For many mainline Protestants, theological education starts and ends with Sunday school. Some are lucky – their place of worship has enough youth to warrant a Vacation Bible School, but for others, there isn’t much else when it comes to theological learning.
But at Think+Pray+Act, a new congregation in St. Louis, MO, members are invited to discuss sermons, ask questions, and explore their curiosity about faith, theology, and vocation in community.
“The Bible didn’t fall pre-written from the sky. It was composed by many different people over many different cultures, times, and places,” founding pastor Rev. Rebecca Klemme Eliceiri explains. “When we gather, we think about what those traditions meant in their original time, and how we represent those things in meaningful ways today for 21st century people.”
On June 1 and 8, you can support emerging and affiliating communities of faith – like Think+Pray+Act – that are going beyond what’s been done before, by participating in the Pentecost Offering.
When Rev. Rebecca was growing up in the United Church of Christ (UCC), she never felt safe enough to ask questions, even if she experienced it as a loving place of faith.
“When I got my Bible in the third grade, I felt so happy to have the book of my faith tradition. I thought that it would answer so many questions, but it just left me feeling more confused than ever,” she recalls. “It is important that you can encounter a friendly face if you have a question about your faith, and that you don’t feel scared or ashamed for asking questions.”
Her childhood experiences, Jesus’s continued calls amid deep doubt, and her participation in another UCC congregation informed her decision to enroll at Eden Theological Seminary in 2003, which had a strong reputation for congregational ministry in the early 2000s. But while she loved learning and felt the Holy Spirit in the classroom, she had a hard time imagining how to start a non-traditional place of worship when she graduated three years later. This frustration led Rev. Rebecca to return to grad school in 2009, when she took up a Masters in Library Science.
“Spending time outside of church helped me to better understand the points of view of the ‘nones,’ agnostics, and atheists,” she reveals. “A lot of my friends fall into those categories.”
She kept her ties to her alma mater though, joining the staff at Eden’s Luhr Library. A year into her degree, she lost that job – the school was selling its library facility to Webster University.
Rev. Rebecca felt a shift.
If seminaries were selling their library buildings, then theological education was changing too.
“It solidified an idea that I’d had since 2003,” she says. “How the church educates lay people is too often not a very vibrant thing, which was different than what I had experienced as a seminarian. In seminary, I had the opportunity to dive deep into theology.”
What Rev. Rebecca wanted to do was create a resource library where lay people could easily access the best theological resources – the same ones that seminary students can find on campus. But her BiblioMinistry, as she referred to it at the time, wouldn’t just be a warehouse full of books. It would be a ‘third place,’ a concept that refers to a public space that is neither one’s home (the first place) nor one’s work (the second place), where people can come together and spend time with one another without the obligation of spending money.
“Librarians often understand the concept of ‘library’ differently than most people,” she points out. “We are information professionals, but we also know that libraries are ‘third places’ where folks can build and strengthen connections.”
Two years after her graduation from library school, she started the ordination process and began sharing her idea of the BiblioMinistry. But that working title didn’t seem to resonate with others, who thought it was a “very large and unwieldy” name and encouraged her to come up with one that better reflected what she wanted to do. So, she went back to the drawing board. She wanted the BiblioMinistry to be a place where participants could hold conversations with each other and theological scholars, study the historical Jesus, and live into God’s call in their lives, including acting for justice in the world.
“’Thoughts and prayers’ are great, but they’re ineffective without action,” Rev. Rebecca muses. “The words ‘think,’ ‘pray,’ and ‘act’ really encapsulated what I was interested in and what I felt the church should be like: a place where we not only do serious theological learning together, but also act on what we learn by individually and collectively living into what God has called us to.”
And yet, she still didn’t view Think+Pray+Act as a church. It wasn’t until the spring of 2023, when she met Minister of New Church Strategies Rev. Dr. Jose Martinez at Compton Heights Christian Church, that she began to become confident in her project. That fall she attended New Church Ministry’s Leadership Academy, an event that empowers pastors, core teams, students, and others on their journey to become movement initiators. It also provides her with continuing support in the form of a new church coach with whom to discuss questions and concerns.
“If you find yourself outside of what has already been done, it feels lonely and you don’t know where you fit in,” Rev. Rebecca confesses. “Going to Leadership Academy was an affirming experience of my call. It helped legitimize what I was doing in my own head.”
And so, after 14 years of trying to find a way to integrate her library and theological education, she finally saw her dream come to life last fall, when she started putting together a leadership team. The following month, the Mid-America region unanimously voted to recommend Think+Pray+Act as a congregation in formation. In February of this year, it started gathering in the library of Compton Heights – a symbiotic relationship that Rev. Rebecca feels is an integral part of the success for emerging congregations.
“It’s easier for new churches to be on the forefront of innovation,” she says. “At the same time, more established churches remember the importance of tradition and can help churches like mine consider the ways that we can live it out in vibrant ways.”
Today, Think+Pray+Act meets in person on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month. It partners with Metropolitan Congregations United, an interfaith organization dedicated to congregation-based community organizing, to work for social justice in St. Louis.
As for the future, Think+Pray+Act is in the process of building the People’s Theological Library, which will be available both in print and online. It’s both a lasting testament and a call to the church to view theology as a conversation – one that lay people aren’t too afraid to join.
When you make a gift to the Pentecost Offering, half of your gift stays in the region in which it is received to support the local new church movement. The other half goes to New Church Ministry, which trains, equips, assists, and multiplies emerging and affiliating congregations and their leaders. Please give generously.
