Try ‘shalomify’ next time you’re playing Scrabble

Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall coins a word and leads a thoughtful discussion during his first talk at Synod School

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

Photo by Clark Tibbs via Unsplash

STORM LAKE, Iowa — Few Synod School convocation speakers can get away with birthing new words on the spot the way Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall did Monday morning.

Monday’s word was “shalomify,” as in the way God asks us to build places of shalom, justice, peace and well-being in the places where we live and work and worship. “You can have projects of shalomification,” Schlosser-Hall, the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s Deputy Executive Director of Vision, Innovation and Rebuilding, told those attending Synod School, which is offered each year by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa.

Although he lives in the Pacific Northwest, Schlosser-Hall has roots in the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, having been born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and having spent his formative years in Aberdeen, South Dakota and Bismarck, North Dakota.

He showed a slide of a line sliding downward from left to right, and many people guessed it represented the PC(USA)’s membership trend: about 4 million in 1970 and about 1.2 million in 2020. But what if, as one Presbyterian told Schlosser-Hall and others present on a Zoom call a while back, that represents a line of possibility.

“God is doing more than we can ask or imagine,” he said, picking up on the Synod School theme during its 70^th year. “We might want to be part of it.”

Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall (Contributed photo)

Schlosser-Hall has seen the T-shirts with the four qualities spelled out during ordination questions: Do you promise to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination and love?

“We want to escalate the role of imagination to create new stories and [employ] imagination’s cousin, innovation,” which someone once defined as “imagination applied,” Schlosser-Hall said. “My hope [this week] is that we will see our circumstances in an ecosystem of possibility.”

Schlosser-Hall, a PC(USA) ruling elder who’s married to a pastor, shared photos of some of the places in Eugene, Oregon, that mattered to the couple when they were younger.  The Koinonia Center, a former Victorian home where Schlosser-Hall worked as a janitor, is now a towering apartment building. Hayward Field, a beloved place for track fans, was leveled in 2018 and rebuilt in time to host the world championships in 2022. But the church where the two used to worship has remained largely unchanged.

He wondered — and he asked those present to think along with him — whether there’s something going on that makes it more difficult to exercise “that blue-sky imagination, to take steps with great risk and great possibilities.”

He asked the crowd for their ideas. Among them:

• People are invested in their past accomplishments.
• Comfort means complacency.
• We’re scared of the chaos that can occur between the former and the future.
• A group of churches told one pastor, “We welcome new ideas that will help us keep on doing what we’ve always done.”
• There is a fear of loss, and we don’t like fear. Even when it’s good change, change always involves loss.
• We forget that God calls us to be resurrection people.
• What we let go of might be a faith anchor for some people.

“Discipleship is being able to hold more than one emotion, reality or observation at the same time. That creates maturation as disciples,” Schlosser-Hall said. “It’s not one or the other. It’s grief and newness together.”

But “if we rush in with new zeal saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do. Get on board or get off the bus,’ that can be harmful for people,” Schlosser-Hall said. “We need that influence, but we need to find a way to take good steps out of good Spirit-led choices.”

Our job is to find out what innovation God is already orchestrating, he said. He quoted from Dr. Linda Hill, who along with three others wrote “Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.”

“Ordinary people can do extraordinary things,” the authors wrote. “Everyone has a slice of genius. The innovative leader’s role is to unleash it, harness it and use it for the collective good.”