Three years ago, Emily Scott had an idea. What if twentysomethings in Manhattan’s East Village got together every Sunday for an agape feast, just as the early Christians did? Scott knew that Gen Xers and millennial peers crave egalitarian participation in a close-knit community and tend to avoid anything that looks like an institution. What if a group of friends cooked and ate a meal together, read scripture and sang some hymns? St. Lydia’s, named for the hospitable woman mentioned in Acts 16, was born.
At first a dozen young adults met in each other’s apartments, but soon Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish adopted St. Lydia’s. Trinity’s sanctuary could accommodate dining tables, and Scott was given an office in the 175-year-old church building. When St. Lydia’s grew in number to 20 people, both congregations agreed that St. Lydia’s needed to work toward independence. The tiny congregation would either have to strike out on its own or affiliate with a denomination. It engaged in a nine-month discernment process with the Metropolitan New York Synod, part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ameria. The synod agreed to allow St. Lydia’s to join and retain its identity, so the congregation decided to join.
There was one problem: Emily Scott, though a graduate of Yale Divinity School, was not ordained (she is currently a candidate for ordination in the ELCA). In order for its feast to be a synod-sanctioned Eucharist, St. Lydia’s needed to have an ordained person preside. (Various volunteer clergy had filled that role previously.) The ELCA also normally requires church planters to serve at least three years in an established congregation before embarking on new mission development. That would mean that if Scott wanted to lead St. Lydia’s, she would have to leave and serve as a pastor elsewhere for three years. But the fledgling community was dependent on Scott’s vision and pastoral care. “If I had been asked to serve three years in a parish,” she said, “we would have failed.”
Fortunately, the ELCA had just lifted the three-year requirement for church planters, allowing new seminary graduates to launch into church planting. Stephen Bouman, former bishop of the MNYS, had helped push for that change, which mirrors a movement across the mainline. Some denominations have even dropped the requirement that missioners be ordained before they serve and are supporting entrepreneurs who are building congregations among immigrants or young urban adults. These missioners have recognized a need and yearn to create a church to meet that need.
“Who is God’s heart breaking for?” said Philip Lotspeich, coordinator for church growth in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “We’ve sensed that the way we’ve done church is not working in a lot of our communities. The people that [these young church planters] are reaching are just very different from those whom we would typically reach.”
