Thriving Congregations featured in Matthew 25 broadcast
Seattle Presbytery
Being Matthew 25 broadcast explores ministry gifts and opportunities found in the neighborhood
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
This video describes Seattle Presbytery’s Matthew 25 work, especially its Thriving Congregations learning cohort, financed by a grant from the Lilly Endowment.
The film features the Rev. Scott Lumsden and the Rev. Eliana Maxim, co-executive presbyters, as well as the Rev. Tali Hairston, the presbyter’s director of Community Organizing, Advocacy and Development, who leads the Thriving Congregations cohort.
In the film, Hairston is depicted talking with members of three congregations east of Seattle. A central tenet is this quote from Tim Shapiro, the author of “How Your Congregation Learns”: “Congregations don’t just do new things; they learn to do new things.”
“Congregations in this learning cohort are having hard conversations that are easy to shy away from,” Maxim says in the video. Some churches “are so busy taking care of their to-do list they shy away from these deeper conversations.”
“Scott and Eliana said, ‘Go talk to these churches,’” Hairston says in the video. “What does it mean to creatively cultivate Christian practices? We are learning a lot about what that means” by looking at the relationship participating churches have between place and story.