June is traditionally a time of a lot of changes in our personal lives --- this is a time of year when folks --- graduate, get married, move or, more simply, just change their daily routine to a more relaxed style of life for the summer months.
This year there are a whole other set of changes that are happening in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) of which Nashua Presbyterian is a part. During the past year the presbyteries have been voting on proposed changes to our constitution and most of them have passed. They go into effect on July 11th so we're spending June getting ready!
The two biggest changes are 1) a streamlining of the rules that govern our local ministry and mission and 2) a change that moves the arena for deciding who shall be ordained in the church (as elder, deacon or minister) from the national church level to the local church level. In all things we are seeking to be more flexible and more open to God leading the church into new ways of being. As our culture and our church has become more and more diverse (some like drums, some like piano, and some like silence in worship, for instance) the goal is to have a constitution (our 'rule book', if you will) that will let us each be church without having to break or stretch the rules.
At the moment it feels a bit uncomfortable since so many basic rules -- like what is our quorum -- used to be in the constitution and now each church has to make those decisions and get those basics out of the way before we can move on to exploring what this will mean for the future.
It's an exciting, unsettling, wonder making time in a denomination which has always been known for its rules as we've done things 'decently and in order'. I'm wondering what it will mean for the church in the coming years as we try out this new freedom!
