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Presbyterians in the ‘Big Tent,’ thinking out of the box

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Presbyterians and others protest outside Wendy’s on Bardstown Road, calling for better pay and conditions for Florida tomato pickers who supply it and other fast-food chains. Mark Vanderhoff / The Courier-Journal

Dylan Rooke is spending his time trying to reach people like he was a few years ago — those seemingly out of reach of conventional churches.

Burned out on traditional church after his family went through some painful experiences in their congregation, he had dropped out of college, moved to Pittsburgh, playing in a punk-rock band. But he and other friends — “battered, beat up by the church but wondering if maybe there’s something about this Jesus” — soon found themselves holding Bible studies in the basement of a tattoo shop.

After a while, “we realized, man, we’re really lacking in community outside ourselves.”

They visited several churches, some of which wanted nothing to do with them, he said, while others were all too eager to have them join — and conform to the church’s culture as well as its faith.

Eventually the group found support from Presbyterian and Methodist sponsors as they formed Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community in Pittsburgh, which embraces traditional creeds along with arts-oriented worship, communal meals and community outreach.

Rooke, now ordained a Presbyterian church elder, spoke Friday at the Kentucky International Convention Center during one of numerous workshops sponsored by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The denomination is marking its 25th year of being headquartered in Louisville during its three-day “Big Tent” convention, which concluded Saturday.

Held in odd-numbered years, the Big Tent gathering actually consists of several conferences by different segments of the church, with the roughly 1,500 attendees all getting together for worship and other events.

Topics range from worship to theology to social justice. Among the activities was a Saturday protest outside a Wendy’s restaurant on Bardstown Road, part of the denomination’s long campaign to get fast-food chains to commit to better pay and conditions for Florida tomato harvesters.

Later, the Presbyterians plan a closing worship service at the convention center, followed by a downtown street party to celebrate their silver anniversary in Louisville (in addition to the 30th anniversary of the merger of the northern and southern branches of Presbyterianism, which healed a 19th-century split).

The denomination moved its offices to Louisville in 1988 after a heavy lobbying effort by local Presbyterians and an interfaith coalition of religious and civic leaders.

At the time, its renovation of former warehouses into its headquarters helped kickstart the renovation of the Louisville waterfront.

Since then, the waterfront has taken on an economic life of its own with numerous corporate, sports and recreational facilities. The denomination, meanwhile, has shrunk significantly in staff and membership.

Hence the workshops that Rooke and others spoke at – promoting evangelistic initiatives such as the denomination’s new program, 1,001 Worshiping Communities.

The idea is to provide seed money and support for unconventional congregations of various kinds over the coming decade.

“We’re trying to figure out what the church is going to look like in the next generation,” said Vera White, associate for the 1,001 Worshiping Communities program. “It’s really reaching an unchurched constitutency, (people who are) probably not going to find a comfortable home in a traditional Presbyterian church.”

Already, the denomination is sponsoring more than 100 congregations under this concept, many of them geared to racial or ethnic minorities, immigrants, students or other young adults, White said.

Steve Yamaguchi, executive of the Los Ranchos Presbytery in Southern California, told of one such new community led by a pastor in a mobile-home park, reaching often-isolated people in dire economic straits.

The program is designed to experiment, recognizing that some of the launches will be short-lived.

But Yamaguchi said his biggest fear is not failure. It’s that “we lost our nerve and failed in our imagination.”

“It would be a failure of us to assume that is a failure,” he said. “It’s a failure if we don’t learn from it.”


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