From the Pastor

Aug 2008

He’s a young man with a young family, he has a funky hair style and he wears an earring, he’s a visible minority, he blogs and participates in podcasts (and if you don’t know what a ‘blog’ or a ‘podcast’ is, then you’re helping make my point) he quotes Spider-Man movies, he’s funny, and he was just elected to a two year term as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA). PCUSA is not known for going out on a limb or for radical behavior. But they did it this time. They did it because they knew that they had a choice – take a chance, or quietly fade away into oblivion.

Bruce Reyes-Chow (he’s even taken his wife’s name by hyphenating with his own, for goodness sake!) knows why he was elected. He represents a new generation of Christian. He’s computer and internet savvy. He appeals to a younger demographic tired of church that’s unable or unwilling to grow out of old, irrelevant habits. He knows that, even though he has never claimed that if we do this or that ‘cool’ thing then the church will be fine, people see his election as a “saviour moment.” A moderator 2.0, or the Obama of PCUSA moderators, if you will.

Reyes-Chow appreciates the symbolic nature of his election. As one who has been starting and leading conversations quietly and in the backrooms of his denomination, he says that his election means that the church now has “permission to have particular conversations about the future of the church that they did not have before;” conversations that were “kept or forced underground.” Presbyterians, especially a new generation of Presbyterians in the U.S., see his election as a “new dawning, a new hope.”

But Reyes-Chow offers this challenge: it’s all well and good that the church was will to make this symbolic move by electing someone like him, but now “folks have to show up” or it’s all for naught.

The symbolic nature of his election has to meet the real world. So, Reyes-Chow expects a real response from American Presbyterians. If, he says, you are especially gifted such that this conversation can happen and he asks you to participate, “barring any major thing going on in your life, you have to say yes. Otherwise, I’m hanging out there, and people are saying, ‘see, you may have had this great message for hope and change, but nobody really wants it.’”

Bruce Reyes-Chow honours his Presbyterian heritage, and he is grateful for the faith passed down to him. But the world is starving for meaning, forgiveness, wholeness, and peace – and the world doesn’t even consider the Church as the institution to provide it to them, or the Gospel as the way to life. But this is our story; grace is our gift to the world. Not our buildings, not our political or our liturgical structures. But Christ – and whatever way Christ is communicated so that the world hears and understands, then that’s okay, even if that way is unfamiliar to us.

Thank God for the election of Bruce Reyes-Chow. Now, may his folks “show up.”

Peace,
Pastor Brian

A podcast of an interview with Bruce Reyes-Chow can be found at: http://www.reyes-chow.com/. Scroll down to “Decently and In Order” podcast.