Who ya gonna call?

by Anne M. Wilson

When a man called from Michigan wanting to know what the Presbyterian Church (USA) believes about exorcism, Joyce Campbell was more interested in lunch than in the occult.

She found a one-page synopsis of a statement from 1975 in which the 115th General Assembly of the PCUS (a predecessor denomination of the PC(USA)) said essentially that we don’t believe in exorcism. When she read that to the caller, he seemed satisfied, so she turned her attention to her sandwich.

But the man called back the next day and asked her to email him a copy. A short while later he called yet again and said he wanted to see the whole statement, complete with footnotes, and would appreciate getting copies of any other statements the church may have made on the matter.

After a thorough search, Campbell was able to say with certainty that the 1975 statement was the only one about exorcism that the General Assembly had ever adopted. She explained, however, that that doesn’t mean that the church doesn’t believe in the devil.

Campbell devoted two hours over two days to responding to an inquiry from a single caller. While she was delving deep into exorcism, other consultants were busy providing addresses of ministers and churches and answering a myriad of questions. Just another day for PresbyTel Consultants

Question: What is PresbyTel?

It’s “who you ask when you don’t know who to ask”.

It’s “the denomination’s best kept secret”

It’s “the mortar between the bricks that keeps things connected”

Efforts to describe PresbyTel often rely on clichés that mostly miss the mark. Barry Creech, coordinator of information and planning in the Office of Communication, often compares the operation to a library reference desk. PresbyTel is the information and research service of the PC(USA), available to anyone, by telephone (toll-free) or email, and it exists for one reason: to answer questions.

It’s intended to serve the information needs of the whole church — of ministers, lay leaders, Sunday school teachers, members, even non-members, anyone looking for information about the PC(USA).

Creech says PresbyTel’s “sole purpose” is to be available to anyone who has a question about the church.

“Our work is to wait for the phone to ring,” he says, while most other offices produce resources, conduct workshops or meet with Presbyterians from around the country.

PresbyTel hears from 200 to 300 callers a week. While the phone is the primary means of communication, many questions also come by email — directly, through the denomination’s Web page, or by way of PresbyNet. A few come by fax or regular mail. All come from people with the same essential needs: to make contact; and to get information.

A caller from New York asks, “What does the word ‘Presbyterian’ mean?”

PresbyTel’s research finds that it comes from the Greek word for elder, “presbuteros,” which appears 72 times in the original Greek documents of which the New Testament is made. This also explains why we call our elected lay people “elders.”

PresbyTel was created in the spring of 1988, when the New York office of the former United Presbyterian Church in the USA (UPCUSA) and the Atlanta office of the former Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) merged and moved together to Louisville, KY, to form the new Presbyterian Church(USA). One of PresbyTel’s first purposes was to help keep track of all those people and their program areas. John Coffin, PresbyTel’s first director, then director of stewardship and information, recalls that selling the concept was a struggle at first.

“We didn’t have enough money to go around, and had to make more than one run at it to get it initiated,” he says. “It wasn’t just immediately bought by everybody as the best idea in the world.

To Presbyterians, it was a new idea. The United Methodist Church had started a similar service, InfoServ, in 1974. But no one knew whether Presbyterians would accept it. No one knew whether people would call.

Then, as now, starting any new program meant diverting funds from existing programs, and that was no easier to do then than it is today. Clifton Kirkpatrick, now stated clerk of the General Assembly, remembers that, as national staff members prepared to move the church headquarters to Louisville, there was “the hope of creating something like PresbyTel as a way to be really responsive to the people in the church, to help them get involved in mission.”

Kirkpatrick also remembers that he voted against PresbyTel the first time it was proposed. The issue, he says, was money, not the value of the program. At the time, he was director of the church’s global mission unit, and was afraid that money used in this new enterprise would come from his world mission and other projects. He wasn’t the only one dealing with such fears. In the end, however, the idea prevailed, and the money was found.

“In retrospect, one of the best things we did, when moving to Louisville, was to set that up,” Kirkpatrick says today. “PresbyTel’s just been a lifeline to get congregations, presbyteries and others connected to the life of the church, and to get what goes on in this building connected to what goes on in local congregations.”

A caller from Iowa noticed that, in an obscure paragraph in the 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer about the Human Development Index (HDI) Ranking of Countries for 2001, Norway was ranked first, the United States sixth. She wants to know which countries are ranked second through fifth.

PresbyTel consultants couldn’t get in touch with the Mission Interpretation people who produce the Yearbook, so they went to the Web site of the United Nations and found the listing of countries, from first to 153rd. The second-place country was Australia, followed by Canada, Sweden and Belgium.

Maintaining the connections Kirkpatrick mentioned is what PresbyTel does so well. It seems obvious now that a general information service with a toll-free number would be invaluable to the church, that it would promote mission, clarify issues and dispel rumors. History has proven that. But it wasn’t obvious at the outset.

“I had no idea what kind of calls we would get,” Coffin remembers, “or if people would call at all.”

In those early days, Coffin spent a lot of time on the phone. His favorite call (although it’s one he didn’t personally field) was that of a woman who said: “My husband just died. What do I do?” In his mind’s eye, Coffin sees her sitting there, phone in hand, next to her husband’s still-warm body. “It turned out he’d died several weeks earlier, and what she needed was to talk to the folks at the Board of Pensions,” he says.

Coffin often mentions that call while telling new consultants that the first question someone asks is not necessarily the one the caller really needs answered. Consultants have to learn to “listen between the lines,” and dig a little deeper.

“We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of smart people, very welleducated people, and we draw upon their experience of having been in various churches, in the mission field, or in seminary,” says Edna Sinnock, who, as associate for churchwide information information services, is the PresbyTel consultants’ immediate supervisor. Newly hired consultants spend a lot of training time learning about the computer system and the available information resources, but the most valuable thing they bring to the job is their lifetime of experiences as Presbyterians.

A Pennsylvania caller asks for the dates of next year’s General Assembly.

The PresbyTel consultant has the information at her fingertips: May 24 through May 31, in Denver CO.

Sinnock and Creech have both been with PresbyTel since its infancy. They have seen it metamorphose from a simple telephone- and-paper operation to the sophisticated computer database system it is now. In the beginning callers wanted to know whether a staff person was in New York, Atlanta or Louisville. Now they run the gamut from simple requests for addresses and phone numbers to news of Presbyterian mission activities, General Assembly actions, curriculum options, and the finer points of Presbyterian theology and polity.

Questions often are driven by the “controversy of the month” — the Human Sexuality report, the Re-Imagining Conference, the battle over whether gay and lesbian Presbyterians should be eligible for ordination, a “60 Minutes” story about something the National Council of Churches is doing. Others have to do with natural disasters and relief efforts. Some people call to express an opinion. Recently, consultants say, a lot of callers are looking for advice about using the denomination’s Web site.

But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

“PresbyTel folks are service—oriented, and want to help,” Sinnock says. “They get a lot of satisfaction out of helping people across the country find the things they are seeking.”

One of the biggest changes has been in coverage of the actions of the General Assembly, according to Creech. In the old days, PresbyTel tried to offer a daily summary of GA highlights. Now it tracks every decision. “We’ve actually had commissioners call PresbyTel and say, ‘I know I sat there and heard that, but what did we decide on this issue?’ That’s a long ways from just having a summary report of the day,” he says.

A woman from Missouri is trying to find the pastor who conducted her brother’s funeral. The family didn’t know him, but she wanted to thank him for being sensitive and caring. She didn’t know his name, and all she could remember was that the church’s name had “Westminster” in it and was somewhere in Illinois.

PresbyTel combined a series of thoughtful questions and a computer search to get the pastor’s name and address.

Edith Sutton, a PresbyTel consultant for more than seven years, says it was a run-of-themill inquiry, “but it was important to the caller.”

“It was nice to be able to help,” Sutton says. “That’s what we’re here for.”