In the last few days I’ve heard things said by church leaders that have made me cringe, but I’ve also interacted with folks that get me so excited about what can happen when people are honest about their need for God, and live out of that need. I even heard from a old white guy who planted a black church in Georgia in 1954. Think about that–White Dude, Black Church, Jim Crow, Deep South. That means this guy might as well be Jack Baur’s great-grandpappy. General Assembly embodies the best and the worst parts of being connectional all wrapped up into one very long week, but it’s well worth it.

Here are 5 things I learned at General Assembly:

1. Sometimes Procedural stuff is good and sometimes it gets in the way of actual discussions – I wish we spent more time talking about our actually disagreements and less time wrapped up in procedural vortexes (Dave Snoke’s handy term). I hope next year is different.
2. World Harvest Missions is legit – first off any group that foregoes the usual free luncheon to rent out a bar and gives away good beer, good cigars and great Christian material has my vote, but I also got a chance to hang out with some of the folks planting churches in London, and they are doing some cool stuff.
3. Southern guys can bring it – I sat it on a lecture by Brian Habig Church Planter and Pastor down in Greenville NC and that dude was great.
4. Disagreement and Disunity are different things – Some speaks were very gracious and winsome and even when I didn’t agree with their point, I was glad they had the chance to speak, while at other times guys spoke and even though I understand where they are coming from I wish they hadn’t said anything. All young pastors need to take some notes from guys like David Coffin, Bryan Chapell,  Tim Keller, and Ligon Duncan.
5. Face time is important – Email is great and twitter will help build connections but, nothing can replace good face-to-face conversations.

People on all sides of are forgetting that we are supposed to see each other as family, that we are supposed to love everyone the way that God loved us.

One of the most frequent and thought provoking images that the Bible uses when it talks about how people relate to God is the idea of God throwing a party. God wants everyone at the party but there are all these reasons that should keep us from getting an invite. In one text we find the story of two brothers who are both disconnected from their father there is a young brother (whom we might call a law-breaker), and an older brother (we we could see as the rule-maker). The younger brother decided that he wants to go off and have a party on his own terms. So he basically says to his Dad “Dad your a rich guy, and when you die I know your gonna leave me a nice chunk of change…do you think I could get that now?” The younger son takes the money and starts partying like the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but soon he burns through all that money and he is broke. So he decides to go back to his father and ask for one last favor–to hire him to clean out the pig stalls. We the son gets back his father is so happy that his son isn’t dead and that he has come back that he decides to throw a party.  When the father throws this massive party (think as big as a wedding) the older brother is really upset and refuses to attend–he feels its wrong to throw a party for his reckless brother when he never had a party like that and he always did what he thought his father would want. At the end the father leaves the party to go after his moping older son, and we are left wondering if he accepts the invite to the party.

Its important to remember that God wants to have a relationship with both types of people, law-breakers and rule-makers. All of us have acted like one or both of the brothers in this story. We think we should be rewarded for our rule keeping while ignoring a real relationship with God. Or, we take stuff (money, time, gifts etc.)  God has given us and blown it on really nasty and messed up things. All of us need an invite to God’s table entirely isolated from what we’ve done with our lives.

The sad part is that often folks who were rule-makers tend to be more forgiving for other rule-makers and law-breakers tend to favor law-breakers. So what happens is that both types of people want to exclude the other from God’s table.

The sense I get from reading different sites is that the younger brothers want to be more gracious with people outside of their tradition than they are with people they have taken vows to serve along side. On the opposite side I see many  older brother unanimously, demonizing and scrutinizing well meaning younger brothers.

I am happy to be in the Presbyterian Church in America, but genuinely hope that its a denomination that is big enough and wise enough to realize that the party will be incomplete with if either group is forced out.

You want to know the really sad part, there are a ton of folks watching us just waiting to see when the two brothers will start taking swings at each other. And I’m sorry that I even have to remind church leaders about this but there is one who will hold us accountable for every countless word, that we say or write, and I’m pretty sure the internet is gonna be a big part of the tally.

Monday morning Jo, Gus and I flew to Atlanta, for our denominations Church Planter Assessment. The main goal of the Assessment was to interact with Jo and I to see how well we might do at starting a new church (often called church planting). Our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America does this kind of thing several times a year. We were with 8 other couples and one guy.
The actual assessment was an intense process. It was broken up into projects, teaching, interviews, and personality testing. The men and women evaluating us had all participated in church planting or were in leadership in similar areas. All our assessors were great–they really cared about getting to know us, and while I assumed the whole thing would be just one big job interview, I’m glad I was wrong. I made some great connections with the other potential-planters as well as the assessors.

What Assessment wasn’t

• A cake walk — It wasn’t an easy process. We probably spent 15 hours just with the application alone, and that was before the intense 3 days spent in Atlanta.
• A vacation — I’ve never been on a vacation with that kind of breakneck pace.
• Final approval — The assessment offered us a recommendation. The final approval comes from our local network of churches(presbytery).
• That scene from Armageddon — The counseling wasn’t crazy and no one went near my cooli.

Why was it important?

• It was one of the best things that Jo and I have done for our marriage.
• The process also helped shape my thoughts on my limitations as a potential church planter.
• We went away from the week with a fresh perspective on our hopes for Lawrenceville, some of which changed over the week and other which were affirmed.
• It let me see that I hadn’t been relating to Christ the way I need to. I had been offering people the church, it was Jesus’s church, but I hadn’t been offering people Jesus. This blew me away, and I so glad that it did.

Does this change anything?

• Yup, it sure does, but I’m not exactly sure of everything yet, so I’m gonna keep my mouth shut.

1. We had a counseling session with Phil Drake. It was really good. We looked at where our blind spots are, and it confirmed to us that Jo and I are working well together. It also revealed some potential challenges for church planting and pastoral ministry in general.

2. I preached a 10 minute sermon and then Jo and I talked about our call to church planting. The format was such that there was no dialogue as much as they ask and we answer. It was a bit wearing, but an important step.

3. We’ve already got to talk to some great couples about ministry they are excited about. Its interesting to find that alot of the people here are looking for affirmation and they didn’t necessarily wait till after assessment to start talking praying and planning for church planting opportunities.

On a side note I need to thank my Mom who is staying with us all week, and all those other folks who contributed to let us get here.

Second, people need to start asking themselves how can God change this region and what part does he want me to play? At this point far too many christians might be avid fans, but they haven’t gotten off the bench.

Third, Remember the motivation for church planting isn’t personal notoriety, or denominational pride, but as Paul says, a desire to see grace extend to more and more people for the glory of God.

Fourth, churches need to move beyond a church-vs-church standard. When I say church-vs-church, I mean that many churches today evaluate themselves not based on what they are called to be, or what God has made them, but by how they match up to other churches. They have a program we have a program, they get 170 we get 190, etc. When churches are content competing with each other for the self-awarded title of best church the Kingdom with suffer. It doesn’t matter what the best is, it might be most engaging, most missional, most evangelistic or most reformed, all these man-made crowns are a barrier to church cooperation and Kingdom expansion

Fifth, churches need to begin to strategically recruit planters to Pittsburgh. Local churches need to begin to get the word out that they are looking for qualified church planters. I think the PCA would have more church plants if we simply communicated our need for gospel-centered churches, with more potential candidates. This also means that churches need to speak with their bank accounts, and start putting money aside for planting. This needs to be done proactively rather than reactively. I know that many churches do not have extra money lying around, but church planting shouldn’t be one of those extra things we do, it should be as core to our church as Sunday worship.

Finally, churches need to make plans, and at the same time welcome unexpected opportunities. This was a lesson that I learned from Bruce Finn, a PCA church planting coordinator in the Philadelphia area. Sometimes we will make plans and God will have different ones, which will present us with opportunities that we never could have imagined.

Why do this?
I began this project by simply putting up the information for my presbytery, but I soon began filling out the northeast, and once i can to a certain point, I thought that I should just make one for the whole denomination.

How much time did this take you?
My wife might just reply by saying “too much time!”. It took me probably around 15 hours to complete, most of that was spent while my wife was sleeping.

What can this be used for?

• I hope Churches and Presbyteries will use these maps to for the purpose of planning church plants, and other cooperative projects. (This is the primary reason I started this project.)
• Ministers and Members could use it to learn more about the PCA.

Since most of the boundaries are marked at county lines, its very difficult to understand the size and shape of a presbytery without knowing alot more local geography than most people. Even in my state (Pennsylvania) I did not understand how all the presbyteries connected. I hope this project allows people in the PCA to learn a bit more about the shape and movement of the PCA.

Do you have any other plans for this project?

I have plans to make a separate file with the Korean PCA Presbyteries. I was unsure of exactly how to display the overlapping files.

If I can gain access to a spreadsheet file with the locations of the churches in each presbytery, I would love to do that as well. (If you want see the Pittsburgh Presbytery I happen to have that one.)

I tried to be as accurate as possible, but I understand that there might be some mistakes. Please email me samthedesocios.dotcom
In a few cases I marked certain areas as being connected to a certain presbytery because of the existing churches they have. (Ie. Pac NW including Idaho and Oregon)

These files are free to use, or alter. I would ask that if you link to any of these files that reference where you got them with a link to this website, TheDeSocios.com. I used the state by state files provided by Juice Analtyics.
You can open these files by entering the link location into google maps (like this)
A better way is to open them with Google Earth.

The preview image takes a long time to load. The All Presbyteries files is much larger than the individual files.
If you have a slow computer I would recommend opening only a few presbyteries at a time.

All PCA Presbyteries
Ascension Presbytery
Blue Ridge Presbytery
Calvary Presbytery
Central Carolina Presbytery
Central Florida Presbytery
Central Georgia Presbytery
Chesapeake Presbytery
Chicago Metro Presbytery
Covenant Presbytery
Eastern Canada Presbytery*
Eastern Carolina Presbytery
Eastern Pennsylvania Presbytery
Evangel Presbytery
Fellowship Presbytery
Georgia Foothills
Grace Presbytery
Great Lakes Presbytery
Gulf Coast Presbytery
Gulf Stream Presbytery*
Heartland Presbytery
Heritage Presbytery
Houston Metro Presbytery
Illiana Presbytery
Iowa Presbytery
James River Presbytery
Louisiana Presbytery
Metro Atlanta Presbytery
Metro New York Presbytery
Mississippi Valley Presbytery
Missouri Presbytery
Nashville Presbytery
New Jersey Presbytery
New River Presbytery
New York Presbytery
North Florida Presbytery
North Illinois Presbytery
North Texas Presbytery
Northern California Presbytery
Northern New England Presbytery
Northwest Georgia Presbytery
Ohio Presbytery
Ohio Valley Presbytery
Pacific Northwest Presbytery*
Pacific Northwest Presbytery Proper*
Pacific Presbytery*
Pacific Presbytery Proper*
Palmetto Presbytery
Philadelphia Metro West
Philadelphia Presbytery
Piedmont Triad Presbytery
Pittsburgh Presbytery
Platte Valley Presbytery
Potomac Presbytery
Rocky Mountain Presbytery
Savanah River Presbytery
Siouxlands Presbytery
South Coast Presbytery
South Florida Presbytery
South Texas Presbytery
Southeast Alabama Presbytery
Southeast Louisiana Presbytery
Southern New England Presbytery
Southwest Florida Presbytery
Southwest Presbytery
Susquehanna Valley Presbytery
Suncoast Florida Presbytery*
Tennessee Valley Presbytery
Warrior Presbytery
West Carolina Presbytery
Western Canada Presbytery
Westminster Presbytery
Wisconsin Presbytery

On the down side this means that by the numbers we are not even adding one new church per presbytery (76) per year .

This figure also means that we only have one church plant for every 26 existing churches.

Are PCA churches so devoid of leaders and finances that it takes 26 of us to start a new work? The real shame is that there are many churches and presbyteries that are very active in planting which means that there must people other churches and presbyteries that are doing almost nothing.

Some statistics on the Presbyterian Church in America can be found here.

• God’s wants his love to be made real to people in the context of community (i.e churches).
• Pittsburgh is centrally located in the middle of half of the country’s population.
• Pittsburgh is economically connected on the national and international scale.
• Pittsburgh has a diversity and density that will allow for many neighborhood church plants.
• Costs associated with planting could be greatly reduced in Pittsburgh, leading to more churches being established.

Before looking at market research or demographic trends which might make Pittsburgh a good place to plant churches we must understand a more important reason to plant churches in Pittsburgh. We should plant churches in Pittsburgh because God uses churches as the main instrument of his redemptive work.

Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left…

One verse that encapsulates God’s desire for reconciliation is Jonah 4:10-11 “And the LORD said, ‘You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’” God explains to Jonah that the reason Jonah was sent to Nineveh was because God loved and cared for the people of Nineveh, and he wanted to be reconciled to as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, some Christians today would rather enjoy their own vines, than do the harder work of declaring God’s love to a people who don’t know their right hand from their left.

I hope that beyond the circumstantial reasons for church planting in Pittsburgh, people will see it as a priority because God uses churches to care for people.

There are however several reasons why Pittsburgh is a good location for church planting efforts, from a strategic perspective.

Location

Pittsburgh is a half-days drive to 5 of the 10 most populous metro areas in the country. It is 6.5 hours from Chicago and NYC, 5.5 hours from Philadelphia and only a little over 4 hours to Washington DC. This means that Pittsburgh could become a strategic center for ministries serving half of the country’s population centers.

National and International Connections

Though Pittsburgh is small city it has many industries that give it a very long reach, both on a national and international scale. Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, which year after year is ranked as among the top universities in the world. Pittsburgh also has has a disproportionate number of fortune 500 companies(7 in all). Additionally, because of the influence of CMU, Pittsburgh is becoming a tech hub, with many new startup landing in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is so tech-connected that Google has an office here. All this means that people reached in Pittsburgh might very well end up being connected to many people in many areas of the country and even the world.

Neighborhood City

Pittsburgh like many Northeastern cities is a collection of smaller neighborhoods that all interact with one another. Additionally many of these neighborhoods are very densely populated. Some ranging from 5000 to 18000 people per sq mile. For church planting this means that churches can be planted very close to each other and still reach new groups and more non-christians. This means that church plants can be close and be connected to one another in their day to day lives.

Cost Effective

Finally Pittsburgh is a very cost effective place to plant churches. Pittsburgh never entered the housing bubble which means that it is much cheaper to live in Pittsburgh than most other large cities. For instance I recently saw a four bedroom victorian townhouse for sale in an up and coming neighborhood for 149k. In most American markets that would be the absolute minimum entry price for the city.

If Pittsburgh is cheaper it means that less support is necessary to plant churches here. This means that planting can be more rapid. It also means that church planters can be less concerned about being self supporting. Not because it would be harder in Pittsburgh but because it will me easier than in many other major cities. This means less time will have to be spent on support raising, and more time can be spent with people.
Because of low cost associated with planting in Pittsburgh, Planters can experiment with planting strategies.
Right now most of the PCA’s “research and development” is happening is places that are costly, but I would suggest that Pittsburgh would be a better testing ground for planting techniques.

These are just some of the reasons why people should consider church planting in Pittsburgh.
Can you think of any other reasons?

I know that guys like Drew Goodmanson and even Mark Driscoll speak about using technology, but from what I gather, they haven’t spoken about technology from a stewardship perspective ( ie Matt 25:15-30).

Looking at my own denomination of churches, I see that technology is not used well. I’m not sure of the reason, and I do not mean to disregard or downplay the work that has been done. Ill be honest when I first went to the PCA website around 2001 I was impressed that a denominations site looked that good. But the site hasn’t changed much in the last 9 years.

I’m not simply talking about having a website. I’m suggesting that we see technologies such as: twitter, facebook, skype, ning, googletalk, flickr, vimeo, texts, blogs and many others as resources that God has given for the purpose of serving our King.

The PCA is a small denomination many churches are very far from each other, and yet I believe that God has handed us resources that allows us to overcome many of the geographic challenges that limit our connection and our development as a people with a purpose.

I understand that it is not a one-to-one application of the text but I do think that it merits a longer conversation on the matter to that end I propose three questions:

Should Technology be consider a “talent” or resource that God is calling his church to manage well, with the implication from (Matthew 25) that God is very upset with those who do not use it well?

How can people in the PCA help each other become better stewards of technology?

Is this just a PCA problem or are other churches and denominations not fully utilizing the resources we have been given?

I know that historically some of the reformers argued that we should participate in other parts of the christian experience on days other than traditional liturgical days. Butzer argues in De Regno Christi, that we should not fast on Ash Wednesday, but instead have other times of fasting. In their defense, most people don’t want to look like the group that is persecuting you.

To be quite honest I can see both the benefits and dangers of participating in the liturgical calendar in general, and Ash Wednesday in particular.

Around the twittersphere lots of other church-folks have been talking about how or if they are participating in ash Wednesday.

Do you know of any Presbyterian Churches or Reformed Churches, that participate in Ash Wednesday or in the liturgical calendar more specifically?