Community Matters

Who benefits most from your team or session mission? How much more could be realized if new partnerships were nurtured the community at large, not just the "faith" community? Our newly emerging Newark Presbytery Community Transformation Corporation is redoubling its efforts to bless our neighbors. By engaging in new ministries sited at our existing properties, opportunities for sustainable initiatives will transform not merely the host church, but help reconnect and empower new relationships and new futures.

A congregation must not seek to experience health and vitality if the community around the congregation is not included in that same experience.

Newark Presbytery, Elizabeth Presbytery, and Palisades Presbytery have been exploring how realigning our resources could lead to new health, growth, and vitality of all our congregations. We ask God to use us to bless the 4.5 million people that live within our bounds. Imagine… 28,000 plus Presbyterians (our tribe) discovering new, innovative, authentic, and tangible ways to demonstrate God's love in the name of Jesus Christ to the millions of our neighbors (God's tribe). Now, that's a really something that's worth exploring.

Throughout the Synod and national church, God's listening people are setting aside preconceived, ineffective notions, self-interest, and former ways of being the Body of Christ so that more and more people experience joy and abundant living.

After all, our mission is to resonate and represent the love God has demonstrated for the whole world. Community matters. What matters to your church?

Got Courage?

It takes vision and courage for a leadership team or session to consider a realignment of mission objectives. To achieve a strategic redeployment of property assets for alternative or shared ministry, it requires us to contemplate a different way to respond to God's Spirit in collaborative mission. We know we must change. We just choose not to. Scared? Sure. Hard work? Yes. But to remain the same, expecting different results, well, you know what that indicates, right?

The mission critical moment comes when we, or when our team, or session and congregation choose to change with a sense of hopeful urgency and get courageous. Ready to change is not changing. Changing our actions and behaviors in authentic, humble, and intentional ways is changing.

What new could emerge if our focus as a church was not actually the church, but the community the church is located in? What does a session need to be equipped to re-tune its spiritual radar to see opportunities instead of only obstacles? What would it take for your team to take responsibility for its own future instead of blaming others? It takes courage.

How useful is your church site, buildings and property to help you achieve the unique mission God is sending your congregation out into the world to fulfill? We need congregational transformation, but also property transformation. Instead of feeling stuck with your existing building, or overwhelmed by negative outcomes of deferred maintenance, what might emerge as a blessing if you considered alternative ways of gathering, worshipping, serving, teaching, and transforming by collaborating with an adjacent congregation? 

Got courage?

Focus Leads to Collaboration

When a congregation, or team, focuses on itself, it never grows beyond itself.


The true gifts they could offer the world are shut up tight within their walls of preoccupation and selfish ignorance. Though the sign outside says, "All are welcome!" nothing could be further from the truth.
Jesus put it this way; "If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me" Matthew 10.39. Additionally, when you forget about yourself in an authentic, humble, and intentional way, you begin to grow, improve behaviors, and become the blessing to others God created in advance for you to do (Eph. 2:11).


When a leadership team has a clear, other focused, focus, a clarity in mission, a congregation soon discovers they can't think they can do it all alone. This collaborative energy is freeing and energizing and I have seen it lead to exciting, new, emerging approaches to ministry.


When churches become less the point and the communities they are located in become the point, it is no longer about "My" church, but "Our" community, and when geographically proximate to other fellowships and congregations with a similar out-ward vision, collaboration is natural and compelling. Two or more outward-focused teams can choose to focus on achieving their mission goals together and not surprisingly, new options appear.


In consultation with teams such as the Committee on Ministry, Board of Trustees, and Mission Council, new energy has emerged from new, adaptive structures and relationships.
For example, Elmwood United PC in East Orange and the former Central PC in Newark found mutual blessing when they explored what could happen when more resources would be released by uniting together. Instead of focusing on what was, or what is, the leaders began to focus on what could be. The opportunities for congregational and community transformation was discovered together. Today, God has blessed the collaborative mission with multiplied outcomes.


Driven by a similar kind of mutual vision, leaders from three West Orange congregations aligned their resources to unite as the United PC of West Orange. With the collaborative effort of a Newark Presbytery Administrative Commission, new opportunities for common ministry took shape with many cascading benefits that have rippled throughout the region. By selling deteriorating buildings and repurposing property into more liquid resources, the new united congregation now occupies a common site that is shared equally with Elmwood United's other growing worship site.


What can your session or team do to have a better future, to grow? Where they focus their mission is the key to uncovering the enormous and awesome outcomes of collaborative mission. Your community deserves nothing less.

Clarifying Mission is #1 Task for the #1 Customer

Who is the #1 customer of your presbytery?
If you responded the sessions of your congregations, you answered wisely.


18 months ago, I initiated a missional intervention in conversation with other key committees in Newark. I asked the moderators and clerks of session to invite me to a meeting of their choice and give me 33 minutes on the docket.


Within that time I wanted to achieve one primary objective: To express our belief that the session is the #1 customer, the focus, and the priority, of the presbytery. Its been a great experience. They sometimes believe me! (It's a shock to their time-tested experience.)
40% of our sessions have intentionally set aside time to join me to listen and lead in new ways. They are clarifying their congregation's unique mission and refocusing their ministry on new initiatives. Using demographic, survey, and other tools, they are realizing that every church can take responsibility to rekindle their mission passion to love their community in tangible and sustainable ways.


Reliable data leads to better decisions. Like in Moneyball, when your session gains clarity about what matters most, and the real Wow emerges. (More on this in a post to come.)


When a session and congregation discern and choose a clear, focused, mission, they begin to make better choices. They can say “Yes” to what achieves their unique mission and they can confidently say“No” to actions, programs, and ministries that are not aligned with their mission.


By constantly listening to the Spirit, the focused mission becomes part of a new DNA for the church and the blessings sure to follow will reinforce the new direction that has begun. It is at this fundamental level that the presbytery, the collective spiritual energy of our congregations, can provide resources needed for the transformative work.


Clarifying mission is the #1 task for the presbytery's #1 customer. Its working already.

Moneyball Wow and Church Radar

In his book Moneyball, Michael Lewis wrote about how baseball scouts and managers were wrong about what makes a great baseball player. They argued about it and invested millions in trying to understand it. They used the wrong radar, they looked for the wrong “Wow” factor of what makes the best player. When statistics taught a few teams what the real Wow was, the balance of power shifted. I pay attention to that information.

Do you know what the real Wow is for authentic and effective congregational mission? Consider the Gospel story recorded in Mark when people appeared like walking trees to a blind man healed by Jesus.

Mark's rapid-fire, cascading, accounts of Jesus' actions included the feeding of thousands of hungry people. That's good, but Jesus wanted more than a full belly for his team of disciples. Sure, they ate with the crowd that afternoon, but after lunch, Jesus quizzed, “And the seven loaves for the four thousand—how many bags full of leftovers did you get?” “Seven.” He said, “Do you still not get it?” Just like us, we thought the Wow factor was in the miraculous feeding, but Jesus wanted his team to understand the leftovers. The outcomes. The Wow was in the leftovers.

Jesus met a blind man and continued to heal him. The outcomes of the miracle were amazing. A person who knew only darkness saw light. This healing experience was not over. He saw people, but the people appeared to be upside down. The Wow was yet to come. If the blind man was in a hurry, if a little was enough, if getting by a bit better was sufficient, he would have walked away happy to see "any" light at all. Jesus knew the Wow was yet to come. As if Jesus said, "Wait, we can do better than this." Touching the man's eyes, full sight was restored.

Where can we see the real Wow emerging?

Do you know what the Wow church looks like?

What's on your radar today that matters?

What is Home?

What is home to you?

As I travel throughout the 150 square mile bounds of our presbytery, visiting our congregational “homes,” I am constantly reminded of the incredible ministries of healing, hospitality, proclamation, and compassion that flow to neighbors nearby and around the world. I celebrate our sessions’ robust faith and resolute spirit as together we embrace the opportunities ahead. By stepping up with new, innovative programs and speaking out on behalf of those with little or no voice our elders point everyone to the Good News found in the risen savior, Jesus Christ. Thank you for your ministry!

We sometimes call our church building our “home.” We speak about our hometown, opening our homes to strangers as a gesture of love, and at the end of the day, we anxiously wait to get back home. Our own references to death or the funeral of a loved one are often tenderly conveyed as a final “home-going.” Our music, books, and movies are filled with “home” titles and themes. Even in sports, we favor our home team and every baseball player focuses on the goal achieved when touching home plate. 

Ecological homelessness is on the rise. It refers to the sense of displacement and fragmentation that alienates us from family and as citizens. We can also experience this homelessness within our own spirits. God is our secure home. If “home” that represents wholeness and peace were not that important to us, I doubt we would be as comforted as we are by its embrace, or find such motivation to experience it. 

From the first book of the Bible to the last, there are hundreds of references to home. God told Abram to trade the comfortable home he knew, for a home he would claim in the distance. The incarnation of Jesus meant that God was making his home with us. In a few weeks, we celebrate the gift of the indwelling Spirit of Pentecost ensuring us, and assuring us, that God’s home is within us. God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! (Revelation 21.3).

Like all things we value, there is a cost to pay for establishing, seeking, or maintaining a healthy, safe home and neighborhood. In my conversations with elders, the increased operational costs of our buildings, frequently paired with reduced income and economic climate have created serious stressors. In some cases, the building has almost become our mission. The costs of operating the physical plant in some cases exceed the costs of ministry.

We honor our congregational homes, but we have become somewhat attached to them. Our aged buildings have suffered the effects of deferred maintenance and, in some cases, have become a disproportionate distraction to the mission of the church. In my visits with elders, I know these stressors are deeply felt and remedies are urgently sought. Sometimes our existing buildings and their upkeep have sapped energy away from having those needed conversations about innovative ministries, shared ministry with another congregation, and ministry re-alignment.

Decide today what is home to you and your ministry.