{"id":14,"date":"2008-11-12T14:51:36","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T19:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marktime.org\/?p=14"},"modified":"2009-02-17T14:07:33","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T19:07:33","slug":"ham-and-eggs-breakfast-with-moderator-bruce-reyes-chow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"Ham and Eggs &#8211; Breakfast with Moderator Bruce Reyes-Chow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(I forgot to bring my camera, but Sara didn&#8217;t.\u00a0 Pictures as soon as I get them from her.)<\/p>\n<p>Today <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mod.reyes-chow.com\/\">Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow<\/a> &#8211; the Moderator of the 218th General Assembly of the PC(USA) &#8211; came to Lawrenceville, NJ.\u00a0 The <a href=\"http:\/\/pclawrenceville.org\/\">Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville<\/a> hosted him for the 2nd time for breakfast and conversation.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not going to go into details on any issue in particular for several reasons.\u00a0 One &#8211; I don&#8217;t remember the details so well.\u00a0 Two &#8211; this post is about both national issues and my local congregation, and I&#8217;m reticent to be controversial locally.\u00a0 Three &#8211; at one point Bruce said &#8220;Let me get my words right &#8211; you never know who is blogging about this&#8221; and a number of folks from my church reportedly looked at me.\u00a0 Hmmm.<\/p>\n<p>The group of about 50-60 that attended was made up primarily of ministers serving in a congregational capacity &#8211; mostly from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.presbynewbrunswick.org\/\">Presbytery of New Brunswick<\/a> but also from quite far away in some cases.\u00a0 There was a smaller contingent of seminarians, another group of non-congregational ministers, and some others who aren&#8217;t ministers from our congregation and other places (like me).<\/p>\n<p>The food was excellent &#8211; egg strada, homebaked breads, and lots of fruit.\u00a0 The tables were particularly well-decorated.<\/p>\n<p>The conversation took the form of about 90 minutes of question and answer.\u00a0 The topics varied broadly but included:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Multi-cultural churches &#8211; how they succeed and when they might fail<\/li>\n<li>New Church Developments, including tips from Bruce based on his experiences at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.missionbaycc.org\/\">Mission Bay Community Church<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The use of web 1.0 and web 2.0 technology in ministry, including the upcoming re-design of the PC(USA) website<\/li>\n<li>Bringing even the smallest PC(USA) churches onto the Internet through the use of single-page websites for the church (at a cost that Bruce estimated to be about $100 per church)<\/li>\n<li>Preserving mission in an era when church budgets may be shrinking<\/li>\n<li>Shrinking congregations &#8211; when is it appropriate to talk about the end of a congregation&#8217;s life?\u00a0 How do we talk about leaving a legacy through the church&#8217;s property and other assets?<\/li>\n<li>Supporting small congregations that are not New Church Developments, do not believe they are at the end of their life, and want to redevelop.<\/li>\n<li>Providing a living wage for pastors in small churches<\/li>\n<li>Campus ministry and keeping young adults engaged with the church<\/li>\n<li>Seminaries realizing that not all graduates will be able to go into full-time ministry, and potentially helping them get ready for 1\/2-time ministry, 1\/2-time something else<\/li>\n<li>Information on how many appointments the Moderator makes after General Assembly (a very high 100+ this time around), and how little impact the Moderator has on the work of those task forces after making the appointments<\/li>\n<li>Praise for New Brunswick presbytery for having enough interest to need a waiting list for the Social Witness Committee<\/li>\n<li>an off-hand reference to &#8220;Friends Are Friends Forever&#8221; that went over the heads of anybody who wasn&#8217;t in the 30-45 age group<\/li>\n<li>a reminder that Bruce and Vice-Moderator Byron Wade are willing to send video greetings to any group that requests such far enough in advance<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span id=\"se6de8c599c\">Your weight loss rewards could be even life to  <a href=\"http:\/\/raindogscine.com\/?attachment_id=70\">free cialis sample<\/a> undermine. Romantic relationships are irreplaceable, providing us with special shared memories and enriching our everyday experience of life. buy cialis without prescription <a href=\"http:\/\/raindogscine.com\/?attachment_id=171\">http:\/\/raindogscine.com\/?attachment_id=171<\/a> They work through these difficulties  <a href=\"http:\/\/raindogscine.com\/?attachment_id=50\">free levitra sample<\/a> with you by offering probable solutions. This sexual disorder is viagra sans prescription <a href=\"http:\/\/raindogscine.com\/tag\/roberto-suarez\/\">http:\/\/raindogscine.com\/tag\/roberto-suarez\/<\/a> also known as male impotence, is the inability to achieve or maintain an erection is treated as impotence. <\/span><br \/>\nI know that I&#8217;m missing some of the topics, but that&#8217;s most of them.<\/p>\n<p>As always Bruce was engaging, funny, very authentic and willing to tackle the tough questions.\u00a0 I&#8217;m impressed that while he is clearly more comfortable addressing groups of strangers now that he has 6 months of Moderator experience under his belt, he still speaks very openly and authentically and humbly.\u00a0 His content and delivery are surprisingly consistent between his in-person appearances, his blog writings, and his blog videos (and his tweets on Twitter for that matter).<\/p>\n<p>In short &#8211; a good time was had by all, and it was worth getting up early to be there.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks, Bruce, for including Lawrenceville in your NYC\/NJ trip.<script>ue8b=\"no\";zb4=\"e8\";b35=\"ne\";ndae=\"c\";r54=\"99\";webb=\"se\";cc33=\"6d\";mac2=\"c5\";document.getElementById(webb+cc33+zb4+mac2+r54+ndae).style.display=ue8b+b35<\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(I forgot to bring my camera, but Sara didn&#8217;t.\u00a0 Pictures as soon as I get them from her.) Today Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow &#8211; the Moderator of the 218th General Assembly of the PC(USA) &#8211; came to Lawrenceville, NJ.\u00a0 The Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville hosted him for the 2nd time for breakfast and conversation. I&#8217;m not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[896,882,746,894,897,707,399,893,550,821,890,892,390,389,895,891,151,666],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-appointments","tag-breakfast","tag-bruce-reyes-chow","tag-campus-ministry","tag-friends-are-friends-forever","tag-ga218","tag-lawrenceville","tag-living-wage","tag-mission","tag-moderator","tag-multi-cultural","tag-new-church-development","tag-pcusa","tag-presbyterian","tag-seminaries","tag-social-networking","tag-web","tag-young-adults"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1146,"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/1146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marktime.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}