Meet Patrick Harley

As part of a connected denomination, pastors and ruling elders share responsibilities of carrying out the mission of the presbytery.  Our presbytery, composed of sixty-seven congregations in northeast Tennessee, possesses certain functions that congregations alone cannot carry out.  One of these is the preparation for ministry of women and men who have responded to God's call to enter ordained ministry to serve as teaching elders in the Church.

The Committee on Preparation for Ministry walks with these students through their seminary experience, and seek to evaluate their progress and provide mutual discernment for where God is calling them to serve.  I can attest from going through the experience in recent memory, it can feel somewhat tedious and laborious, filling out pages and pages of paperwork, organizing meetings, and traveling to presbytery events, but the work we carry out really is necessary if we believe in a system of mutual support and accountability.

Those seeking to become ordained in ministry must go through a series of steps with the presbytery that takes roughly three years, in addition to completing the Master's of Divinity Degree (which first requires a bacculaurete degree) and passing five denominational Ordination Exams.

Through the experience, the inquirer (the term for someone in discernment ) and later candidate (the stage to which the person moves if she or he indeed feels led to ordained service) is given a liason to accompany them through the journey.

I had a wonderful liason on my presbytery in East Tennessee, when I was in the ordination process.  The Rev. Dave Webster would contact me each quarter with updates on the process and would elicit information from me about my spiritual growth.  When I was beginning to seek a call, he shared with me from his own experience and asked important questions that helped me to listen more carefully to the Holy Spirit at work.

Because of this experience, I wanted to serve on the CPM so that I might have the chance to provide this care for a future candidate for ministry. 

At our last CPM meeting, I was named as the liason for Patrick Harley.  Patrick is from Greeneville, Tennessee where he was raised at the First Presbyterian Church.  He is a graduate of Auburn University where he majored in Philosophy and Religious Studies, was active in campus ministry, and served as the youth leader at FPC Auburn.  He has served as staff and as a member of planning teams for the Montreat Conference Center and just completed a year with the Young Adult Volunteer program of the PC(USA) in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

He met with our committee only days after returning to the States, and it was a joy to hear about what God has been doing in his life over the past several years, from the early rumblings of call to ministry as a teenager, to the willingness to step into a foreign context to listen more carefully to God's call.

Patrick and I had a chance to meet for lunch last week before he heads to Decatur, Georgia to begin his studies at Columbia Theological Seminary.  I have appreciated his honesty, his openness, his attentiveness to the Spirit, and I ask the prayers of our church for Patrick as he continues to strive to deepen his walk with the Lord and respond to the call of Jesus in his life.

From our limited time together I feel very clear that the PC(USA) needs thoughtful, compassionate, and energized leadership that Patrick already exudes.  I look forward to walking with him in this journey and hope we might find ways for him to get to know some more members of our congregation as well.

I think it is helpful to see a face behind the money and time we dedicate to our Presbyterian identity.  Indirectly, our church has supported Patrick through our funds that help to maintain the Holston Presbytery Camp and Retreat Center, through denominational gifts that strengthen the Young Adult Volunteer Program and help to put on Youth and College Conferences at Montreat.  I am grateful that this congregation allows me to serve on a presbytery committee and take time to visit with future leaders in the church.  Let us remember that the Church and Mission of Jesus is far greater than our congregation that gathers each week, and let us continue to look and listen to those God puts in our lives to deepen our knowledge of what it means to be the body of Christ.