Being Presbyterian

When we don’t communicate effectively prior to an outreach or other church event and we don’t get the volunteers we need to make it really successful, it’s easy to focus on how the communication short-comings make the work much harder for the staff and the event not as effective as it could be for guests.

That church bulletin (or worship guide or whatever you choose to call it) is for some people the very first piece of Christian literature they see. It is certainly the very first information a visitor reads about your church.

In our secularized society today many people grow up without reading the Bible or any kind of Christian material. At the same time, everyone has a spiritual vacuum inside and they will come to your church looking for a way to have it filled. When they come in they will read anything you put into their hands. You give them the bulletin.

For no other reason than to celebrate the one remaining treasure on the corner of Wellington and Fifth Streets, we all need to celebrate the 175th anniversary (the congregation was formally organized in 1835) of First Presbyterian Church (Oct. 3 to 4).

The cornerstone for this wonderful example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture was put into place in May of 1892 and a wonderful picture survives of that event that managed, in one simple photographic image, to capture a time, a place and an age.

One of the concepts that I have been studying is the "reorganization" of denominations. As I have commented before, this is more than just the divisions and schisms that probably first come to mind, but also a couple merger-related reorganizations that formed whole new denominations as well as reorganizations that merged multiple branches together. I find it instructive that the "family trees" for American Presbyterianism and Scottish Presbyterianism are equally convoluted and the Presbyterian branch of the United Church of Canada is almost as full. (And the Canada chart does not even include the continuing Presbyterian Church in Canada.)

One of the bloggers in our web ring has done a series of posts about the value of social media in the development of faith communities:

Using Social Media to Build Community, Part I
Using Social Medial to Build Local Community, Part II
If Jesus Were a Dog, Would He Tweet, Part III

Xan does an excellent job helping understand the value of some so seemingly impersonal as social media as a tool for developing the most personal kind of community. What she wrote really makes me think in a different way about the kinds of relationships that God asks us to participate in and how those relationships work in practical terms.