“The Presbytery as part of the Body of Jesus Christ understands itself as a Christian community seeking a balance of worship, business, education, fellowship, and service.” – 1.4a Manual of Operations
The Gathering Planning Team is gearing up for our August 22nd Presbytery Gathering at First Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood, and we are extremely excited for an inspiring day of community, work, worship, learning, and 
missional partnership! At the last Gathering Planning Team meeting, the team charged with organizing our presbytery gatherings decided to introduce an experiment for this August—this one gathering will be completely in-person! This is a change from what has been normalized as our practice since 2020, but will only be for this one gathering. There will be a chance on the post-gathering surveys to give us feedback about this approach and what your preference would be for future planning (our November 2nd meeting will be hybrid as planned, and our February 1, 2025 meeting will be All-Zoom as originally planned)
Here is a top ten list for reasons behind trying this approach:
NUMBER ONE: LEARNING ABOUT EMBODIED COMMUNITY! As part of our 2024-2025 theme, Essentials for Church Vitality, we are hosting Rev, Paul Vasile, church musician, consultant, composer, and teacher, to be our keynote speaker. His approach is named in his website: he is “committed to modeling expansive, imaginative, and hospitable experiences of music making wherever he goes, Paul’s leadership builds trust, invites spaces of creativity, vulnerability, and play, and supports practices of reflection and holistic learning. Recognized as a multitalented musician and liturgist, he is helping to strengthen, energize, and liberate faith communities through the ways they worship and sing together.” This is best experienced in person.
NUMBER TWO: MEDIA UPGRADE SABBATICAL! Our media hardware technology is currently on Sabbatical so that it can be updated. We have received a lot of mileage out of it when we stretched it beyond capacity for the pandemic, but many of us experienced live when it broke down in the middle of the last Presbytery Gathering.
NUMBER THREE: CONSISTENT CALLS FOR INPERSON COMMUNITY! We continue to hear a deep need for embodied connectedness to break bread, sing, pray, and labor together in the same space, as well as deep appreciation for the opportunity to be closely connected to each other. This will be a way to designate this one meeting to this approach so we can have just one opportunity for enhanced personal connection.
NUMBER FOUR: CAR POOL COMMMUNITY! This August, we will be providing gift-card incentives for any who are carpooling together with two or more commissioners to the gathering! (There may or may not be a contest of who provides the best carpooling selfie, which would be….awesome)
NUMBER FIVE: GIDDINGS-LOVEJOY PRESBYTERY IS A HYBRID STANDOUT: Having emerged from the pandemic, very few presbyteries are still providing electronic alternatives to their presbytery gathering. We have been singular in our approach to provide hybrid meetings and have celebrated our approach as an expression of our values of providing access, but at the expense of tending 100% to the presence and energy solely in the physical room. While our technology is “on sabbatical” this will allow our full staff to be more present with those in the room in ways we have not been able to for the past several years. (Friendly reminder note that no one is discussing that hybrid gatherings will be going away! But just in the same way that we have been offering one gathering a year on Zoom only, this would be the one gathering this year that would be in-person only)
NUMBER SIX: EXPERIMENTATION IS GOOD! It is good for any organization to constantly be testing, experimenting, and stretching our ability to change, so that we can cultivate a community that is not afraid of trying new things and receiving feedback that best helps us live into our embodied values together. Practicing regular adaptability will make us as an institutional more agile and resilient when faced with growth and change! (Be sure not to forget to fill out your post-gathering survey so we can learn and move together!)
NUMBER SEVEN: REGIONAL AWARENESS AND CELEBRATION! Part of our missional focus for the last gatherings has been on lifting up in a more intentional way the ministry expressions of our local host site to the larger community (more Minutes for Mission, highlighting local partnerships modeled by the host site, involving community partners, etc). It is good to lift up and celebrate our diverse regional witness–which, we should remember, is definitely not limited to the St. Louis area!
NUMBER EIGHT: STREAMLINING OUR MEETINGS! Holding multiple simultaneous channels for participation does double the technical procedures that a moderator needs to manage, increasing our meeting time by at least 30%.
NUMBER NINE: UNCERTAIN AND INEVITABLE TECHNICAL GLITCHES! more channels for connecting each individual participant doubles the required logistics to indentify and trouble-shoot, and therefore the stakes, when tech issues beyond our control inevitably arise: connectivity problems, audio-visual malfunctions (on either side), software glitches—we have experienced it all, which has the impact of disenfranchising a voting participant if connection happens to fail. It would be good to increase certainty of reduction of possible technical glitches, even if just every once and a while.
NUMBER TEN: HAVING A UNIFIED SHARED EXPERIENCE! We have noticed that people’s experience of our gatherings varies greatly whether they participate by Zoom or whether they are in person. Different experiences of the meeting are creating diffeernt experiences of the presbytery, and it would be a good practice to have more opportunity where we all experience the same connections, the same access, and the same presence, the same love, and joy and laughter and community, across the board, even if every once and a while.
Friends, may we try this this one time and see how it works?
In humility and faith,
Ryan
Rev. Ryan J. Landino
Presbytery Leader
Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy
June 11, 2024