Today in the Mission Yearbook - From stand-alone churches to mixed economy ministries

Podcast explores innovation and social entrepreneurship in new models of church

November 19, 2024

“What does it feel like to be stuck?” asked the Rev. Sara Hayden, host of the “New Way” podcast, a production of the 1001 New Worshiping Communities (1001 NWC) movement. Her guest, Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, deputy executive director for Vision and Innovation at the Presbyterian Mission Agency, gave both a theological answer and a personal anecdote. According to Schlosser-Hall, to be stuck is to be without confidence and faith, i.e., lacking in “con-fidelis.” Feeling stuck reminded him of driving a brown Ford Pinto station wagon in high school and having to navigate the North Dakota winters with only rear-wheel drive. Sometimes, one needs more to get unstuck and stop spinning one’s wheels than to exert more effort doing the same thing. Sometimes, one needs a group of people pushing from behind or sand to help with traction under one’s tires.

In the first episode of two, titled “The Holy Spirit is the Sand Under the Tires,” Hayden and Schlosser-Hall speak about the balance between following surprising leads and new ideas and sustaining organizations with predictable patterns and a culture of comfort, drawing on examples they’ve encountered over the years. Schlosser-Hall has worked on the mid council level in the Pacific Northwest and currently oversees the PC(USA)’s Center for Innovation, and Hayden has spent her career working with church planters and founders of new worshiping communities, most recently as 1001 NWC’s associate for apprenticeships and residencies. The conversation lifted up examples of ministries built in the back room of fair-trade chocolate and coffee shops to small-business incubators born out of industrial-grade church kitchens that inspired churches to think about themselves not as ministries seeking members to join them but as their churches as members belonging to a larger community and economy of social entrepreneurship.

“To be clear, we need them both,” said Schlosser-Hall. “If you pull up the volume too high on the comfort and familiarity, then you get stuckness. But if you pull up the volume too high on the serendipity and holy newness, then you get out of whack.”

In episode two, Schlosser-Hall delves deeper into defining what ministries built on a social entrepreneurship model mean in contrast to stand-alone churches that contract with what they consider outside partners in mission as a “supplement to our stand-alone church,” rather than part of their core identity as a church that is itself a member of the larger community.

“I’m fascinated by how the church is moving more into an understanding of itself as less a stand-alone church and more one node in a constellation of relationships in its community,” said Schlosser-Hall.

Hayden and Schlosser-Hall then imagine how the stand-alone church is sustained economically by its members, but the social entrepreneurial model of ministries shares the economic responsibility and the call to serve others among many initiatives. One of the ways that the PC(USA) is helping communities imagine, transition into or build new models of ministry is through the “Good Futures Accelerator Course.” Because of the partnership between the Presbyterian Mission Agency and Rooted Good, which has developed the course, PC(USA) churches receive a 50% discount on the course.

Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Daily Readings

• Morning Psalms 54; 146
• First Reading Habakkuk 3:1-10 (11-15) 16-18
• Second Reading James 3:1-12
• Gospel Reading Luke 17:1-10
• Evening Psalms 28; 99

Today’s Focus: Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, guest on the New Way Podcast

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Beth Zornick, Vice President, Customer Business Systems, Board of Pensions 
Princeton Abarahoa, Associate for African Intercultural Ministries, Racial Equity & Women’s Intercultural Ministries, Presbyterian Mission Agency 

Let us pray

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for the windows of opportunities that have opened. May your Word go forth in power, and may new believers come to faith. We pray, too, for protection, discernment and boldness for those who labor. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Gamers can help us see and shape the future

Synod School convocation speaker: Four tools employed by gamers can be helpful for faith communities, too

September 26, 2024

Photo by Samsung Memory via Unsplash

A longstanding practice at Synod School is to offer a talk-back session with the convocation speaker each evening. At the start of his talk, Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, this year’s convocation speaker, shared some of what he learned during the previous evening’s talk-back.

One participant said we might consider attaching our FOMO — the fear of missing out — to what God’s doing right now.

Another noted that much of discipleship formation is built around conserving and preserving. “I wonder if more can be built around what Jesus said in John 20: “Peace be with you. Now go,” said Schlosser-Hall, the deputy executive director of Vision, Innovation and Rebuilding in the Presbyterian Mission Agency. “Then [Jesus] breathes the Holy Spirit on them.”

He said he also heard from people who want faith communities to grow better and more attuned to “memorializing and sacramentalizing when something has completed its lifecycle,” he said. “Could we do better with honoring, blessing and letting go?”

“It was a good, robust conversation,” Schlosser-Hall said.

Turning to the day’s material, Schlosser-Hall showed a couple of TV ads to help spur discussion. The first examines the calamities that can occur when one’s cable goes out. “It’s catastrophizing,” Schlosser-Hall said. “How do you see that lived out in your life?”

“It’s a slippery slope,” said one Synod School-goer. “If we let them in, who else will come?”

“People assume your ideas are bad even before you try them on,” said another.

Then the 540 or so people gathered at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, viewed a second ad, one for a handheld computer that celebrates people who are filled with passion. “What kind of future is this depicting? Schlosser-Hall asked.

“A sense of possibility, hope and anticipation,” said one.

Jane McGonigal, who wrote “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything, Even Things that Seem Impossible Today,” develops social games about relating to the future. One of McGonigal’s concepts, Schlosser-Hall pointed out, is time spaciousness, which encourages people, faith communities and organizations to plan and dream in 10-year windows, rather than next month or next year or even five years from now.

Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall (Contributed photo)

Schlosser-Hall asked Synod Schoolers to take a brief McGonigal quiz using a rating scale of 1 to 10:

• Over the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same or that most of us will dramatically rethink and reinvent how we do things?
• Are you mostly optimistic or mostly worried?
• How much influence do you feel you have in determining how the world and your life will change over the next 10 years?

“We live in a VUCA world,” Schlosser-Hall said, an acronym for volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous. But so did the people who lived in gospel times, he said.

“Hope is not a feeling you hope lands on you one day,” he said. “It’s a choice we seek to live into. It’s less something that happens to us and more about what we might choose.”

McGonigal says gamers are good at seeing and shaping the future. They employ four tools to help them do that.

• Urgent optimism, the desire to tackle an object combined with the belief there’s a reasonable chance of success. “It’s worth trying, and trying now,” is their approach.
• Social fabric. “They are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric,” Schlosser-Hall said.
• Blissful productivity. “When they’re engaged, they lose themselves,” he said of gamers. “They’re happier working hard at the game than relaxing and just hanging out. It can be a deeper kind of energizing. We need to relax and renew, but we also need to be engaged in blissful productivity,” he said.
• Epic meaning. Schlosser-Hall held up The Legend of Zeldaand World of Warcraft as examples. As for The Legend of Zelda, “the depth of meaning this invites people into is almost a spiritual experience. It’s pretty profound,” he said.

“What better place for these qualities to show up than in our congregations, our presbyteries and our communities? It’s about finding our identity in something way bigger than ourselves and doing it better,” Schlosser-Hall said. “Maybe we can get really darn good at the future. Amen?”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Gamers can help us see and shape the future shares Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall at Synod School

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Effie Shipp, Associate for Lending Services, Presbyterian Investment & Loan Program 
Elaine Shilstut, Cataloging & Metadata Librarian, Presbyterian Historical Society 

Let us pray

God, thank you that you are a God of peace and love. We pray for those who need healing from confusion, pain and despair. We ask your blessing that we might bear rich fruits. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Try ‘shalomify’ next time you’re playing Scrabble

Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall coins a word and leads a thoughtful discussion during his first talk at Synod School

September 25, 2024

Photo by Clark Tibbs via Unsplash

Few Synod School convocation speakers can get away with birthing new words on the spot the way Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall did.

The word was “shalomify,” as in the way God asks us to build places of shalom, justice, peace and well-being in the places where we live and work and worship. “You can have projects of shalomification,” Schlosser-Hall, the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s deputy executive director of Vision, Innovation and Rebuilding, told those attending Synod School, which is offered each year by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa.

Although he lives in the Pacific Northwest, Schlosser-Hall has roots in the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, having been born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and having spent his formative years in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and Bismarck, North Dakota.

He showed a slide of a line sliding downward from left to right, and many people guessed it represented the PC(USA)’s membership trend: about 4 million in 1970 and about 1.2 million in 2020. But what if, as one Presbyterian told Schlosser-Hall and others present on a Zoom call a while back, that represents a line of possibility?

“God is doing more than we can ask or imagine,” he said, picking up on the Synod School theme during its 70th year. “We might want to be part of it.”

Schlosser-Hall has seen the T-shirts with the four qualities spelled out during ordination questions: Do you promise to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination and love?

Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall (Contributed photo)

“We want to escalate the role of imagination to create new stories and [employ] imagination’s cousin, innovation,” which someone once defined as “imagination applied,” Schlosser-Hall said. “My hope [this week] is that we will see our circumstances in an ecosystem of possibility.”

Schlosser-Hall, a PC(USA) ruling elder who’s married to a pastor, shared photos of some of the places in Eugene, Oregon, that mattered to the couple when they were younger.  The Koinonia Center, a former Victorian home where Schlosser-Hall worked as a janitor, is now a towering apartment building. Hayward Field, a beloved place for track fans, was leveled in 2018 and rebuilt in time to host the world championships in 2022. But the church where the two used to worship has remained largely unchanged.

He wondered — and he asked those present to think along with him — whether there’s something going on that makes it more difficult to exercise “that blue-sky imagination, to take steps with great risk and great possibilities.”

He asked the crowd for their ideas. Among them:

• People are invested in their past accomplishments.
• Comfort means complacency.
• We’re scared of the chaos that can occur between the former and the future.
• A group of churches told one pastor, “We welcome new ideas that will help us keep on doing what we’ve always done.”
• There is a fear of loss, and we don’t like fear. Even when it’s good change, change always involves loss.
• We forget that God calls us to be resurrection people.
• What we let go of might be a faith anchor for some people.

“Discipleship is being able to hold more than one emotion, reality or observation at the same time. That creates maturation as disciples,” Schlosser-Hall said. “It’s not one or the other. It’s grief and newness together.”

But “if we rush in with new zeal saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do. Get on board or get off the bus,’ that can be harmful for people,” Schlosser-Hall said. “We need that influence, but we need to find a way to take good steps out of good Spirit-led choices.”

Our job is to find out what innovation God is already orchestrating, he said. He quoted from Dr. Linda Hill, who along with three others wrote “Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.”

“Ordinary people can do extraordinary things,” the authors wrote. “Everyone has a slice of genius. The innovative leader’s role is to unleash it, harness it and use it for the collective good.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall speaks at Synod School

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff

Ellen Sherby, Associate Director, Global Connections, World Mission, Presbyterian Mission Agency 
Alejandra “Alex” Sherman, Executive Assistant, President’s Office, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)

Let us pray

Lord God, we lift up all who work to spread your love, made known to us through Jesus Christ. May congregations and clergy touch more lives with the good news of the gospel. May they be an inspiration for us as we work to spread the message of Christ in our own communities. Amen.