Today in the Mission Yearbook - 1 John has wisdom for preaching in polarized communities of faith

The Rev. Dr. Janette Ok leads the ‘Equipping Preachers’ webinar for the Synod of the Covenant

August 8, 2024

The Rev. Dr. Janette Ok

Preachers ascending the pulpit in a polarized church can turn to the letter of 1 John for, say, inspiration — or even a preaching series.

“It’s not an easy time for the preacher, trying to navigate our own biases,” said the Rev. Dr. Janette Ok, “much less those of our congregation members.”

Ok teaches New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary and recently led the “Equipping Preachers” webinar for the Synod of the Covenant. View her 78-minute talk, which included a question-and-answer session, here.

“You don’t need me to tell you American democracy is struggling with this very topic” of polarization, Ok said, “and the church has not been immune to this.” The ruptures “between fellow Christians are too apparent and painful to ignore.”

Ok asked participants to name some of what she called “the enemies in the room, in our sanctuaries.” Responses included “stubborn and self-righteous folks,” “those who proclaim all the answers,” “single-mindedness,” “once they are removed from power, they leave” and “arrogance.”

The author of 1 John also names the enemies in the room: liars and antichrists. “That’s some powerful rhetoric,” Ok said. The term “antichrist” appears four times in the Bible — all in the letters ascribed to John, and never in Revelation. The author uses the term to describe people who have deserted the community.

The letters are written following a disagreement in the church about the messiahship and humanity of Jesus. Ok said the disagreement led to a schism between an orthodox group and secessionists. “First John is addressed to those in between,” Ok said. “The author is trying to combat false teaching of those who have disrupted and left the community. … The author is upset because of the damage they’ve done to fellowship. It’s not just doctrinal disagreement. It’s their failure to love the community. They left without turning back.”

The ”importance and prominence of love can’t be missed when you read 1 John,” Ok said, focusing a large portion of her talk on the first five verses of 1 John 5. “Here we see an emphasis on love and on faith,” Ok said. “Our love for God confirms our love for fellow believers.”

What “binds and unifies believers is our shared confession, not our shared affection. Affection is important and it delights the Lord,” she said. “But affection is a pretty fickle thing. It’s moody and it comes and goes. Confession is reflected in the relationships we have, in the trust we put in Christ.”

This kind of love, she said, is “cruciform, Christ-shaped and cross-shaped. The cruciform fellowship means our love doesn’t depend on natural affinities. It’s based on our status as children of God.”

“We have to be able to preach and remind our congregations of this,” Ok told the 25 or so preachers in attendance. “First John reassures us God’s commandments are not burdensome. … Freedom from the onerous weight of sin makes obedience light by comparison. We are set free to give God pleasure, and when we make it our aim to please God, we do what God loves.”

Ok noted it’s often “easier to have a room full of people who speak different languages than a room full of people who hold different opinions than we do.”

“Maybe the differences in perspectives that aren’t fundamental to our Christological confessions … are a form of diversity the Spirit can use to disciple us,” she said.

Here’s what Ok had to say in Working Preacher on 1 John 5:1–6:

“Belief in Jesus as the Christ (5:1) and the Son of God (5:5) must not be reduced to intellectual consent to Christological ideas and verbal confessions of the creeds. Faith has power. Faith confirms our identity as God’s children and forges our familial bonds. Faith enables us to love one another and prevail over the forces that defy God and distort God’s love. It is through our commitment to our shared faith and love for one another that we love the parent and give God pleasure.”

“When in doubt, love. It supersedes everything else,” Ok told webinar participants. “You can’t go wrong.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Today’s Focus: Rev. Dr. Janette Ok leads the ‘Equipping Preachers’ webinar for the Synod of the Covenant

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Julie Mullins, Acquisitions Editor, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Michelle Muniz, Mission Associate II, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Gathering God, remind us of your abundance. Move us to be people willing to share what you have given us, for your gifts never run out. In the name of our Lord Jesus, the abundant one. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Synod of the Covenant preaching webinar invites us to join those present for the wedding at Cana

The Rev. Dr. Cindy Halvorson works to get preachers to explore biblical stories through the eyes of multiple participants

April 11, 2024

Photo by Amritanshu Sikda via Unsplash

During the Synod of the Covenant’s recent Equipping Preachers webinar,  the Rev. Dr. Cindy Halvorson worked with participants to engage John 2:1–11 — an account of Jesus’ first miracle — through the eyes of the person of their choice as part of the story of Jesus transforming water into wine during the wedding at Cana.

Halvorson works for LeaderWise and is the author of the 2022 book, “Real People, Real Faith: Preaching Biblical Characters.”

Halvorson asked participants, “why do we preach?” and “why do you preach?”

Halvorson sometimes hears preachers say, “We preach because we want to express theology and we want to encourage people to align their behaviors with their theology. … For most of us, most of the time, we are hoping all that coalesces inside the inner being that we are as people. We want their faith to grow and to know God is good and loving. By doing that … they increasingly show evidences of God’s love in the world.”

Our Western dichotomy of “head” and “heart” needn’t be so separate, she said. “Often, I find preachers want to impact the heart while they preach to the head,” Halvorson said. But “we’re very holistic beings. What impacts our mind impacts our heart, body and soul.”

Then Halvorson asked participants what caught their eye about the prospect of preaching biblical characters.

It’s their fallibility, one person said. “They’re human, just like we are — human and fallible and still children of God.”

Then it was time to explore the John 2 passage, first from the perspective of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Halvorson got participants talking about how Mary may have perceived the proceedings. How did she find out the wine had run out? What does she then do? Is she using her agency? When Jesus answers her, how might a mother feel when addressed that way by her child? When she tells the servants to “do whatever he tells you,” is she still using her agency?

Can Mary turn the water to wine? No, but she knows who can, one participant said. How does she feel when she hears Jesus tell the servants to fill the large containers of water?

The Rev. Dr. Cindy Halvorson

When a scoop of water is handed to the chief steward, does Mary wonder how this will go? “May can be proud and confident and still hold her breath because she’s scared,” Halvorson said, adding she too has wondered “when I begged God to show up and do.”

And what about the stewards? As was customary in those days, they’d been serving wine to guests for a good long time, and they were exhausted. “Now as a servant you’re told to get how much water?” asked Halvorson. One participant put it this way: “This guy and his mom are guilt-tripping you into something.”

Jesus instructs a servant to take the chalice to that guy and let him have it. How does that servant feel? “I’m so going to get fired for this,” said one participant. “But they’ll know who to blame,” said another.

“Sometimes in our churches, we feel the same way,” Halvorson said. “I’m exhausted. People are mad at me because I didn’t open up from Covid soon enough. I’m being asked to pivot and do something else, when all I really want is a good nap.”

“Suddenly, we’re in the story,” Halvorson said of this approach to preaching. “Our question is, ‘Jesus, are you going to turn our water into wine?’ We want to have faith enough that that’s a positive ‘yes,’ but we’re still asking the question.”

“All of a sudden,” she said, “John 2 has a different feel.”

She left participants with this quote by the Rev. Eugene Peterson in his book “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”: “The Bible includes us, always. Our lives are implicitly involved in everything said and done in this book. In order to realize this, we must enter the story imaginatively. We must let our conversations and experiences and thoughts be brought into the story so we can observe what happens to us in this context through this storyline, rubbing shoulders with these characters.”

Learn more about the Synod of the Covenant’s Equipping Preachers webinars here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Synod of the Covenant’s recent Equipping Preachers webinar

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Margaret Farmer, Facility Specialist, Building Services, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 
Joe Ferguson, Director, Building Services, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 

Let us pray

Lord of the Harvest, pour out your blessing on the dedicated who are striving to be your faithful field workers, showing your love and sharing your word of new life. Grant them courage and strength as they lead your people to serve their communities with joy and gratitude. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Synod of the Covenant workshop helps preachers convey ‘exilic hope’ in the climate crisis

On ‘Equipping Preachers,’ the Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal shares research for an upcoming book

January 10, 2024

The Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal (Photo courtesy 

of Duke Divinity School)

Together with the Rev. Dr. Ellen Davis, her colleague at the Duke Divinity School, the Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal, who teaches homiletics there, has been teaching a class that requires students to preach a sermon on the climate crisis to any congregation in North Carolina. “My congregation is too politicized, too distrustful, too poor or too rich, too white or too Black, too rural or scientifically illiterate. They’re theologically conservative or progressively smug. They’re lectionary bound or they’re despairing or they’re afraid,” the students tell their professors early on in class.

After a couple of weeks, students turn the lens on themselves, claiming they’re ignorant of the science or of the congregation or about what to say, or just plain afraid of the task before them. “What does one say in the face of the unthinkable?” Neal asked during “Equipping Preachers,” a webinar offered by the Synod of the Covenant. Watch the 82-minute workshop, hosted each month by Synod Executive the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, by going here.

“We’re going to talk today about hope, exilic hope in relation to the climate crisis,” Neal told the online gathering of preachers. Hardwick noted that Neal is completing the manuscript for her upcoming book, “Holy Ground: Preaching, Climate Change and the Apocalypse of Place.” Neal called her online workshop “Preaching Exilic Hope in the Climate Crisis.”

“Hope is a complicated topic in relation to climate justice preaching because there are so many ways to get it wrong,” she said. Hope can lead preachers to passivity if they think, “God’s got this, and we really don’t need to do anything.” Or it can lead to “an overblown sense of our own importance.”

Texts like Jeremiah 4:23–26 can lead preachers to ask difficult questions, including this one: Can the Creation and the covenant of a good God come undone? It can, she said. “Notice the way there is a kind of unraveling of the Genesis 1 account of Creation,” Neal said.

The Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick

Biblical scholars tell us that Genesis 1 was put “at the front of our canon precisely during the season of Jeremiah and his peers,” Neal said. “The two texts are in dialogical relationship with each other.” Genesis 1 “was never meant to be this sort of proof that God’s people will never be displaced,” Neal said, calling Jeremiah 4 “a hope-filled cry of an exiled people who are claiming that God can still breathe life in the face of devastation. It brings an exilic lens to the question of climate justice: What does it mean to be faithful when the land changes under your feet, and where is God when that happens? More significantly, what does God require of us?”

“My thesis today is God’s solidarity with Creation is foundational to salvation history and God’s commitment to Creation is woven throughout both scriptural testaments,” Neal said. She offered workshop participants six takeaways during her engaging talk:

• Re-remember the old, old story. Doing this kind of work “means that when you preach on climate, you’re moving beyond the Genesis 1/Romans 8sermon,” she said, preaching Creation care “from the whole Bible and all liturgical seasons.”
• Make justice connections. “I think this is the preacher’s job at this moment: to make very clear to folks that climate care is racial justice. It is the eradication of poverty work, and it is decolonial work,” Neal said. “The crisis disproportionately impacts Black and brown bodies all over the world.”
• Honor everyday resistance. “It’s easy to come up with solutions to the climate crisis that benefit only some,” Neal said. Today, African American women including Heather McTeer Toney“are taking center stage in this fight.”
• Draw on spiritual disciplines. “There is a kind of musculature in the church that climate advocacy requires,” Neal said.
• Renounce false optimism and reject despair. “I think sermons can help congregations see this crisis in a new way,” Neal said.
• Know your people. “Take the long view,” Neal suggested. “This isn’t one-and-done preaching.”

“This work has to be locally rooted and biblically grounded,” Neal said. “It’s not political posturing. It’s core to who God is and what God requires of God’s people.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: ‘Equipping Preachers’ webinar hosted by Synod of the Covenant

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Jeanne Williams, Managing Editor, Curriculum Resources & Geneva Press, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Layton Williams-Berkes, Communications Associate, Communications Ministry, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Nurturing God, we thank you for those who seek to develop the gifts you have given them. Help us to support them in their life’s service to you. In Christ’s gracious name we pray. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Empowering clergy and other church leaders to help care for congregants’ mental health

Webinar by Synod of the Covenant and Science for the Church looks at what’s working in Michigan and Ohio’

May 24, 2023

Dr. Addie Weaver

Wrapping up their three-part series on Mental Health, Science and the Church, the Synod of the Covenant and its partner, Science for the Church, recently offered an hourlong conversation on churches and church leaders who are offering mental health services to congregants and to their communities. Watch the webinar here.

The panelists gathered by the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, Synod of the Covenant executive, and the Rev. Drew Rick-Miller, project co-director for Science for the Church, were:

• Addie Weaver, Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan.
• Ikeshia Smith, a clinical psychologist in Canton, Ohio.
• Susan Jennings, minister for pastoral care and mission at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dr. Ikeshia Smith

Weaver’s presentation focused on Raising Our Spirits Together, a clergy and science partnership designed to increase access to treatment for depression in rural Michigan.

“Michigan is a pretty rural state, where clergy are serving as de facto mental health providers already,” Weaver said. Together with colleagues, Weaver talked to clergy in the southeastern part of the state “about how we might be able to collaborate, bringing together mental health intervention, science, clergy knowledge and expertise, the visual and performing arts and technology” to create a program “that would support clergy in meeting the needs of their congregants and their communities in a way that would not be a significant burden,” Weaver said.

Raising Our Spirits Together integrates cognitive behavioral therapy “with elements clergy already are doing to support folks,” including praying, active listening, engaging congregants in church activities, and helping them focus on “the positive, using Scripture to lift folks up,” Weaver said.

The Rev. Susan Jennings

In cognitive behavioral therapy, “We want to help people be able to understand the importance of taking action and doing things even when you don’t feel like it,” Weaver said. “Clergy said, ‘We do that a lot when we talk to people with depression. We invite them to come to fellowship hall on Sunday nights for Bible study. We invite them to come to Wednesday night groups when we’re writing cards to our congregants who are in the hospital or nursing home care.’”

“There are nice ways to build a program that emphasize the strengths of mental health treatments,” Weaver said. “We always have a Scripture that connects, and time for prayer requests.”

The partnership works for many reasons, according to Weaver. “Clergy get in a really authentic way the fact that their congregants are suffering,” Weaver said. Church members and friends “have unmet mental health needs, especially in the rural context. There are a lot of barriers people face in order to access care,” including the shortage of providers, especially in rural areas. In addition, “many people are much more comfortable seeking help from clergy, family or friends.”

The Rev. Drew Rick-Miller

Smith is part of Mind Your Business, an organization founded in November 2019 by Minister Marquez Johnson. “He realized a lot of people in churches were talking to their pastor about things the pastor was not equipped to handle,” Smith said. “His vision was to help leaders help people cope with everyday stress. We are there to be a support to them.” A tenet of Mind Your Business is “It’s OK not to be OK.”

Up to 10 people usually show up for sessions, and sometimes the crowd swells to about two dozen. Mind Your Business seeks out mental health providers in the communities it serves and operates The Hub, which helps people with utility bills and food.

One of the biggest impacts has been on people suffering grief and loss, Smith said. “You’d be surprised how many individuals are carrying around something very, very heavy,” Smith said.

Two months ago, Mind Your Business helped 20 pastors complete a course on mental health first aid training “to understand the symptoms,” Smith said. That helps them tell congregants, “Here’s what I can do while we’re connecting you with a mental health provider.”

Jennings leads the Mental Health Referral Panel at Westminster Presbyterian Church, which has published a booklet helpful to Grand Rapids residents. Since the panel’s founding in 2015, 180 individuals and couples have been served, “and there has been increased education and awareness through adult education and faith formation programs,” Jennings said.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Donna Costa, Food Service Manager, Stony Point Conference Center, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Amanda Craft, Manager, Immigration Advocacy, Office of the General Assembly

Let us pray

Holy God, you call us to love you with our minds. Bless those who are devoted to study and teaching. By their fruits strengthen our minds and wills and so bless your church. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Sunday’s sermons for Monday’s world

During a Synod of the Covenant webinar, preachers are invited to explore rather than explain

December 15, 2022

The Rev. Dr. Sally A. Brown

With the goal to help preachers explore biblical texts rather than explain them during their sermons, the Rev. Dr. Sally A. Brown, the Elizabeth M. Engle Professor of Preaching and Worship Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary, was the guest recently on the Synod of the Covenant’s Equipping Preachers series. Watch Brown’s engaging talk, hosted by the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, the synod executive, here.

Two years ago, Brown published “Sunday’s Sermons for Monday’s World: Preaching to Shape Daring Witness.” She used some of that material during her talk. The idea, she said, was to answer this question preachers often have: How can our sermons better help those in the pews to participate in the ongoing redemptive work of God in the ordinary situations of their everyday lives?

“The power of preaching to move hearers to action does not lie with the preacher,” Brown said, “but in the radical Good News to which we testify: God has acted, continues to act and promises yet to act in the world to make all things new.”

Too many people, Brown said, come to worship each week expecting two things from the sermon: a scolding and a longer to-do list.

When she preaches, “I pay attention to activities of God’s love and justice breaking through.” One example is a story she heard on how one church subverted a white supremacist march planned in their town.

The preacher asked worshipers to pledge a few dollars for every mile the marchers walked in the community, then painted “Thank You” messages on the pavement because “Every mile you walk is raising money for antiracism [training and activities] in our community.”

Church members set up water stations to help the marchers “across the finish line to raise maximum dollars for antiracism,” Brown said. “They didn’t interfere. They subverted and multiplied resources. Stories like that are evidence of God inspiring imaginative subversions rather than trying to shout louder over whatever we consider to be the enemy.”

Sermons that explore rather than explain leave hearers with this takeaway, according to Brown: Because God has done this, we are invited to/have the opportunity to do that. It’s a far cry from the traditional imperative sermon.

“I think people in the pews have tin ears for ‘must,’ ‘ought’ and ‘should,’” Brown said. The message can also stimulate this question in the minds and hearts of worshipers: “What can participating in God’s redemptive action look like here and now?”

“We can name injustice clearly,” she told the preachers on the call, “and yet reimagine transformation in those same situations. It’s the Spirit who transforms the world; we are agents in the process.”

The process Brown is suggesting includes reframing, which she defined as “evoking a familiar space or situation in all its brokenness and then reimagining its transformation in light of God’s redemptive action.” The preacher can paint a word picture to help worshipers answer this question: What would transformation look like in this situation?

“Part of our calling [as preachers] is to be daringly imaginative and hopeful,” Brown said, “to resist what is evil and embrace anything that’s an inbreaking of good.”

It can help, Brown said, to “work out in a single, affirmative sentence the focal message of your sermon. Then ask: What would it look like if taken seriously?”

The hearers can take that message seriously “in the everyday situations and settings” where they work, socialize and volunteer. “Your goal is to explore, not explain. Exploring is answering what it might look like. To explain is to use big words,” such as encouraging the hearers to seek out “more justice and less polarization,” she said. Rather, the preacher asks, “What would those look like? Be concrete,” Brown encouraged preachers.

Participants were receptive to what they were hearing.

“The opportunity to help the congregation imagine can be a really powerful way to engage — if they are willing to follow,” said one. “That takes time. There is never a lost opportunity!”

Brown offered up this reminder to close the session: “The new creation work has been done. What we’re here for is to participate.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff

Troy Marables, Vice President, Director of Human Resources, Presbyterian Foundation
Michael Marrone, Vice President, Strategic Planning & Execution, Board of Pensions

Let us pray

We are in awe of you, O Lord. Thank you for choosing to have a special relationship with us and for others with whom we can lie in community with you. Thank you that in relationship with others, we are able to reach out more effectively in your name, be brave and face difficulties, and be reminded of your presence. Amen.