IRC Meeting Helps Missional Leaders Push Through the Pain
By Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D.

Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site.

The International Research Consortium: Congregational Mission and the Social Sciences held its 4th annual meeting March 23-26, 2007. The main theme of the meeting was: Change, Grief, and Conflict.

The first day, traditionally an open day for students, faulty, pastors, and other church leaders to attend, was held at the Theology Faculty, University of Greifswald in Northeastern Germany. The open day included welcoming speeches and an address by Dr. Johannes Zimmermann of the Greifswald faculty on change, grief, and conflict in church development in East Germany. Three case studies presented by members of the consortium from South Africa, Holland, and the United States. We were also treated to a tour of the campus prison cell, a colorful reminder of the past in many European universities. No one was incarcerated this time.

The Consortium continued its work days on the Isle of Zingst on the Baltic Sea, in fact in Zingsthof, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer began his hidden seminary in the days of the Nazis. We began our work on Saturday morning and concluded it on Monday afternoon with presentations on Bonhoeffer, the first by Ulf Harder of Greifswald, and the last by Bishop Dr. Hans-Jurgen Abromeit.

In between these two Bonhoeffer pieces, five other presentations were given. Frederick Marais and Michael Herbst each presented papers on grief as experienced by persons and churches in their respective countries of South Africa and eastern Germany. Pat Ellison presented a conflict process in which scripture is used for discernment in local congregations, and then Ellison and Marais presented a small portion of their comparative study between the ethnographic interviews of a southern African and a North American congregation both part of the Partnership for Missional Church. Lastly, Hans Iverson presented a perspective from Gruntvig and the Danish folks church, including several of Gruntvig’s hymns.

Martin Reppenhagen served as pastor to the group, and he presided and preached at Sunday morning worship in the Bonhoeffer Chapel. Although the group took almost every meal at the Zingsthof dining room, we had Sunday evening meal at a beautiful fish restaurant a hearty three-quarter mile walk up the Baltic coast beach.

Although the group was smaller in number this year since several people could not attend, we wrestled with several important topics and grew our friendships deeper; after four meetings now we begin to trust one another to make honest conversation, and we begin to learn from one another what things are the same no matter where you go, and what things are so different that we could bear some instruction. Helping congregations push through pain and grief toward God’s promised and preferred future for them is our shared aim, and the partnership and conversations are worth the investment and sacrifice it takes to make them happen.

Next year the group will meet again during the last week of March, either in Stellenbosch, South Africa or in Goshen, Indiana.

Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations. She is currently on sabbatical in the Pastor-Theologian in Residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is writing a short theological novel for children and their parents.