Gayle Parker: 'Don't try to save the church' Parker T. Williamson The Layman Online Thursday, October 9, 2003 PORTLAND, Ore. – "I was hired at First Presbyterian Church [a declining downtown church in Phoenix, Ariz.] in order to save it" the Rev. Gayle Parker told Gathering VIII of the Presbyterian Coalition. "But I discovered that we would kill ourselves trying to save this church. I learned that the church only comes alive when it goes out to save the world." Addressing leaders of a dying Presbyterian Church (USA) that has hemorrhaged more than 1.7 million members in three decades, Parker reflected on parallels that she has discovered between her moribund denomination and the dying inner city congregation to which God called her. Faced with deficit budgets, a once-splendorous but now decaying building, and iron bars that had been installed to protect their remaining assets from a poverty-stricken neighborhood, Parker and her people discussed survival plans. She said that the more they worked on defense for a dying institution, the more turbulence she felt in her soul. She concluded that the church must invest the remainder of its meager resources into the community that God called it to serve, even if this meant the depletion of bank accounts and hastened the church's demise. Dying to live Parker said this decision cost them some members, but it brought new life to the church. Leaders of the congregation stepped outside their fortress and began to visit their mainly-Latino neighbors. "We learned a lot," she recalled. Church leaders heard about an inadequate public transportation system that kept would-be workers from employment opportunities. They learned that children often were left to fend for themselves while both parents worked minimum-wage jobs. They saw intolerable living conditions. These observations led church leaders to invest in their own neighborhood. Members appeared before the city council to demand improved transportation. The church opened its doors for schools, day care programs, and weekday youth activities. And the Parker family gave up its comfortable suburban home and moved to the community that it had been called to serve. Bearing fruit Soon, the congregation began to change its complexion. What was once an Anglo congregation whose members' average age was 70 became a multi-cultural, multi-economic mix, whose average age is now in its early 40s. "We still don't have much money," Parker said, "but God provides us with what we need, just when we need it." Parker called the ministry of First Phoenix "a fruit-bearing ministry." "This church is alive," she exclaimed with a big smile on her face. Becoming a fruit-bearing church was painful, Parker said, "because it required pruning." She said many church leaders are narcissistic. "The problem with narcissistic leaders is that they have a tendency to love, accept and be non-judgmental." They won't confront problems. "But you can't wait for narcissistic believers to die out," she warned, "because narcissism perpetuates itself." "Being nice gets in the way of a fruit-bearing ministry," she told her Coalition audience. "You've got to prune the plant. Dead and dying branches take away the energy. The plant can't flourish – flowers can't grow – unless you cut those parts away." Parker extolled the rewards she had received from pruning: "It is really exciting to bear fruit," she said as she reviewed the signs of her blossoming congregation. "It is so much more satisfying than merely maintaining something that is dying." A Korean perspective Parker's message was juxtaposed with that of another Gathering VIII speaker. The Rev. Jin S. Kim, Korean pastor for English Ministry at the Korean Presbyterian Church of Minnesota, spoke hard words to his comfortably Presbyterian audience. He reminded the group that his Korean family and friends received the gospel from Presbyterian missionaries. "They came to Korea with the seed of the gospel," Kim said, and "they planted the seed in our soil." Kim extolled the work of Presbyterian missionaries who respected the soil of Korean culture. They became a part of the culture to which they had been sent, and they lived the gospel in the midst of the Korean people. As they saw needs around them, they organized ministries to meet those needs. Kim spoke of colleges, orphanages, leper colonies, hospitals and women's ministries that flourished on Korean soil due to the efforts of Presbyterian missionaries. "They bore fruit," Kim said, "and this fruit convinced the people that Christians had the mark of God." Strangled by stratification Kim decried the current state of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which he described as culturally, economically and racially stratified. He said that, rather than inviting Koreans, Presbyterians have encouraged them to form churches of their own. This has been an unhappy experience for Korean immigrants who expected the church that brought the gospel to their parents to offer more welcoming soil. "We discovered that the church that sent us the gospel is captive to cultural idols," he said. "American Christianity has a caste system," Kim said, and this has resulted in "a reduced gospel." Kim cautioned evangelicals against calling themselves "conservatives." He said that word has unhealthy connotations. Conservatives are those who want to go back to the 1950s. "They think those were the glory days," he said, when Anglo churches were growing. "But for people who are not white, those were not good times." Kim reminded his audience that the so-called "glory days" of the Anglo church were characterized by mistreatment of Asian immigrants and segregated lunch counters that would not serve black people. "So, don't combine the words evangelical and conservative. Evangelicals have a future, but not conservatives. I'm not going back to the '50s and '60s," he said.

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