Call to Health has offered our family direction and given us some tools we desperately needed. Here was a source that offered tremendous resources about all those things that give us trouble, concern, and anxiety. And thankfully, I started to peruse Call to Health. We needed something that would provide direction and wise counsel about the many questions we were asking. We wanted to do everything right, but there was so much to get right that we often felt directionless. We both felt anxious about getting our marriage off on the right foot. My wife wondered if she would find a job that provided her meaning and purpose. Pastoral responsibilities could have easily dominated my time. But to be honest, we both felt like our heads were barely above water. There was a lot of excitement, and we were enjoying the start of this new life together. My wife was discerning what she was called to do in our new city.
#Mytime presbyterian how to#
I was figuring out how to be a pastor and a husband. I graduated from seminary, accepted my first call, moved to a new city, and got married! Everything was new. Grace Hellweg is serving as a field education student intern in the Office of the General Assembly for the 2016-17 academic year. She is a first-year student at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is an inquirer under care of Carlisle Presbytery.There are certain years you never forget, and for me and my wife, 2017 was one of those years. In five short months, I have recognized that the PC(USA) is wider and her polity more beautiful than I had ever imagined, and the eternal work we are doing together is greater than any one particular church or office.
To me, that’s what we do here-assist local churches with our shared task of ensuring the denomination is faithful to the gospel. When we are following God, we need people in our corner, supporting us, taking our phone calls, and implementing the convictions we espouse at General Assemblies, in our homes, and in our pulpits each week. I have learned that ministry is not a solo endeavor there is a reason Christ sent the disciples out in pairs. We are the ministries happening across the globe in Christ’s name. The Presbyterian Center might look particularly Presbyterian with its seals and Book of Orders, but it is our collective witness that defines our denomination. The heart of the PC(USA) rests in believers who have been transformed by the good news that Christ overcame darkness, hatred, and death so the Spirit could send us out to be doers and proclaimers of this strangely radical hope. It is in our congregations and our neighborhoods, our schools and our communities. Through these projects, and others, I have slowly been learning what was surely taught to me in my confirmation class at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Overland Park, Kansas: the lifeblood of the Presbyterian church has never been strictly holed up in a cubicle in Louisville, Kentucky. And most recently, I have been working with a team on a constitutional musing in the area of validated ministries.
#Mytime presbyterian full#
I have helped plan and prepare worship at the Polity Conference, learning that there is no trick a room full of pastors hasn’t already seen and still the Spirit devotedly moves as the Spirit wishes. I’ve been assisting the denomination’s manager for immigration issues, Teresa Waggener, curate a resource for individuals and congregations feeling called to the work of accompaniment. While I have been here over the past five months, I have been humbled and grown a deeper sense of the urgency with which we do ministry. I pursued field education at the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) because I was seeking to understand and get close to what I would have called at the time, “the heart of the PC(USA).” As a cliché, first-year seminary student, I anticipated marching in those double doors each day to a new, eternally important task and single-handedly helping the denomination experience some sort of transformation.
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