Big Tent Day 2 Part 2: A Holy Spirit Thing

I just finished a 90 minute workshop titled "How to Start and Grow New Immigrant Worshiping Communities led by Angel Suarez of the PMA.  It was disappointing at first that there were only three participants who were not already leaders of Immigrant Worshiping Communities.  The disappointment abated, however, when we realized that the three of us got to have a unique experience: just us for 90 minutes with PMA staff, a local presbytery staff person and pastors of communities representing south Asia, Haiti, west Africa, Indonesia and Latin America.

To put it mildly, I learned a lot.  I think I took more notes in that 90 minutes than in my first Barth seminar!

The conversation was incredibly helpful and I had some of my assumptions about ministry with an immigrant community affirmed and some turned upside down.  I learned how I was overestimating the challenges in some areas while underestimating them in others.  I learned strategies and models for ministry, some theological context for doing ministry with immigrant communities and heard stories of worshiping communities represented.

Beyond all that, though, I learned that the Holy Spirit can find a small group of Presbyterians even when they are tucked back in a corner of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY.

At the end of the meeting, after all of the conversation, one of the pastors in the group asked if they could pray for the three of us who came to the meeting and for our ministries.  That is when a pretty extraordinary thing happened.  A dozen or so brothers and sisters in Christ from around the PC(USA) representing congregations made of immigrants from around the world came together in that moment, laid hands on us and prayed.

I am not one to throw around Holy Spirit language.  I am pretty staid and almost rigid in my Calvinist reserve sometimes.  But in that moment, sitting in that room, feeling my colleagues hands on my shoulders, back and head and hearing the prayers being offered for our ministry, I felt the Spirit in that place.

Over the last couple of days as I heard the same old song about changing church culture and the need to change the church, about membership decline and all the plans we have to stem the tide, about how this curriculum or that program promised to turn things around, I began to get a little disheartened about the church.  Sometimes we seem to act like the first class passengers who didn't want to get in the lifeboats just yet because the deck on the Titanic was cold.  Then this happened.

In that awkward annoying Holy Spirit way, God reminded me that despite our best efforts, God is nowhere near done with the Presbyterians.  If I God was done with us, the small turnout in that workshop would have been the story.

But it wasn't.

And that is pretty damn cool.