Re Through Prayer and Action, Letters, March, and Seconding a Sentiment, May
I read with interest the exchange between Rev. Dr. Hans Kouwenberg and Mr. Bill Ashby both online and in the pages of the Record, and I enjoyed Andrew Donaldson’s reflection.
As convener of a task force charged with reviewing the health and vitality of congregations within the Presbytery of Hamilton, I have found myself more and more in sympathy with Dr. Kouwenberg’s call for more attention to be paid, and more support given, to the renewal and development of the church at the congregational level. My frustration, echoing Kouwenberg’s, has been to find such attention and support almost disappearing from the national agenda and budget just when it is most needed. At the same time, I have discovered in other denominations a growing emphasis (and spending) on support for congregational renewal that seems lacking in our own.
There are, of course, flashes of light in what sometimes seems a uniformly gloomy scenario of church decline. As we have discovered in Hamilton, there is a deep hunger for renewal in many of our congregations, and the Emmaus Project has been a catalyst for vision and hope. However, as their website declares, the Emmaus Project is focused on the renewal and transformation of presbyteries, which coordinator Harry Klassen describes as “the basic building blocks” of our church.
While presbyteries are certainly integral to Presbyterian governance, surely the local congregation is the basic and essential building block of any church. If so, then it becomes a clear priority for the national church to devote more time, attention and resources to the task of supporting the local congregation in becoming what theologian Otto Weber called “an outpost of the Kingdom of God, placed in a particular spot in the world to bear witness to the Lordship of Christ.”
