Rosa Parks didn’t just happen to sit on that bus that day. Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. and David Richmond didn’t just happen at the Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro one day. These two actions came at the end of a very long process of networking, strategizing, planning, fundraising and much else. Popular history may remember these five as starting a protest but that was just the next phase. Nothing just happens; everything is process.
This has filled my thoughts in the weeks after General Assembly. There has been a lot of despondent chatter, in the same vein as the past few years: A need for leadership, which will provide a financial commitment towards healthy congregations. That’s probably it in a nutshell; there are other points on each individual’s personal wish list.
The despondency began before assembly started when one look at the proposed agenda suggested the court was only going to shuffle the furniture. Another shot at biennial assemblies was considered the hottest topic. The singular reason for skipping years is financial and I didn’t sense (again) commissioners thought that compelling enough to give up on the community and culture of an annual gathering. It was sent down for further discussion. Again.
There were other overtures as well, for example on the use of elders and retired ministers in different ways in presbyteries, which were good ideas but not core concepts. There were presentations of good news stories from several congregations, which were warmly received, but added further to the frustration because the offices of our church are not seen as bringing enough funding, education and other resources to all congregations and presbyteries.
That is a core issue: the Haynes Report (published in our June issue) calls for concentrated efforts in providing resources to congregations and presbyteries. That is the thing, I sensed, many wanted to hear from the 139th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
This is where Rosa Parks and those four young men at the lunch counter come to mind. There is leadership in our church: It comes from the local churches, from the pews and pulpits, from the sessions. That’s where it starts. If as a local congregation you believe you need some guidance to better help you reach your own potentials, then discuss that amongst yourselves. Take the conversation to a neighbouring congregation. Think it out; raise it at presbytery; move it to the venerable assembly. Place yourselves on the committees of the Life and Mission Agency; come at it that way. There are many options.
Our polity, our system, is a process. So, next year in Waterloo, or the year after on Vancouver Island, we can have these needed conversations.
I could pull my notes and pile on the evidence, but I present again the discussion around biennial assemblies. The mood of the court, year after year after year, is not that fussed about money. It worries about money, of course; we all do. But from this one example, we glean it is also interested in the community of the church. Assembly is a great opportunity to meet others from across the country. There is more to assembly than business; more to the church than money. For many lay commissioners it is a transformative experience. Community in God’s name does that.
I was struggling to put these thoughts together, till I read Rev. Matthew Ruttan’s June 10 blog posting: “So often we think the burden is on God to give people signs. But what if it was the other way around? Why is God the one with something to prove? Instead of us wondering why God isn’t dancing around proving Himself to us, why aren’t we giving Him signs that we are His? That we are capable of beauty and grace?”
