Today in the Mission Yearbook - Finding God in the mountains while on a paddleboard

Denver Presbytery finds inspiration from new ministries like A Stoked Life

January 7, 2024

Video URL: https://vimeo.com/879446563

The Heimers lead family-friendly paddleboard outings on Saturdays in 

the summer.

“People are looking for meaning in their lives,” said Nathan Heimer, who with his wife, Mindy, have found more success opening up deep conversations on a paddleboard, in a yoga class or in a coffee shop instead of a traditional church. That’s why the Heimers started a paddleboard ministry named A Stoked Life in Colorado rather than waiting for people who have grown up in secular households or who have been hurt by the church to walk through a sanctuary door looking for a good sermon. They see themselves as a bridge between nature-lovers and communities that seek to be God’s love in the world.

After hearing over and over, “I find God in the mountains,” the Heimers said, “Why don’t we go to them?” In 2020, the Heimers bought Surf’SUP Colorado, a local board rental shop that had launched in 2011 out of a small trailer with just 12 stand-up paddleboards or “SUPs.” Out of their cozy storefront in Morrison, Colorado, the Heimers rent equipment, foster community and run the programs of A Stoked Life. There are group tours of local lakes and reservoirs in the summer as well as individual instruction. Mindy Heimer teaches yoga for paddlers on Mondays at the shop and Holy Yoga on Fridays at First Presbyterian Church of Golden, Colorado. Holy Yoga is “Christ-centered,” where practitioners “learn and live a life’s journey of inspiration, fellowship and spirituality.” A Stoked Life markets a 200-hour teacher training for Holy Yoga.

Mindy Heimer coaches a customer at the Surf’SUP Colorado 

paddleboard rental shop.

The Heimers’ approach as small business owners and spiritual leaders is based on building strong relationships and sharing their love of Creation and the Creator with others. Prior to starting this new worshiping community, the Heimers had each served in youth ministries where authentic relationships were key to building trust and faith. Their website features a blog where the practical meets the spiritual. In a post called “Why do you paddle?” they wrote a kind of credo with allusions to biblical concepts: “We paddle because it’s relaxing. It’s a way to find stillness in our busy world. We paddle to find peace — the kind of peace that is bigger than anything we can understand. We paddle because it’s life-giving, not taking. We paddle because it’s a way to reconnect with Creation and the Creator. We paddle because we belong and it’s a place where you belong, too.”

“They have a passion,” said the Rev. Fernando Rodríguez, associate presbyter for Mission of the Denver Presbytery, “and it is a way of connecting community, God and nature.”

“Denver Presbytery has invested themselves in the whole new worshiping community, 1001 approach and understanding for ministry,” said the Rev. Dr. Dee Cooper, lead presbyter. “We really hold this value that this is a new expression of faith in God’s world.” 1001 New Worshiping Communities partners with presbyteries like Denver through its 1001 Pathways to Flourishing program to foster “ecosystems of innovation that allow new ministries to get their footing and thrive.”

Cooper credits the embrace of an ethos of innovation with having a “radical impact” and inspiring congregational leaders over “new ways of being church.”

Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Today’s Focus: A Stoked Life, a 1001 New Worshiping Community

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Maura Weil, Archive Technician, Presbyterian Historical Society
Kimberly Wells, Mission Specialist, Director’s Office, World Mission, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

God of grace, thank you for people who inspire us. Thank you also for those who are willing to serve you despite discomfort, hunger and struggle. Please help us to risk more, to give more and to sacrifice more as we seek to follow Jesus. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - New worshiping community charters as church in South Carolina

Prospering during the pandemic, a new church development provides fertile soil for gospel growth

April 10, 2023

Eight new elders were ordained at Parkside Presbyterian Church’s chartering service. (Photo by Valerie & Ed Photography.)

“Did you agree to be dirt?” the Rev. CeCe Armstrong asked commissioners of Charleston Atlantic Presbytery and members of a newly chartered church in Charleston, South Carolina. The members of Parkside Church in Charleston, in accordance with G-1.0201 in the Book of Order, signed a charter that read in response to the grace of God, “We promise and covenant to live together in unity and to work together in ministry as disciples of Jesus Christ, bound to him and to one another as a part of the body of Christ in this place according to the principles of faith, mission, and order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).” As a result, the presbytery convened at St. Barnabas Lutheran Church, which is Parkside Church’s place of worship, for a chartering service on Jan. 29 to commission the church, ordain and install elders and fully install their organizing pastor, the Rev. Colin Kerr.

“Did you really feel called to all of this? Because the truth is, you’ve been called to be dirt,” Armstrong preached at the service. “Whenever you become a part of a congregation, you agree to be dirt.” Armstrong then drew on a connection with the parable of the sower and the idea that the seed of the gospel can flourish in the right kind of soil. Armstrong proclaimed that “Parkside is the right kind of dirt for this neighborhood.”

Those who have supported Parkside since its beginning and watched its growth in a short time certainly agree that Parkside’s vision, location and partnerships provide fertile ground for its ministry. The dream of Parkside began in 2016, according to Kerr and new elder Samantha Holvey, who was part of the original wine and cheese Bible study that began to pray about the idea that Kerr described as “a new Presbyterian church focused on reaching younger people and non-Presbyterians.” At the time, Kerr was working with 1001 New Worshiping Communities in the Presbyterian Mission Agency on a collegiate ministry called The Journey, which met in a bar near the campus of the College of Charleston. “Parkside started being dreamed up in 2016, initially as a joke,” Kerr said, but it became a serious idea when he and others started an advisory team. Despite launching during a pandemic, the church reached the 100-member quota required by the Charleston Atlantic Presbytery for official charter in late 2022.

Erin Norton leads worship at Parkside Church. (Photo by Valerie and Ed Photography)

Holvey said she knew when she joined the Bible study that she had “found my people.” When Kerr asked Holvey to join the advisory team to launch the church in 2019, she was all in: “I was always taught that Jesus loves everyone, and I finally feel like I’m in a community that lives that out.” The move from a new worshiping community to a fully chartered congregation means Holvey was also ordained a ruling elder during the chartering service. “It’s pretty magical that this thing that we’ve been working on for so many years is now official. Personally, it was also deeply meaningful to be ordained as an elder.”

Stories like Holvey’s are one of the many things that Kerr says make Parkside special. “In late 2022, we applied to charter and began elder training. None of our eight new elders have even been elders, and none come from the PC(USA).” Kerr also praises the “unique style of worship that is unmatched in the city” thanks to the leadership of Erin Norton, who according to Kerr is “a former evangelical who brings her progressive feminist convictions to bear” as a leader in their church, a current seminarian, a Presbyterian campus minister and an abuse-awareness advocate.

“Colin asked me to be a part of Parkside in the early planning stages in 2019,” said Norton, “but I was hesitant about getting involved in a church plant because of the amount of work involved.” Kerr promised “that it would be ‘just one Sunday,’” remembered Norton. “Well, the next week rolled around, and he needed help with worship for ‘just one more Sunday.’ Now, three years later, I am leading the congregation as the director of worship every Sunday.”

Beth Waltemath, Communications Associate, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Ruth Adams, Director, Assistance Program, Church Engagement, Board of Pensions
Simone Adams, Coordinator, Budget & Mission Effectiveness, Theology, Formation & Evangelism, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Come, Holy Spirit, and fill us with love for neighbor and stranger. Show us your love for the people around us and send us to befriend them and serve them and welcome them in your grace and in your power. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - It’s all in the timing

The Open Table’s new pastor, the Rev. Dr. Letiah Fraser, is among the guests on ‘Being Matthew 25’

November 18, 2022

The Rev. Dr. Letiah Fraser

The Rev. Dr. Letiah Fraser, an ordained pastor with the Church of the Nazarene as well as a hospital chaplain, disability rights advocate, activist and organizer who also recently began ministry at The Open Table, got to appear alongside the organizer of the new worshiping community in Kansas City, Missouri, Nick Pickrell, on a recent broadcast of “Being Matthew 25,” hosted by Melody Smith, associate director for digital and marketing communications in the Presbyterian Mission Agency, and the Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, the PMA’s president and executive director. Watch their half-hour conversation here or here. The Vimeo link is here.

The Open Table will proceed for a time with shared leadership, Fraser said, and “continue to work on our racial identity and how that relates to our spirituality.” It’ll also continue to grapple with this question, Fraser said: “What does it mean to reconstruct a spirituality in ways that are healthy and life-giving without having to fear what was before?”

Both a new worshiping community and a Matthew 25 community, The Open Table’s main focus most recently has been “to build a multiracial church,” said Pickrell, who’s stepping away from leadership at The Open Door after Fraser, formerly a resident at the worshiping community, accepted the leadership position. The Open Table “takes into account the ways that racism continues to wreak havoc on communities of color and white folks. We try to address that head-on as a community,” Pickrell said, with, for example, its participation in the Poor People’s Campaign, an organization Fraser has also worked with.

Nick Pickrell

“Our gatherings,” Pickrell said, gatherings that include serving a meal to the community, “are at the intersection of spirituality and social issues.”

“Thank you for bearing witness,” Moffett told the two leaders, “and for creating people who understand what God would have in terms of the issues that have plagued our world. Structural racism “dishonors God,” Moffett said, and systemic poverty “dishonors the human spirit.”

Noting that the PMA is focused on the word “evolve” during 2022 and is using Philippians 1:6 as a core Scripture, Moffett asked how, in addition to an evolving leadership model, The Open Table continues to evolve.

The Open Table started “as a community of hospitality and conversation,” Pickrell said. “It was an all-white group of people. A lot of us were at the beginning of our own journeys to waking up to our racial identity.” Many in the community “recognized that racism is a real thing and a barrier to human thriving.”

The Open Table began to hear more and more from BIPOC speakers. Now the guideline is to have more BIPOC speakers than white people speak during gatherings, Pickrell said.

“We have tried to become very relational and very flat in our leadership,” Pickrell said. “We needed a leadership structure to reflect the community we are serving … Now you’re seeing some of the fruition [in that approach]. We are about liberation and healing — specifically BIPOC folks and white folks by proxy.”

“The structure of The Open Table,” Fraser said, “lends itself to being a Matthew 25 community.”

It’s a community “seeking to be intercultural,” Moffett noted. What, she wondered, have been some of the community’s greatest challenges and joys?

“A challenge for me as a white dude is that sometimes I want things to move a lot quicker than they do,” Pickrell said. “If you build something multiracial, things have to move slowly, especially if you want to include all. You will encounter some differences of opinion,” especially from people who are looking for something more akin to a traditional Presbyterian church, he said.

A joy of the ministry has been doing “racial identity work as a deeply spiritual act,” Pickrell said. “It’s the same with folks waking up to their gender identity. We can shed stories and ways that society says people have to exist in order to get their needs met. … It’s been wonderful to see myths fall away as we see ourselves clearly or in a new way. It’s been so transformative, and it’s been one of my greatest joys.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Regina Kimbrough, Trust Officer, Presbyterian Foundation
Tracey King-Ortega, Mission co-worker serving in Nicaragua, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Dear Lord, sustain us as we seek to sustain each other: in the beauty of our kingdom, with the bounty of your earth, amid the needs of your cities and through the fellowship of neighbors working together. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - ‘It’s church, and church in its best form’

Webinar reveals the secret behind the partnership between a Delaware new worshiping community and a shared commercial kitchen space

October 27, 2022

The Rev. Chelsea Spyres, executive director of the Wilmington Kitchen Collective and pastor of the Riverfront Church, speaks during last month’s grand opening of the collective kitchen space, which is housed in Grace United Methodist Church in Wilmington, Delaware. (Photo by Cindy Kohlmann)

In locations across the country, PC(USA) churches and mid councils are finding ways to transform otherwise humble church kitchens into spaces of ministry, mission and community engagement.

One such fertile space is in Wilmington, Delaware. The Rev. Cindy Kohlmann, connectional presbyter for New Castle Presbytery, recently hosted an online discussion with the Rev. Chelsea Spyres, executive director of the Wilmington Kitchen Collective and the pastor of Riverfront Church, a new worshiping community in Wilmington. Watch their conversation here.

Riverfront Church meets outdoors in good weather and in restaurants and bars when the weather turns cold or rainy, Spyres said. People who attend “describe Riverfront as a space of rest, community and table. We’ve really been grounded in food from our beginning, but we were never really sure what that was going to look like missionally,” she said. A few years ago, the Wilmington Alliance, a community partner, came to Riverfront’s pastor at the time, the Rev. Edwin Estevez, “and said we have this idea for a community kitchen, a shared kitchen space,” Spyres said.

Organizers approached Grace United Methodist Church — Spyres’ denomination as well — who said, “We have the space, but we don’t have the people. The Wilmington Alliance said, ‘We have some funding,’ and Riverfront said, ‘We think we can get some additional funding and we are willing to invest a staff person part time to this mission.’ That’s where I came into the picture,” Spyres said. “I was that part-time staff member.”

For a year or so, “we did a lot of grant-writing … It was a slow and hard process,” Spyres said. Eventually the team secured enough money to rebuild the Grace kitchen to bring it up to code. In January, the local health department gave its final approval, “and we were officially open.”

Wilmington Kitchen Collective has four goals:

• Provide low-cost shared kitchen facilities for growing food-based businesses
• Increase access to capital and startup grants for entrepreneurs
• Increase access to training and business development for entrepreneurs
• Build a community of culinary entrepreneurs to support and encourage one another on their journey.

Wilmington Kitchen Collective held its grand opening. More than 200 people turned out to celebrate. (Photo by Cindy Kohlmann)

Spyres said 60 Wilmington businesses are now on a waiting list for shared commercial kitchen space. “We’ve just announced we are opening a second site,” Spyres said. “We’re really amazed at the way the Spirit has been working.”

The space exists “for folks in the start-up or dreaming phase of what their business could look like,” she said. “The business development and economic support is important to us because we have heard over and over again from our entrepreneurs that space is not enough. To launch and do business well in the startup phase, they need more support and resources,” including micro grants and business development coaching.

“We are not business experts,” she said of Wilmington Kitchen Collective. “But we have a lot of connections in the community. We are more than a kitchen space.”

WKC has delivered services and workshops that entrepreneurs have told them they need. Among them: food photography and styling workshops. Using only their smartphone cameras, entrepreneurs “saw their pictures transformed” by the end of that workshop, she said.

The Delaware Small Business Development Center offers coaching, and each entrepreneur has a caseworker to help develop a business plan and check in periodically. WKC has also arranged for training sessions in social media use, marketing and accounting.

“It’s a real community,” Spyres said. “We try to make sure our entrepreneurs know that when they win, we win.”

WKC celebrated its grand opening in recent weeks. More than 200 supporters turned out to express their appreciation.

“The Wilmington Kitchen Collective gives me the opportunity to expand my menu to offer new items to customers,” one entrepreneur said in a testimonial. “Being part of the collective, I am excited about working with other businesses to partner for events and collaborate on new business ventures … I’m looking forward to new adventures and vendor relationships that will develop.”

“It’s refreshing for entrepreneurs to be in a space where they’re rooting for each other,” Spyres said. “It means working together and sharing kitchen space — and being patient when someone is running over time or forgot to wipe the counter down properly.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Destini Hodges, Coordinator of the Young Adult Volunteer Program, World Mission Presbyterian Mission Agency
Steve Hoehn, Manager, Hubbard Press, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)

Let us pray

God of grace, we thank you for the joy of serving you by serving others. Continue to open our hearts to the needs around us, and may we show forth our concern with hearts and hands, so that all your children may be showered with your love. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - New worshiping community is A Work in Progress

Organizing pastor says the venture is ‘preparing me for what is next’

November 10, 2021

The Rev. Susan Brouillette (second left front row) with members of the Lafayette Urban Ministry Immigration Clinic legal team (Photo by Lafayette Urban Ministry)

The Rev. Susan Brouillette, a new leader in the 1001 worshiping community movement, hopes to create a community for those who are spiritual but not religious and want to make the world a better place.

Brouillette is beginning to get together with leadership team members to hone their vision for their new 1001 new worshiping community, A Work in Progress.

“I see it as radically welcoming and accepting,” she said, “for everyone, especially those not comfortable in a traditional church.”

Brouillette was founding director of the Lafayette (Indiana) Urban Ministry Immigration Clinic and worked for former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, for 28 years, helping people obtain visitor-, employment- and family-based visas, which she considered ministry.

“People going through immigration are very scared and vulnerable,” she said. “I don’t feel like starting a new worshiping community is a shift or change. It’s just a natural extension, preparing me for what is next.”

Brouillette was one of 12 female leaders honored in Lafayette as part of the YWCA Salute to Women class of 2020. At that event, Joe Micon, who retired in March 2020 as LUM executive director, said that most of immigrants and asylum seekers coming to the clinic are “in serious straits.”

“Some are without family or friends,” he said. “In Susan Brouillette, they have found an advocate who represents and defends them with skill and commitment. She is one of those rare and extraordinary individuals responsible for making our community such a diverse and welcoming place.”

Brouillette spent most of her life in traditional Presbyterian churches. While she still goes to church nearly every Sunday, she feels like there’s a gap between what she experiences on Sunday and what she has experienced in the secular world.

“It’s like the church is fearful of outsiders,” she said, “instead of inviting them into the community and engaging them.”

Coming from a rural area — the town of 2,000 people Brouillette grew up in is 30 miles from Lafayette — Brouillette believes the new worshiping community movement, which draws from many different people, can be prophetic for the entire church.

“It’s easy to say the world has passed us by, instead of saying I have responsibility to engage it with what I’ve been given,” she said. “I feel this sense of call to create conversations that lead to understanding others.”

With A Work in Progress, she hopes to speak truth to power and to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

“I don’t see this as a risk, but as another way to be faithful to God,” she said. “Because of my secular work experience, I don’t need to prove myself. I’m trying to lay the groundwork for others to follow and see new life.”

In 2012, the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declared a commitment to this churchwide movement that would result in the creation of 1001 worshiping communities over 10 years. At a grassroots level, nearly 600 diverse new worshiping communities have formed across the nation.

Recently A Work in Progress received a $10,000 seed grant from Mission Program Grants, which are made available through the Racial Equity & Women’s Intercultural Ministries of the Presbyterian Mission Agency. The grants support the transforming work of new worshiping communities and mid councils.

 Paul Seebeck, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Cathy Chang and Juan Lopez, Mission co-workers serving in the Philippines, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Betsie Chilton, Administrator, Researcher & Analyst, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray

You, O God, raise us from despondence to praise. In spite of our failings, you are faithful, seeking after every one of your children. We join with all who call on Jesus’ name, thankful that our story begins and ends in you. Amen.