Friday, May 18, 2001

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Paul Wilkes, Pastoral Summit director, (910) 962-7225; Mimi Cunningham, press liaison, (910) 962-3171 Email: cunninghamm@uncwil.edu

Email: staff@pastoralsummit.org Web site: www.pastoralsummit.orgNOTE TO RELIGION REPORTERS: Registration fee waived for media to attend. Contact Mimi Cunningham to reserve a spot.

WILMINGTON, NC – More than 600 pastors, church staff, and lay leaders will attend the first-ever Pastoral Summit, a national gathering of Protestants and Catholics focused exclusively on improving the local church, May 30 through June 1, at the New Orleans Marriott. The event will feature some of the most dynamic and innovative pastors and lay leaders from both traditions.

Keynote speakers for the event are Martin E. Marty who will speak at noon Wednesday, May 30, on the topic, “All Religion Is Local: The Protestant Perspective,” and Andrew M. Greeley, who will speak at noon on Thursday, May 31, on the same topic but from the Catholic prospective.

Martin E. Marty, renowned theologian, astute social observer, teacher, writer, is, by his own description, first and foremost a pastor. A University of Chicago professor emeritus, Lutheran minister, and senior editor of The Christian Century, Marty is the author of over 40 books including the three-volume Modern American Religion, The One and the Many: America’s Search for the Common Good, A Cry of Absence, Places Along the Way; Our Hope for Years to Come, and The Promise of Winter. Editor of Context since 1962, Marty was recently named director of the Pew Foundation's Public Religion Project. His web site is www.contextonline.org.

Andrew M. Greeley is a priest, a sociologist, a novelist, and a journalist. He continues to do weekend parish work in parishes in Chicago and Tucson. He teaches sociology at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona and writes a column for The Chicago Sun-Times and many other papers. His most recent sociological monographs are The Catholic Imagination and God in the Movies. Works in progress include The Durability of Religion and Religion in Europe. His most recent novels are The Bishop and the Missing L Train and Irish Eyes. His web site is www.agreeley.com.

Registration for the Pastoral Summit is open to anyone interested in improving his or her local church. Catholic and Protestant clergy and laypeople from large city parishes as well as from small-town and rural congregations will present and discuss their best practices and programs. Information and registration are available at www.pastoralsummit.org or by calling (910) 962-7225.

“There’s a great hunger in our land for authentic spiritual experience and

community,” said Paul Wilkes, project director of the Pastoral Summit and lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. “The local church is still where most people turn for guidance in their lives. An effective parish or congregation feeds your soul, and you’re in company with other people who are seekers, so it’s a perfect combination. Our churches—the ultimate faith-based communities—are a most underutilized natural and supernatural resource. They have roots in faith, in the community, in the lives of people. We’re not using these role models enough.

“The beauty of the Summit is that we are not talking about doctrinal differences or ideologies that may sometimes be in conflict, but simply about pastoral excellence, local church excellence.”

The Pastoral Summit will offer a wide range of innovative and exciting worship

experiences that will reflect the variety of traditions represented at the conference. On Wednesday starting at 8:45 a.m., the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey in St. Benedict, La, will lead a monastic prayer service that will be feature pianist Fr. Sean Duggan, OSB, who is world-renowned for his performances of Bach's music. That evening's worship service from 5-6 will be led by the energetic 60-voice choir and dancers of St. Peter Claver, a Catholic parish in New Orleans. St. Peter Claver is known for its deeply African traditions, which are reflected in music that is anchored by African drumming and in its colorful liturgical dance.

Full Gospel Church of God in Christ, also of New Orleans, will bring its

gospel sounds to Thursday's 8:45 a.m. worship service, led by Chuck Brown, the Full Gospel music director, who is a noted gospel composer, singer, and keyboardist, as well as the church's dancers and choirs.

Friday's closing service, "A Festival of Churches," from 9:30-11 a.m. will cross both Catholic and Protestant traditions with modern worship music. Todd Hahn, pastor of Warehouse 242 in Charlotte, N.C., an innovative church plant that has drawn hundreds of young adults, will speak. Pastors and lay leaders of some of the excellent churches and parishes featured in Wilkes' books will write and lead the liturgy. The service will recognize and celebrate church excellence across the nation.

The basis for the Pastoral Summit is the Parish/Congregation study headquartered at UNC Wilmington, which Wilkes conducted under a Lilly Endowment grant. Over a two-year period, Wilkes and researchers Marty Minchin and Melanie Bruce identified some 300 exemplary Catholic parishes and 300 exemplary Protestant congregations nationwide. They found these excellent churches in consultation with many sources: pastoral and church institutes, scholars who study church life, ethnic and cultural groups, as well as religion writers and reporters.

The lay leaders and pastors leading Summit workshops are from churches featured in Wilkes’ two new books that resulted from the Parish/Congregation Study: Excellent Catholic Parishes: The Guide to Best Places and Practices (Paulist Press) and Excellent Protestant Congregations: The Guide to Best Places and Practices (Westminster John Knox Press).

Workshops will cover specific aspects of themes such as worship, education, evangelizing, inreach, outreach, and church dynamics. One workshop, for example, will deal with reaching various niche groups such as teens, Generation X, searchers/seekers, and the unchurched. Still other workshops will tackle the topics of stewardship, how small groups develop spirituality and community, taking faith into the workplace, and the care and training of lay leaders.

The workshops are a forum for churches featured in the books to share what they are doing and how they are doing it so well. “We all are aware of such events as garden and boat shows—where interested people can find out the latest innovations, what is working, and to be exposed to fresh ideas that might not have been considered or known,” Wilkes said. “The Pastoral Summit does exactly that for local churches.”

The research team found these churches by asking experts to use criteria for church excellence that the Parish/Congregation Study drew up, but to also go beyond them. “We told them that we want the best of the best, the cream of the cream, ” said Wilkes. “We went in search of excellence and found it in abundance.”

Also funded by the Lilly Endowment, the Pastoral Summit is co-sponsored by the Parish/Congregation Study at UNC Wilmington and the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

John Cavadini, director of the Institute for Church Life and chair of Notre Dame’s Theology Department, said, “The vibrancy of the local church is the crucial religious question of our time. In the end it is the local church that is the face of God to people. These excellent parishes and churches present an authentic and convincing Christian witness, and ICL is especially committed to projects like the Pastoral Summit which impact church life at the local level because that is where commitment to the faith is born and nurtured. Each Catholic parish and Protestant congregation is the basic locus of evangelization.”

Wilkes and his researchers combed the country looking for churches that “nurtured the spirit, welcomed and yet challenged, both preached and—more importantly—lived the Good News. “Size or location, denominational affiliation or lack of one were not important, but a certain ‘habit of being’ was, Wilkes said. “We found outstanding mainline, nondenominational, and evangelical Protestant churches as well as both traditional and progressive Catholic churches in our study,” Wilkes said, “demonstrating that excellence isn’t limited to any one expression of the Christian faith.”

Worship, workshops, discussions, and small- and large-group encounters will provide a community-based conference approach. “Everyone who comes will have something to learn and something to share from their own experience,” Wilkes said. “What participants will have in common is that they want to make their local churches the most vital, spirit-filled, and effective they possibly can be.”

The Summit will represent a broad range of denominations, church sizes, regions, and approaches. From a tiny Lutheran church cluster in rural Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, to a venerable Boston-area Catholic parish, from Denver’s evangelical Riverside Baptist Church to a vibrant, largely Hispanic parish in El Paso—the methods and programs they employ are as varied as the churches themselves.

Most of the churches in the study overcame tremendous obstacles to get where they are now, Wilkes said. “Everything from grinding poverty, to racism, to sheer middle-class apathy,” he said. “These places weren’t always ‘exemplary.’ Far from it. Their leaders struggled to make a difference in their churches. What’s so encouraging is that these leaders are willing to share what methods—both bold and prayerful—worked for them.”

Paul Wilkes is the author of numerous books on religious belief and practice including Beyond the Walls and The Good Enough Catholic. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

More information:

The Pastoral Summit will be headquartered at the New Orleans Marriott, within walking distance of the French Quarter, the Mississippi River, and the Garden District. Registration is $150 and includes two meals and two books: Excellent Catholic Parishes and Excellent Protestant Congregations. Rooms at the Marriott are available at the discounted rate of $125 per night.

For more information about the Pastoral Summit May 30-June 1, 2001, in New Orleans, please contact: staff@pastoralsummit.org, visit the website

www.pastoralsummit.org, or call (910) 962-7225.