Are they three in one or one in three? That’s the question when it comes to Elmwood Presbyterian Church in East Orange, West Orange and Newark, N.J.
Eastminster Presbyterian Church, in Portland, Ore., has 38 members. The average age of congregants is 80. And until recently, the church had several unused Sunday school classrooms.
The Rev. Marianne Rhebergen has seen many churches that have little or no sense of what they are called to be, and a host of discouraged and even dysfunctional pastors serving them.
"So many are living out of old models — models that worked in the middle of the 20th century," she said. "Today, there is a desperate need for our congregations to ‘seek the welfare of the city in which they have been planted,’ to move outside their doors into God's world."
That's one of the reasons why Rhebergen, then interim executive presbyter for Lehigh Presbytery, became …