The Pastor Nominating Committee joyfully introduces
Dr. Tony Sundermeier Senior Pastor JUNE 15, 2014
Dear First Presbyterian Church Members and Friends, We are overjoyed to nominate Dr. Tony Sundermeier as the next Senior Pastor of our beloved church. Over the course of the past year, we had the opportunity to learn about and meet many fine ministers in the PC(USA). After considering over 180 candidates in our process, it was a unanimous decision of the Pastor Nominating Committee (PNC) that God was calling Tony Sundermeier to our church. Tony’s strong preaching and teaching skills attracted us to him initially. As we had the opportunity to get to know him, we experienced first-hand his energetic, engaging personality. Above all, Tony readily and joyfully shares his love for Christ and his dedication to ministry. We are confident that his theological knowledge, winsome ability to convey the Gospel, strategic vision for the church, heart for service and mission, and inclusive leadership style will serve our church well as we enter our next chapter together. Guided by the Holy Spirit, First Presbyterian Church’s future under Tony’s leadership could not look brighter. We are grateful for your faithful prayers and for God’s tangible guidance during the past year. It has been an honor and privilege for all of us to represent our church in this process. This experience has reaffirmed our hope and excitement for our congregation and for the PC(USA). We eagerly anticipate the vibrant next chapter that lies ahead for our church and its vital ministry at the corner of Peachtree and 16th Streets.
Faithfully yours, Henry Grady, Co-Chair Melissa Trimble, Co-Chair Sarah Balsley Rick Bold Allison Cochran Nancy Cunningham
August Durmeyer Doug Ellis Dan Latham Granvette Matthews Anne Neikirk John Rooker
REFLECTIONS FROM TONY’S COLLEAGUES
“Tony is one of the best preachers, hands down…he is the creme de la creme. He sees people for who they are and is gifted to pastor people from all walks of life. He has broad vision and has the ability to engage people across gender, race, and income.”
Rev. Aisha Brooks-Lytle, Pastor for Mission, Wayne Presbyterian Church, Wayne, PA
“Tony is recognized as an ‘innovator.’ If he goes to a new church, he won’t just recycle what’s been done before.”
Dr. Christopher Edmonston, Senior Pastor, White Memorial Presbyterian Church, Raleigh, NC
“When you meet him, you have met him for life. He is ‘with’ you when you talk with him. He is a lot of fun. Tony gets how the church must reconnect with the culture.” Rev. Pete Peery, President, Montreat Conference Center, Montreat, NC “Tony has done real, real impressive work wherever he has gone. Tony is smart and well read, has an entrepreneurial impulse, and has his finger on the pulse of the church and the culture. He is not what you think of when you think of the decline of the mainline church. But he is exactly what I think of when I consider examples of success in ministry for my Harvard Divinity students.”
Dr. Jonathan Walton, Dean and Professor, Memorial Church, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA
“Thoughtful, articulate, bright, passionate, great teacher… Tony is one of the finest young theologians in the entire denomination.”
Rev. Don Lincoln, Lead Pastor, Westminster Presbyterian Church, West Chester, PA
“Tony is an innovative thinker and leader who is not satisfied with the status quo. He is good at helping get people on board with an idea, a mission, a project…this is in addition to being a great preacher and manager and being good with people.”
Dr. John Franke, Professor, Yellowstone Theological Institute, Bozeman, MT
The Sundermeier Family Tony is a Presbyterian minister actively engaged in the church nationwide. After graduating from Eastern University with a degree in theology and philosophy, Tony received his Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and completed his Doctorate of Ministry at Biblical Theological Seminary. His background has been focused primarily with large Presbyterian churches. Since 2009, he has successfully led First Presbyterian Church of Allentown, PA as their senior pastor, and before that call, he helped lead Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Chester, PA for six years. He is involved with numerous denominational leadership roles, community boards, and continuing education opportunities, including Community of Pastors, NEXT Church, Lehigh Presbytery, Gospel and Our Culture Network, Lehigh County Conference of Churches, and Communities in Schools. In addition to coaching and playing basketball, Tony enjoys golf, travel and all Philly sports teams! Tony met his wife, Katie, at The Wayne Presbyterian Church in Wayne, PA while working as a youth director. They were later married there on June 3, 2000. Katie is a Teaching Elder (ordained minister) in the PC(USA) and has most recently served as a Chaplain for Presbyterian Senior Living at Kirkland Village in Bethlehem, PA and the Easton Home in Easton, PA. She has also served the Lehigh Presbytery as a member of the Committee on Ministry. Katie is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Princeton Theological Seminary. Before her ministry with Presbyterian Senior Living, Katie served as an Associate Pastor for Pastoral Care at The Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Chester, PA. Katie is a certified pre-marital counselor and a trained Stephen Ministry Leader. She is the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister and she loves to spend time with her family, travel, run, hike, and read. The Sundermeiers have two sons. Jonathan, who is called Jonny, is eleven years old and is now as tall as his mother - something he is very excited about! He is a rising 6th grader and plays piano, basketball and runs cross-country. He is also a wonderful big brother. Luke is six years old and is a master Lego builder. He loves to climb things and hasn’t met a set of monkey bars he doesn’t like. Luke is a rising 1st grader.
STATEMENT OF FAITH | DR. TONY SUNDERMEIER
God is love. This confession establishes the ground of our being. For in the absence of God’s love there is no Creation; there is no call of Abraham and Israel; there is no Law; and there is no prophetic witness of what God intends to do for the cosmos. God’s mission is fundamentally rooted in God’s love and sovereign will to reconcile all of creation to God’sself and to reconcile humanity to one another. Through willful disobedience, however, human beings choose and chose to reject God’s mission of love. The Scriptures call this willful disobedience “sin.”
Jesus Christ incarnates God’s love. In order to overcome humanity’s sin and rejection of God’s mission of love, God continued to act in human history and as the person of Jesus Christ. Being fully God and fully human in one person, he is the mediator between God and humanity. As the mediator, Jesus Christ reconciles the cosmos to God’s-self. Jesus accomplishes this reconciliation through his moral witness; his sacrificial death for the forgiveness of sins; and his resurrection as victor over all principalities and powers of this world. Jesus overcomes sin through his unwavering obedience to God’s mission of love as historically demonstrated through his life, death, and resurrection.
The Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is a provisional witness of God’s love in the way of Jesus Christ. The Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, has been called into existence for the primary purpose of living God’s love in the way of Jesus Christ. The Church is sent into the world as ambassadors of Christ and his Good News for all people. Through the proclamation of the Word of God rooted in the Scriptures; the celebration of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; and through the practices of evangelism and justice; the Church bears witness to the Kingdom of God which marks God’s reign of love in and for the world. The Church’s provisional witness is a plural witness. The Holy Spirit inspires this plural witness of the Church in all its diverse forms and expressions. The Church’s unity, then, is not found in its forms or expressions, nor is it found in exegetical homogeny, ecclesiastical sameness, or theological subscription. Instead, the unity of the Church is found in the mission of God as God chooses the Church for the purposes of love. The Church, in its call and freedom to love, is willing and able to collaborate with any and all people to fulfill God’s purposes of reconciliation.
Human history will end in the confession that Jesus Christ is the Lord of love. The trajectory of human history rides an arc toward the confession that Jesus Christ is the Lord of love. His Lordship will be vindicated when those who sleep in him will be raised from the dead to receive a new heaven and a new earth. This new heaven and new earth are the telos of God’s love. This end will be an everlasting age when there will be no more death, no more tears, and no more pain. It will be an age when God will establish God’s forever-home with all of humanity.
FAITH JOURNEY NARRATIVE | DR. TONY SUNDERMEIER
First things first, I didn’t know what a Protestant was until high school. As strange as that sounds, it was not all that unusual given the neighborhood in which I was raised. Settled by Roman Catholic Irish immigrants, the Mayfair section of Philadelphia was defined by four or five parishes that outlined its borders. I was part of St. Timothy’s parish and faithfully attended parochial school and Mass each and every Sunday. My parents were both committed, not only to the Roman Catholic Church, but also to Jesus Christ and the way of Christian discipleship. Among my peers I discovered this to be a unique quality in them: my parents’ faith pressed beyond the pro forma and “walked in the world.” It was through their witness that I first learned what it means to follow Jesus as a way of life. When I was a sophomore in high school my father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. During that traumatic season, I watched his faith deepen and bloom. More than that, I watched him minister to his friends, to his family, and to me. He died at age forty-six. I was sixteen. It was at the visitation hour the night before his funeral Mass when I first heard God’s specific call on my life. I was standing next to the casket when God spoke, not in an audible way, but in the way of that “still small voice.” The Lord said, “Tony, I want you to serve my mission of love the way your father did and even beyond.” As the new normal set in, I wrestled with this call. I knew I was not called to the priesthood but had little vision as to how God’s call might be made manifest outside of what I had come to know in the Roman Catholic Church. Things began to open up for me through a series of relationships with the first Protestants I had ever befriended. Through those relationships I was introduced to the Protestant imagination and its core commitments. This theological lens was so different from what I so used to and yet was so very compelling. I enrolled at Eastern University, a social-justice, evangelically minded school located on the outskirts of Philadelphia. It was at Eastern where I cut my teeth on the motto, “The Whole Gospel for the Whole
World,” as mentors like Tony Campolo passionately invited us to take Jesus’ call to radical discipleship with the utmost seriousness. With roommates like Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Lupton (his father is Bob Lupton of FCS Urban Ministries in Atlanta), we explored what it means to be a Christian on the precipice of a new millennium by engaging the space between the post-liberal and post-Evangelical movements. We didn’t know what we were becoming: Progressive Evangelicals or Evangelical Progressives but we did know we cared a heck of a lot about poor people and rich people, and sought to meet them through the ministries of evangelism and justice. It was at that same time that I found my way into the Wayne Presbyterian Church (Wayne, PA) as a 30 hour per week, unpaid summer youth intern and as a 20 hour a week custodian. It was there I became a Presbyterian at age nineteen. It was there that my romance with Reformed theology had its genesis. It was there that mentors encouraged my journey toward Princeton Theological Seminary, the ministry of Teaching Elder, and profound conversations about the Missional Church. It wasn’t just Wayne Presbyterian Church that shaped my faith, theology, and call, but churches like First Presbyterian Church of Moorestown, NJ; The American Protestant Church in Bonn, Germany; Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Chester, PA; and the First Presbyterian Church in Allentown, PA. All of these communities have contributed, by the power of the Holy Spirit, significant and irreplaceable gifts and experiences that shape my faith today. Above all, I am blessed to walk the way of Jesus with a wonderfully faithful and strong partner. Katie and I very much view our marriage as a platform to live out our discipleship and as a witness, albeit an imperfect one, to God’s perfecting love. Our sons, Jonny and Luke, remind us each and every day that the very best gifts come wrapped up in flesh; especially the gift of our Lord and Savior who is the author and perfecter of our faith.
Dear Members and Friends of First Presbyterian Church, What a joy it is to be with you today! Katie and I, along with our sons Jonny and Luke, are thrilled with the prospect of practicing faith and life with this dynamic and gifted church! For the past five months, we have been blessed, amazed, and simply overwhelmed by the way the Holy Spirit has joyfully led us through this process with your remarkable PNC. The PNC members embody a passion, hope, and love for Jesus Christ; for your congregation; and for the neighbors to which you have been called to serve. That passion, hope, and love deeply resonate with my gifts and my own sense of call. The more we sojourned with the PNC, the more our imagination grew as to what it might mean for God to call us together for ministry. This is an exciting time in the life of the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta! God has you poised for incredible opportunities that will continue to love and bless this church, the city, and the world! The potential of an affirmative call to join with you in this season only serves to expand my enthusiasm and gratitude for what is possible in this next chapter of your church’s faithful history. Blessings,
Dr. Tony Sundermeier