PRESBYTERY LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
February 18-20, 1998
St. Simons

KEYNOTE
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church

PRAISE GOD WITH BOLD DEEDS
- Leadership -

There is a wonderful incident in Norman Mailer’s
retelling of the gospel story when Jesus is reflecting on his
choice of friends. He has been criticized for associating

with the wrong people, sinners and publicans:

“Why did 1 seek out men who would rather eat
and drink than pray? ... These publicans were
rarely solemn. Still | trusted the good spirit
between us. It was nota time to fast. There
was much to prepare for the Lord. To fast
would make us gloomy, and we would become
like those who praise God with their words but
remain so afraid of other men that they can

never praise him by bold deeds.”

| was captivated, | confess, by those images of
Mailer. Who, by the way, other than Norman Mailer, would
attempt to tell the life of Jesus in the first person? | don’t
recommend it as a replacement for Kenneth Bailey or
Raymond Brown as a source of scholarly insight into the
New Testament narrative, but Mailer, the artist, does
capture some essentials. And, artist that he is, he sees
with clarity truth that became dull with much handling,
truth that no longer startles because we have become
weary with the words, truth that has lost all of its urgency
and passion because those of us to whom God has
entrusted it have become absorbed in the mainstream of
an institution which, literally translated, means our lives,
our livelihood. We fast and draw lines in the sand, and
make strong our boundaries and turn our energy to the
latest constitutional amendment and we are so afraid that

we can never praise God with bold deeds.

We’re talking about leadership and I’m already too

far down the road.

| was captivated by Norman Mailer’s insight and

thought about it a lot last week — because | attended two

very long and consummately boring meetings, of my
Presbytery and the GAC, the business of both of which on
that occasion was the revision of the Manual of

Operations.

Now this is not altogether fair — institutions need
manuals of operations — but I’m not making this up — the
Presbyterian Church called me and many others away
from our life in the world, our laughing and loving and
earning money and managing our time and resources and
energy and sat us down for several hours to discuss
whether in the Manual, it should say “chairperson” or

simply “chair.”

The subject is leadership and the context is a time in
history that is producing literally thousands of books,
essays and articles on the subject and at the very same
time not producing many leaders, or refusing to allow
those who would or could to lead, or attacking those who

have been elected or appointed to lead.

And our immediate context is this church — this
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the year of our Lord 1998 —

its 210" year of existence as a church: ata time in its

sometimes glorious and sometimes sad history when we
reflect with mirror-like precision our culture’s
schizophrenia on the topic of leadership. The scuttlebutt,
as we all know, is that you have to be a saint or psychotic
to want to be Executive Director of the GAC or Director of
anything in the church these days. Fortunately, saint and

psychotic are not always mutually exclusive.

I digress. The topic is leadership. The big context is
the culture. The immediate context is the church and its

tradition.

| have already shared some of my reflections,
experiences and conclusions from my year of service as
Moderator of the GA. Let me have at it again, this time

leading to some comments on leadership for the future.

This church of ours is a marvel. You wouldn’t know
that if all you read about the Presbyterian Church comes
from the pages of publications whose purpose is to change
the church by convincing readers that there is something
wrong at the heart of our denomination and its leadership
that requires correction. There is a place for advocacy

journalism in the body politic and with every responsible

organization. Indeed, the existence of a vital and free
society depends on the freedom to criticize and argue
vigorously for change. Historian Martin Marty says flatly:
“One cannot have a republic without argument” (7he One
and the Many, Harvard, 1997, 154). The problem is that
most of what Presbyterians read and think they know
about our church comes from the pages of polemic
publications that deplore much of what the Presbyterian
Church is and does, publications that specialize in the
“Presbyterian crisis du jour.” And somewhere in the
middle of that dynamic, the reality of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) gets lost.

Moderators know it. Moderators spend a year
traveling throughout our church, visiting presbyteries,
synods, mission projects, colleges, seminaries, and
congregations. Every Sunday the Moderator is privileged
to experience the life of a different Presbyterian
congregation. What a jarring contrast, between what the
advocacy press says about us and what actually is
happening where our church lives, moves, and has its
being: in the life of its congregations! The Moderator
deserves a church which is marvelously alive and faithful

and vital and hopeful, in congregations of astonishing

diversity. {tis deeply moving to witness the faithfulness of
Presbyterian congregations and people everywhere
engaged in the work of our Lord — baptizing babies,
nurturing children, teaching the young, standing with
young families, caring for the sick, comforting the grieving
- and, everywhere, reaching out to their neighborhoods
and towns and cities in ministries of compassion and
justice. Literally everywhere in this country, Presbyterian
people are doing the work of Jesus, feeding the hungry,
sheltering the homeless, healing the sick, visiting the

prisoners.

Ina New York Times editorial, Peter Steinfels
reported a recent study of service projects provided by
local churches in major metropolitan areas and what it
would cost the municipalities to provide these same
services. In Philadelphia alone, the figure amounted to
$70 million annually. The Moderator of the General
Assembly sees it every week, and I will never forget it,
never cease being grateful for this marvelous church of

ours.

We are an old church. It’s part of our glory and it is

part of the challenge of our future. Most media attention

recently has been devoted to the phenomenon of the
megachurches, most of them new, most of them trying
desperately, and succeeding, not to look, sound, or feel
like a traditional church. But we’ve been around in North
America for something like 325 years. We were here 150
years before there was a United States of America. Our
forebears brought to the New World their feisty Calvinism
with its distrust of hierarchies and its stubborn insistence
on freedom and representation, and the creative interface
of theology and life. By the time of the War for
independence, the Presbyterian Church was here in
strength, proclaiming the gospel, establishing schools and
colleges, evangelizing, teaching, and building hospitals,

many of which still bear our name. Itis our glory.

We have a Presbyterian Historical Society with a real
story to tell. Our history is also our greatest challenge.
Many of our congregations give evidence of it, located in
old neighborhoods in older cities, living in and struggling
to maintain old buildings. Because we are a faithful
church of Jesus Christ and not a business enterprise
whose evaluative criteria are numbers and profiis, we
have stayed in those old buildings in old neighborhoods in

old cities, hanging on for dear life as the world changed

and continues to change around us. We love to wring our
hands about membership loss and the decline of
Presbyterianism. But itis, at least in part, a story of
faithfulness, of congregations staying with their neighbors,
of a denomination investing its resources and energy to

sustain those congregations.

The challenge of the future is to continue our faithful
presence but also to discover new ways to be the church.
The leadership challenge of the future is to create and
invest energy and resources in a vision of a new church for

anew century.

What an exercise in “ecclesiastical culture shock” to
return from traveling in the church and visiting mission
partners who look to us for strength, encouragement,
resources and leadership to return to a church that feels,
for all the world, like it doesn’t want to be a church any
longer. Every day | read an article, essay, or personal
letter from a Presbyterian who has concluded that the time
has come to sacrifice the unity of our church, that we are
already two churches, that we need to “take back the
church” or “declare our dissent from the church” or

“become a church within a church.” Every day | talk to

Presbyterians who are ready to give up on the project of
being a denomination with people who have different
opinions on this or that. | believe we are at a critical time
in the long history of our church. And | know that | am not
alone in my weariness over this ideological warfare that
divides us and my longing for a way to help my church
reinvest its energy and passion and resources in its
mission. Itis a time that desperately needs extraordinary

leadership.

Is there anything to be learned from our own past?
We romanticize and lionize with perhaps more nostalgia
than is appropriate the days when we had real leaders,

recognizable leaders, larger than life leaders.

e Kevin Neigh
e John Coventry Smith

e and, of course, Eugene Carson Blake.

Is there anything to learn? Blake was the subject of a
symposium at Princeton recently, sponsored jointly by the
WCC and NCC and an invitation to raise money to create

scholarships for Presbyterians to study at Bossey

combined with an internship at the WCC andNCC. The

development of ecumenical leadership is the goal.

| was asked to prepare a paper on Blake, the pastor.

What a leader he was: a successful pastor of two
large churches, Albany and Pasadena. Blake shaped each
church, led it, became more involved in the world. Each

grew.

i noted how thoroughly Biake, as a pastor, did his

homework.

He preached prophetically but based his ministry on

¢ pastoral availability

e attention to youth education.

He attended to his institutional responsibilities.
Paid his dues by community and church involvement.
Earned respect - affection and the right to be a

leader.

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The three things for which he will be most
remembered were: his arrest in Baltimore and his service
at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and the combat racism
of the “WCC” “Bold Deeds.”

Blake had to be taught and brought along on racial

justice.

Christian unity grew out of his sense of the Lordship

of Jesus Christ — big vision of ecumenism.

And also, my pragmatic concern that if Protestant
Christian faith was to have public impact and credibility, it

had to be ecumenical.

Anything to learn: yes —boldness, this faith base:

Blake’s simply Christological foundation.

Paying institutional dues
Risk-taking.

Itis helpful, | think, to take a step back from the

immediacy of our situation, to check in with other

disciplines and enterprises, and to put our current

il

dilemma into a larger context. Peter Drucker,
management consultant and theorist, introduces a recent
article on leadership with this succinct observation: “As
the twentieth century winds down, our disappointment
with leaders is escalating rapidly.” Drucker lists the
corporate and governmental leaders who have fallen in the
past decade and suggests that, “Our disappointment
stems from the inexorable sea of change in the conditions
of leadership imposed by our new global environment.”
He quotes Vaclav Havel, who recently declared,
“Something is on the way out, and something else is
painfully being born” (Drucker Management spring 1997,
vol. 1). Historians say the same thing about he period in
American history immediately preceding the Civil War.
Havel’s statement also reminds us of Paul’s wonderful
image of the whole creation groaning in the travail of
labor, as the new creation, the new being in Jesus Christ,

is born.

Drucker’s simple, clear observation is that high
technology has forever transformed the way leaders must
iead. High-tech communication has spawned an
incredible new diversity in the body politic — like the

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Instant communication

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spawns diversity, which spawns conflicting agendas and
“calls into play separatism, tribalism, nationalism.”

Sounds like my church!

Drucker describes the complexion of this new,

factious environment:

e splintering nations

e disintegrating and reconstituted alliances

* increasing group pride

e proliferation of narrowly defined, often singe-issue

political groups.

Ils that a description of the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.)?

Drucker is calling for a “New Paradigm of Connective
Leadership.” By that, he means leadership that can
“negotiate, persuade, and integrate conflicting groups,
inspiring both supporters and opponents to work together
for the common good.” That — in case you’ve never tried it
~ is what moderators do, and itis not easy. Sometimes it

feels impossible. The key, Drucker says, is keeping your

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eye on the connections between conflicting visions:
“Connective leaders see connections where traditional

leaders see only chasms.”

So, where are the connections in the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.)? ts there common ground upon which
people in conflict can stand? That is the challenge for new

leaders.

Some are saying that it is too late, that we are
already divided into two, perhaps three groups
with irreconcilable differences on fundamental matters.
And yet ... and yet... our best tradition as Reformed
Christians is an intentional commitment to discourse and
dialogue as a way to get at truth. In a sense, we invented

the notion of public, civil discourses in the modern world.

Marty says we must keep talking. Leadership fosters
conversation, never shuts it off, holds out to the very end
for more talk, dialogue, argument, discussion. | don’t
think we’ve finished talking with one another yet. | know

we haven’t.

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In The One and the Many, Marty suggests that the
ideological divide that separates Americans from one
another on a variety of issues is not really a chasm in the
middle of the society, but rather two platforms with a huge
valley between them. Twenty-five percent of the
population live on the plateaus, 75 percent in the valley
between them: 15 percent are on the right plateau, firing
salvos over the valley at the 10 percent of the population
on the left. The left 10 percent return the fire, aiming at
the 15 percent on the right. The 75 percent in the middie
observe the warfare, sometimes lean right or left,
occasionally get hit by the fire, and almost never are
willing to fight to the death, which means sacrificing the
unity, integrity, and life of the society for ideological purity,
right or left.

This is not to say that 75 percent of us are neutral on
the big issues which are dividing us. Not at ail. When
asked to respond to the specific issues of ordination of
homosexuals or abortion, a clear majority of Presbyterians
oppose the first and prefer freedom of choice for the
second. The question before us is this: Are these issues
the ones that precipitate the sacrifice of our church’s

unity? It is my suggestion that about 25 percent of us are

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ready to say yes, while 75 percent of us, who may lean one
way or the other on the particular issues, are willing to live
with diversity, extend acceptance and grace, and, above
all else, keep talking. My strong sense is that 25 percent
of us are willing to stop the debate, resolve the issue once
and for all, absorb whatever losses result to the unity of
the church, and move on, while 75 percent of us are willing
to keep talking in the interests of our church’s unity in

diversity.

The challenge of leadership to enable the second
alternative, in my opinion. The temptation for all of us,
and, believe me, it is very real, is to resolve it, shut off
debate, and move on. Strong leaders must help us resist
that temptation and gird ourselves for more talk,
argument, and dialogue, and life in a family that is not

ciose to agreement.

Is there not way to declare a cease-fire? is there no
way to declare a moratorium on amendments to the
constitution and at the same time a moratorium on name-
calling and accusing one another of insincerity,
unfaithfulness, duplicity, and deception? Would it not be a

good idea if the combatants retired to their separate

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corners and gave themselves and all of us a much-needed

respite?

Moderators know how difficult that proposal is.
Some would say its impossible. Efforts to effect it feel like
capitulation and betrayal to one side or the other and often
both. The one thing the right and left agree on, it seems, is
that the moderate middle is wrong, weak, compromising,
and unfaithful. And that is precisely where leaders must

be, whatever the cost.

Drucker advises us to find the connections in the
meantime. It was my privilege to work on a daily basis
with the newly elected stated clerk of our General
Assembly. Cliff Kirkpatrick’s dream, which | happily
share, is to help all of us refocus on our precious
Presbyterian/Reformed tradition by studying, celebrating,
rallying around, and investing ourselves in the
implementation of the Six Great Ends of the church. | hope
new leadership will press forward with that timely

invitation. | know Cliff Kirkpatrick will.

The connections that can hold us together while we

continue to taik are, | believe, those things we have done

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so well and so faithfully in the past. 1 look forward to the
day when, instead of arguing about sexuality, we
Presbyterians will focus our energy, intelligence,

imagination, and love on:

e Higher Education: exploring new ways to relate to our
colleges and universities, aggressively creating new
ministries and a strong presence on the campuses of

our public universities.

e Public Theology: entering into dialogue, from our
Reformed theological perspective, with the major
cultural currents that are creating a new world-media,
arts, leisure time, free-market economics, globalization,

and high-tech communication.

e Public Advocacy: | have missed our strong voice
recently. Even when | did not agree with the positions
our church took | was always glad to hear Presbyterian
convictions expressed on the important issues of the
day. | do think we are trying to say too much about too
many issues and so hardly anyone is listening to us any

longer. | wish for a narrowing of our concerns and

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refocusing on public education, for instance, a

Presbyterian agenda if there ever was one.

e Racial Justice: Wouldn’t it be something if we
Presbyterians actually did something about racial

inclusiveness instead of passing resolutions?

e Public Celebration and Evangelism: After the glorious
opening worship at General Assembly in Syracuse
someone quipped, "Why, we looked like a megachurch
this morning.” Presbyterians love to celebrate our
history, tradition, and mission. Every time we schedule
a large, visible, public event, Presbyterians travel
whatever distance is involved and show up to be the
church together. Itis a great public witness and
effective evangelism. Why can’t we do it in every
presbytery, one Sunday morning, every year, all across

the country?

Blake’s ministry began and proceeded through a

time of enormous social and cultural change.

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Shortiy after his ordination in 1932 a retired minister
said to him “I’m glad it’s you who is beginning your
ministry. things are changing so much | couldn’t face
being a pastor now.” Blake lived through the Great
Depression, World War ll, post-war economic and
demographic change, McCarthyism, Korea, Civil Rights

and Vietnam.

We live in a time characterized by the most rapid
social and cultural change in the history of humankind Ten
year old global maps are hopelessly out-of-date. The
Soviet Union is gone. Russian troops serve under
American commanders in Bosnia. The Pope is in Cuba
celebrating mass and Fidel Castro was in the
congregation. Twenty-five percent of the words we
routinely use did not exist twenty-five years ago. A “crack
salesman” used to very effective sales representative for
IBM. Futurist Leonard Sweet calls it a “Phase Transition,”
a major shifting of the cultural tectonic plates with a
greater potential impact than the invention of the printing

press and moveable type.

The question, of course, is how to be a faithful

Church of Jesus Christ in the brand new world we are

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facing. And how to induce our lively tradition to respond

creatively to the new world without losing its integrity.

Blake was clear that his faith centered in his trust in
Jesus Christ and his commitment to the basic mission of
the church as bearing witness to the Lordship of Jesus
Christ and bringing people to God in Christ. And then he
trusted the church, his own Presbyterian Church, as the

best vehicle for his vocation in all the changes ahead.

We simply must learn to be more reflexive,
responsive in a world that is changing so rapidly that we
risk becoming an anachronism is our own life time. And
we must do it without abandoning the faith and the
theological tradition that has been handed to us by the

generations before us - starting with Blake’s.

Parenthetically - can you imagine the energy,
renewal and growth that would occur if the Roman
Catholic church decided to respond faithfully to what has
happened to this role and identity and very being of

women in our time?

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Unfortunately we don’t have to waste timecritiquing
the Romans. My sense is that if we don’t do something
quick and radical and dramatic about the urban church -
we, you and I will be known as the Presbyterian Amish of
our time - so committed to doing it the same way as we
always did - that we become a small, precious but very
significantly marginal ecclesiastical entity in the future.
Forget future - we’re 75% of the way there in Chicago, New

York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Blake seized Civil Rights, poverty as the realities to
which the church needed to respond a generation ago.
Not surprisingly Reinhold Niebuhr said that it was Civil
Rights that saved the Protestant churches from

irrelevance.
The crisis of our day is the slow relentless death of

the urban churches. Presbyterians Today documented it

in the last issue:

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aa Presbyterian Churches Presbyterian Members
Cities 1967 1997 1967 1997
Chicago 143 118 | 87,882 43,315
Cleveland 72 56 49,064 17,886
Detroit 101 91 81,891 42,017
New York 116 107 41,785 19,142
Philadeiphia 182 152 103,953 47,332
San 35 20 13,243 4,177
Francisco/
Oakland

Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the haunting
experience of visiting the sites of early Christian churches
in Turkey, observing that Christianity was once a vital
force with many thriving churches. Today all that is left in
ruins. tt doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
The same thing is happening before our very eyes in our

cities.

Why? There are a fot of people who think they know
and we have lots and lots of data on racial, economic and
demographic change in the cities. We have interesting

and lively experiences in urban ministry. What we don’t

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know much about, | would submit, is how to create urban

congregations that thrive and grow.

Please understand - we know about how to be a big,
urban cathedral. We may know more about that than
anyone else, by the way. And we know how to be
suburban and county seat. We’re learning, | think, how te

be rural. But! don’t think we know how to be urban.

We have, first of al, lots of old buildings, badly in
need of repair, built for a world that doesn’t exist any
longer. And in those buildings we have aging
congregations declining in numbers for very

understandable reasons.

And we have a system that finds it virtually
impossible to help those congregations this side of the
inevitable Presbytery Commission to perform last rites and
arrange for the funeral and we’re not even very good at
that.

The fundamental challenge of the current urban

church is raising enough money to meet the Presbytery

minimum. Who answers the call, obviously, are brand new

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ministers whose agenda after about a year and a half
becomes getting a new call with a little more money and a

little less institutional depression.

The fact that newly ordained clergy have an annoying
pattern of getting married and having babies guarantees

that they won’t be around long.
Who else answers the call - Ministers about to retire.
Now, do forgive me. Some of the most heroic,
competent and faithful colleagues | know are the

exceptions to these rules. But we don’t make it easy.

i don’t have the answer - but like Blake | believe in

the Presbyterian Church's ability to discover it.

| wonder if it isn’t time to think anew and stretch the

tradition.

Is the old Victorian church building what it should
look like?

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Is the Presbytery minimum salary a helpful dynamic?

Do we need a new order of Presbyterian urban
missionaries, trained, disciplined, under vows for five
years, who will as William Stringfellow advised, live with
the poor and let the Holy Spirit and the people create a

new form of church?

Do we need to sell off six dying churches and create
one new one with a pastor, educator, community
organizer, youth worker, housed in a store front with fiscal
know-how to the Mac Arthur Foundation or Fourth Church,
or First Church Wheaton and say - for $100,000 per year -

you can help to create a new church?

Do we need to ask Bill Hybells, God forbid, toa
conversation, not on church music, but on responding to

new realities instead of slowly but surely dying?

Blake learned what he needed to know as a pastor in
three churches that challenged him to grow, and in each
case part of his growth came as a result of an intentional
relationship with a strong predecessor. !n fact, that

pattern repeated itself when Blake succeeded W. A.

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Visser’t Hooft, an accomplished linguist and distinguished
scholar who had helped to found the World Council of
Churches in 1948. Blake avoided the twin mistakes of
trying to emulate his predecessor or contradicting him, by
seeking Visser’t-Hooft’s advice and counsel, giving him an
office and secretary at World Council of Churches

headquarters and meeting with him regularly. [p.151]

We Presbyterians are inclined to wring our hands
about this perilous new situation or, more typically, to
accuse one another of causing the demise of the old
structures and realities. | have an alternative strategy
based on my conviction that the Holy Spirit is moving with
freshness and new energy in the church and the world and
that our task is not to fight rearguard actions with one
another to preserve our pasts, but to hold on to one
another as we try to discern what the Spirit is saying and

where the Spirit is leading.

Church leaders should keep a three-by-five card in

their pockets for daily reference:

Do not remember the former things, or consider

the things of old. | am about to do a new thing;

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now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
(Isaiah 43:18-19a)

Clearly there is a relocation of attention, followed by
intellectual energy and financial resources, going on in the
world, nationally and focally. And just as clearly, people
involved in national structures are challenged to think and

work in new ways.

There is, for instance, tremendous energy for mission
today in the Presbyterian Church at the congregational
level. Thousands of Presbyterian congregations are
building houses with Habitat for Humanity, sending work
teams to Africa and Central America, and establishing new
relationships with congregations and mission projects all
over the world, from our large urban centers to remote
parts of Africa and South America. And the task of
national leadership is to nurture that new energy, to
coordinate and facilitate the growing mission involvement
of Presbyterian people. The day of a global mission
program in which the only local involvement is writing
checks or exchanging friendly letters with missionaries is

over.

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Our urban areas are crying for new forms of the
church. What we did relatively successfully for several
centuries does not work in the city of the twenty-first
century. We have old buildings that require enormous
resources to maintain, oftentimes in places where people
no fonger live. We need to think anew, to reinvent a new

church for a new day.

Can we produce feadership for the fabulous future
we are facing? Can we nurture and support people who

will lead us to praise God with bold deeds?

Of course we can. But we will have to generate the
grace and courage to transcend the ideological divides
that fracture our church and paralyze our ability to act at
all. We have been hunkered down in a defensive posture
for so long, the very ideas of bold Presbyterian initiatives
and bold Presbyterian leaders sound curious to our ears.

But they are what we need.

The Presbyterian Church needs:

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« Leaders who are visionaries and who will help us

discover where the Spirit is leading.

e Leaders who can articulate the vision with eloquence

and integrity.

e Leaders who are risk-takers and who can encourage
our embattled church to shake off its defensiveness and
act boldly.

e Leaders who simply will not accommodate the status

quo.

e Leaders who base their ministries on the biblical notion
of servanthood and who teach and express in their own
leadership the words of Jesus: “Whoever wishes to
become great among you must be your servant, and
whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of

all.”

Our church is commonly characterized as sick. That

is not my experience.

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| believe we’re sick and tired of fighting; sick of
expending our financial and spiritual resources
contending with one another; sick of the relentless

negativism about our Presbyterian Church.

But no, we’re not sick. We’re ready to become a new
church for a new day, a church more than capable of
producing new leaders who, in the best tradition of our
own history, will lead a new generation of Presbyterians to

praise God boldly.

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