How to play well with others

LOUISVILLE — During this month’s Presbyterian Older Adult Ministries Network conference, the Rev. Sharan Knoell, pastor of Valley United Presbyterian Church in Waverly, New York, led the workshop “How to Play Well with Others: Developing Ecumenical Partnerships.” Knoell offered a case study of how Valley United Presbyterian Church has worked with other faith communities — especially the Catholic Community of the Epiphany in nearby Sayre, Pennsylvania — to more faithfully and abundantly serve their communities.

One day right during the Covid pandemic, Knoell called Fr. Daniel Toomey, the priest at the church, and asked him, “What do you guys do unrelated to food ministry? Do you want to get together?”

“They said, ‘why not?’” Knoell recalled. “Honest to God, it was that easy.”

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After initial forays went well, Knoell and Toomey came up with social justice as a theme for future ecumenical work together. 

“That was 2023, and our churches are now best friends,” Knoell said. “[Toomey] laughs every time I say that, but our churches are best friends. We’ve done four series together.”

The expenses for putting on each series, with each session opening with dinner together, have been covered by grants. “Love your neighbor,” “Caregiving and aging with confidence and grace,” “How to experience life through the senses” and “Embracing aging” have been the topics so far. Ministry to older adults “has been the most requested topic we get,” she said. “We live in an older community. We don’t have young families with kids. We have older adults, and so that was the most common thing that was requested for us.”

Several times throughout the workshop, Knoell warned participants not to engage ecumenically because they think it could grow their own faith community. “That is never the place you want to start an ecumenical partnership,” she said, suggesting instead churches engage in a spiritual gifts inventory before getting started. “It’s really quite simple. What is your church good at? What are your church’s growing edges?”

Then “put together a small team from your church who thinks this is a fantastic idea. You don’t need 15 people. We started with four — three Catholics and me,” she said.

A key to planning meeting success is the meeting site itself, she said. “We meet in the rectory of the Catholic church, and that is for one reason: snacks,” Knoell said. “They have chocolates. They have home-baked goodies. It is really hard to say no when you’ve got a mouthful of homemade chocolate chip cookie.”

Knoell also recommended visiting other churches and joining them for worship. “Look at the printed materials they have in their narthex. Check out their worship bulletin and see what events are going on. Is that stuff that seems like it might be useful to your congregation? Does it seem like it might be complementary to what you want to do?” she asked. “You’ve got to investigate to figure out how you can get to that meeting.”

Knoell assured the preachers in the room that “It’s perfectly acceptable to stand up in the pulpit and say, ‘You know, we’re working with Church ABC. We don’t know what we’re doing yet, but keep us in prayer as we figure it out. We’re trying to make new friends.’ And the congregation’s going to go, ‘OK.’” 

“Later down the road, of course, they’re going to have more questions, but at this point, they’re going to go, ‘OK.’”

Early on, Catholic participants didn’t “have a context for a woman and a man standing side by side as spiritual leaders,” she said. “After the first series together, you know what I heard? ‘She’s just as good as he is.’”

“That’s huge. I didn’t have to fight for that,” Knoell said. “I showed up. I said, ‘Hey, this is what I bring to the table. You’re not my people, right? You go back to your church when this is done.’ But they started to see me as a pastoral figure.”

By the time the churches completed their fourth series together, some Catholic parishioners “came up and shared pastoral concerns with me. I never saw that one coming,” Knoell said. “These are the awesome benefits you didn’t see coming. They are just low-hanging fruit of these sort of partnerships.”

Then she asked workshop participants: What’s some pushback you’ve heard? Responses included “just don’t make me go,” “we’ve never done this before,” “I’m tired” and “they might steal my people.”

“Be prepared for pushback,” Knoell advised, and “be prepared for questions you’re not ready to answer yet.”

Next steps include figuring our “how you’re going to divide up the responsibilities” and doing “an inventory on what stuff and what people you need,” she said. “Consider sustainability. Is this something you want to repeat year after year, or is this going to be a one-and-done kind of presentation?”

Be open to learning from one another, Knoell said. “It’s not just who is going to bring the spaghetti and who’s making the sauce,” she said. “The core of this is ministry. What is God designing this to look like, and how an we live out what God is calling this to be?”

Anytime two people occupy the same space, “there will be conflict,” Knoell said. “It doesn’t matter how healthy the relationship is and how kind the people are.” Be aware of differences in theology, she said. “Even if your theology is compatible, this is really important because this is the thing that’s going to come up and bite you later on. You’ve got to remove the sacred cows from the get-go.”

Attendance at each of the ecumenical events has climbed to the point where 80-100 people now attend. “The last one we had in August, we had to put more tables and chairs in the room,” she said. “Yes, we were all running around and sweating, trying to get up in the attic to get the tables and chairs down.”

People would see a friend from another church walk through the door and they’d gesture their friend to come join them. “That just warms my little pastor heart to watch people do that,” she said.

View Knoell’s workshop slides here.