pastors, and associate pastors who are thinking through what it means to be committed to a particular place and people.  The churches these men serve range from 1000 to 100 people and from 30 to 3 years old. We are presenting the former discussion here in serial form over a few weeks, and the idea is that you’ll be encouraged to join in as we go–ask questions, argue, provide insight–to help the conversation take new directions.

“Some Practical Applications”

Shayne Wheeler, Decatur: For us, this means that when we talk about redemption, service, reconciliation, or whatever, we talk about it happening in our particular city and/or in the particular neighborhoods where we live.  And our calling to participate is a calling to do so in those neighborhoods.

It also means that a church has to be willing to start new churches with courage.  As great as it feels when folks come from “far away” (10 miles in some contexts, like ours, or 30 miles in some other contexts) we must be willing to keep our focus on our particular parish and plant another church in the other parishes where people live.

Giorgio Hiatt, Charlotte: I’m working off instinct here–which is mostly my army brat upbringing…which weirdly enough is completely tied to place (when we lived on post)…or completely tied to a people (when we lived off post).

I think parish ministry makes for a fabulous goal but a lousy master.  If it becomes a rule, it can be dehumanizing in its own right.  We live in a world with unprecedented travel options and people live like the passage in Hell in The Great Divorce—where they are increasingly separated.  I think our job in a parish-type ministry is to create cities/towns of refuge amid the ever expanding distance between people and place AND to go out to the highways and call people to the same.  Sometimes, and for a time, you may rightly have people in your midst who are from a long way off, but as they mature they will either relocate their place or relocate their hearts to the place they live.  But that stuff has to brew for a while and its hard to draw a hard line–at least I’ve found it unwise.

So we have a very quirky demographic here in our church.  Probably 2/3rds of our people live within 0-3 miles of the church–which in a city like ours is close.  But the other 1/3 is from all over our city and neighboring counties.  Some have moved in; some are seeing their disperse living as harmful and are asking for a church plant one day; some drive from 25 miles away including about 30 college students, and some are just learning what place is all about.

So I don’t know what’s best or good here.  Our city only has about two places in it where you can get something other than Chilean tomatoes.  It’s just that kind of city.  If we ride the parish train too hard we won’t have a contextualized ministry at all.

Somehow we have to incarnate into the gnosticky, dispersed, back porch, front garage community of people who’d rather have sex on the internet than with their spouses.  Not sure how to be against it and reach it incarnation-ally—without falling into it.

Vito Aiuto, Brooklyn: Giorgio, I like your thoughts about this Philosophy of Ministry being a great goal but a lousy master.  It needs to be fluid, not in the sense that you sacrifice it when it hurts someone’s feelings, but because…

a.) People’s lives are really are made up of many places–where they work, where they live, where they socialize, etc.  Some of this is good and holy and some of it is consumerist and bad, but it can take a long time to figure out which is which, and even when you do figure it out, the 2nd issue is that

b.) Most people, esp. Christians, have never heard of this way of thinking before, and it strikes them as unrealistic at best, and at worst, domineering and idiotic of the pastors who ask it of them–thus you have to be willing to work with folks over the long haul (and by folks, I mean me, too.  I don’t understand this completely or what the ramifications should be for me or my church).  When someone comes to faith, or comes back, you can demand that they break off their adulterous affair as a command of Jesus, but I don’t think you can do the same about where they live.  This issue strikes me more like the issue of giving: it will usually take time to see that giving 2% of one’s income isn’t much of a faithful option, and that giving 10%, or 12%, or 14%, is much harder, but also brings one closer to the threshold of faith and joy.

One more thought: just like giving/tithing, the more your congregation sees you living out a vision, the more persuaded and able they will be to embrace that same vision.  If I don’t give sacrificially of my money (or time), then my authority to ask someone else to give will be emasculated.  But if I am tithing, giving sacrificially, then my words will carry more weight (”Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”)

The same way if you want to have a parish-model church: I want my people to see me with my family in our neighborhood, getting to know our neighbors, dealing with raising a child here, etc.  And then we can talk about why we make the choices we do.