New clergy, new churches: Church planting as a first call
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 America. 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."
