What’s happening with the Cultivating the Gift of preaching initiative (CGPI)

Many who are reading this have likely had a retreat or a camp experience that they would describe as a spiritual “mountain top” event. An event wherein your faith is enlivened and deepened, or even – to use a word we Presbyterians are sometimes a bit afraid of – you have a mystical encounter with God that leaves your faith, your relationship with God, forever changed and enriched. Words often fail us here. Not because they cannot describe the experience, but because they can only describe moments and not the totality of it. To paraphrase Aristotle, the whole is simply greater than the sum of the parts.

As I write this newsletter, I find myself in just such a state of mind. There were so many wonderful things that happened at our third annual Cultivating the Gift of preaching Conference, held at Alma College from June 4-8, 2026.

Our Keynote speaker, Catherine Williams, invited us to consider the intersection of preaching and worship, music in particular. Beyond just trying to match hymns to the text being preached, she invited us to consider worship as part of preaching itself, the word of God is proclaimed in the hymns we sing, in the liturgy we hear and recite, etc.

Our workshop events introduced our first year participants to the basics of preaching, introducing them to the Bible, Reformed theology, the fundamentals of public speaking and more. Our second year participants dove into the Book of Confessions and participated in new workshops on preaching the parables and social justice preaching. And all participants gathered together to consider various spiritual practices for preachers.

Worship was universally acclaimed as highlight; our keynote speaker Catherine Williams preached a sermon on Sunday morning that close to a dozen attendees told me they will never forget. And our morning worship services, led and designed by our multi-talented worship team, used not just the sermon, but liturgy, poetry, song, to lead us in praise of God. Each service focused on a different part of worship, e.g., praise, confession, proclamation.

Fellowship and comradery: these are things that are nearly impossible to program, other than to make space for them. This year we had an impromptu men’s choral group, a group organized a karaoke night, and we enjoyed one another’s company over food and drink.

But this does not capture the heart of it all.

If you spend any amount of time nowadays around the church and especially with church leaders, there is the presence of an underlying doom, a sense of irreversible decline and loss. Declining attendance and participation, declining budgets, subsequent loss of programming. And I could add a hodgepodge of others: the loss of members over political issues, the decline in the number of seminary students, the reduction in staff at seminaries, a reduction of mid-council staff and ministry, etc. And then there is the decline and the loss of civility, and with it respect, empathy, and compassion for our fellow bearers of the image of God. The story these days is one of decline and loss, a story that seems headed to end “not with a bang but a whimper,” as T.S. Eliott wrote over a century ago.

But I drove home from the conference some three weeks ago with an uncanny sense of hope for the future of the church. For what I witnessed was a group of people gathered from the across our Synod – from the far reaches of the Mackinac peninsula to Detroit, from the farmland of central Ohio, to the inner cities of Cincinnati and Clevland, coming from churches large and small and in-between, and exhibiting an extraordinary range of diversity for not quite 70 attendees – who love and have faith in the God who calls us to gather as the Church and to serve the world.

If CGPI is any indication of what is to come, church of the future will likely be much different than the last hundred or two hundred years. The way we educate church leaders will change – it has to. The ways in which we gather and worship will change – again, because it has to. And there will be resistance because few of us actually like change. We will have to navigate new waters and go into new places. But as he promised, Jesus is ever with us, going before us preparing a future for his beloved community. So, in the midst of the despair that decline and loss bring, take heart because there is also much hope for growth and new life. God is indeed doing a new thing (Isaiah 43:19).

 Dr. Matthew Aragon Bruce

Director, Cultivating the Gift of Preaching

matt@synodofthecovenant.org

609-712-4258