Interim pastor seeks to help congregation clarify vision

As interim pastor, Rev. Preston Dawes is guiding the First Presbyterian Church’s transition to a new minister.

By Virgil Hervey

As Yellow Springs Presbyterians look forward to Advent, or the coming of Christ, they are also looking hopefully toward the coming of a new pastor for the First Presbyterian Church. And they are doing so with the help of their new interim pastor, Preston Dawes.

For Dawes, the interim position is a specialty. After having congregations of his own in the areas surrounding Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton for many years, he was working on the Presbytery staff in New Jersey when he underwent training to become an interim ministry specialist in 1995. He filled this role “three or four times in the Cincinnati area and two or three times in the Dayton area” before his retirement a few years ago, he said in a recent interview. The Yellow Springs job is his second interim pastorship since he retired, according to Dawes, who has vast experience in guiding pastor search committees in their work.

A visit to worship at First Presbyterian on a recent Sunday found what at first glance seemed to be a contrast in styles between Dawes and the congregation. SoulStirrers, the church’s gospel group made up of Jim Felder, Dayna Foster, Jeanna Reza, and Molly GunderKline, gave spirited performances as a prelude and postlude to worship and during the offertory. Meanwhile, Dawes was the picture of a staid Presbyterian minister as he delivered a scholarly sermon, titled “A Context for Christmas.”

“I ask you to consider your context of Christmas,” Dawes told the congregation. “For you, what is Christmas all about? What is Jesus about? What is his role in your lives? Find some way for you yourself to express it in the coming weeks.”

However, Dawes is quick to point out that apparent difference in styles between minister and congregation is only a surface one. He is in sync with the congregation, both theologically and in its bent toward the arts, he said.

“A few years ago I obtained a grant to fund the blending of worship and the arts, but I never had the time to do anything with it,” Dawes said. “I think I can draw on it now.”

His wife, Lorna, was the director of the Muse Machine in Dayton from 1995 to 2002 and was known to many in Yellow Springs before Dawes took the interim position in the beginning of September. They currently live in Washington Township.

As for his sermons being liberally sprinkled with references to Biblical scholars, Dawes said he has had a number of appreciative comments.
“I’m not one who keeps a file of old sermons to draw on,” he said. “I give a new sermon every week based on the experience of the life of the congregation. I am open to various approaches.”

Last year, after four years of struggling unsuccessfully to attract young families with children, full-time Pastor Angie Schenck resigned as the congregation sought new directions, both fiscally and philosophically.

Interviewed for an article in the News in January, Key Reimers, who is chair of the church’s Revitalization Committee, said she thought that in seeking a new pastor, emphasis should be moved away from “salvation through Jesus,” and toward a more progressive Christianity. She said that she would like to see a balance between a traditional worship service and a progressive social agenda.
Keith GunderKline, a church elder and also a member of the Revitalization Committee, also said at that time that he believed that the key to increasing the church’s membership would be to change to a more progressive brand of Christianity.

None of this is new to Dawes, who said he is familiar with congregations wrestling with these kinds of concepts. Dawes was hired on a one-year contract with an option to renew. As the congregation has not yet reached the stage where they have begun the actual search process, he expects to be around for “two or three years.”

“I look forward to it being extended,” he said.

The Presbytery has a special process for churches that are “between pastors” that involves the congregation dividing itself into groups to study geo-demographics and passages from the Bible in light of each other. The goal, Dawes said, is to come out with a vision, develop clarity on a mission, and eventually come up with a strategic plan for engaging in that mission.

“As an interim, I have worked with congregations who have gone through that process,” Dawes said. “I need the leaders of the church to translate the strategic plan into a tactical plan.”

If a congregation has a history of members with differing priorities, it is his job to unite them to work with the Presbytery in the search process. As an interim specialist, his focus is on a congregation “clarifying its own identity,” Dawes said. Some congregations are defined by the pastor; others, as in the Yellow Springs case, are more democratic.

“The most support I can give as a specialist is in the congregation defining themselves and pursuing that identity in the context of ministry, theology, and themselves,” he said.

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com