Sustaining Grace: Innovative Ecosystems for New Faith Communities

Sustaining Grace explores the dynamic between new faith communities and denominational systems through the lens of stewardship and sustainability. As a collection, these essays suggest that to facilitate ecologies for innovation in our current era, established congregations and new faith communities must model the sustaining grace of God to one another in creative ways. Thus, problems of sustainability are not for church planters to solve alone, but rather are related to the theologies of stewardship and the ecclesial system to which they belong. Issues of vision are not for denominational systems to theorize alone, but are given shape on their historic foundations in the creative and prophetic structures practiced in new faith communities.
This book speaks to a central tension in the growing movement of church planting—the mutual need of and the mutual frustration between establishment leaders and innovators, conservators and risk takers. Standing at the contact point of that tension in one of the wealthiest mainline denominations, 1001 New Worshipping Communities and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary engage the question of faithful stewardship with voices reflecting and strategizing on each side of the tension, broadening the conversation to include those beyond the Presbyterian Church, and bringing both the academy and practitioners from church judicatories, church plants, and traditional church communities to offer a theologically grounded, practical, and generative conversation.

Scott Hagley is Associate Professor of Missiology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is the author of Eat What is Set Before You: A Missiology of the Congregation in Context (2019).

Karen Rohrer is the director of the Church Planting Initiative at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Before coming to Pittsburgh, she was an organizing copastor at Beacon, a new faith community in Philadelphia.

Michael Gehrling serves the Presbyterian Church (USA) as an associate for the 1001 New Worshipping Communities initiative. Before coming to this role, he was an organizing co-pastor of the Upper Room, a new faith community in Pittsburgh.