The Rev. Herbert L. Lynskey wants to plant spiritual seeds he hopes will sprout growing churches for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the Houston area.

Lynskey, 50, is the new area minister for the Houston-based Coastal Plains Area, a regional grouping of churches similar to a diocese or synod. The Coastal Plains Area consists of 52 congregations with 8,000 Disciples stretching from the Louisiana-Texas border west to Brenham and from the Gulf Coast north to Huntsville.

As area minister, Lynskey wants to challenge Disciples to take on new missions and outreach programs to reverse declines in membership. He also hopes to emphasize spirituality as a pillar of church growth. It is a new direction for a denomination that has dropped from 2.2 million members nationally in the 1960s to fewer than 1 million today.

"We are at a crossroads as a denomination," said Lynskey, who pastored Kirkwood South Christian Church in Houston from 1988 to 1998. "Our numbers have being going down the past few years as many of the mainline denominations’ have."

Lynskey took over area minister responsibilities Nov. 1 but will be formally installed Jan. 19 at Memorial Drive Christian Church.

In his installation sermon, Lynskey will ask ministers and church members to enter into a "season of prayer" to discover "what is God’s intention for us in the Coastal Plains Area." He will visit each of five sub-area clusters composed of about 10 churches each before the next annual assembly in April.

At each cluster, he will listen to what churches propose for missions and outreach so he can introduce a three-year area plan at the annual meeting in Beaumont.

"Prayer is two-way communication," Lynskey said. "It is communicating with God and being silent and quiet enough to allow God to speak to us.

He hopes the churches will be inspired "to do something larger than any of the churches can do by themselves," he said. He wants programs that display Disciples’ social concerns and willingness to reach out to neighbors.

One idea Lynskey is considering is an annual program to take Disciple youths and adults to domestic and foreign missions. The youths would serve primarily in other areas of the United States while the adults could serve both in the States and outside the country. The area currently supports missions in the Rio Grande Valley through its Good Samaritan program.

The mission trips would help Disciples put their lives in perspective and be grateful for what they have, Lynskey said.

They also would help others understand Disciples and their emphasis on service.

As area minister, the Ohio native will wear several hats, but his top priority is knowing and assisting the nearly 100 ministers in the area.

"I certainly am, first and foremost, the pastor to the pastors in the Coastal Plains Area and to their congregations," said Lynskey, who pastored churches in Kentucky and Ohio before moving to Texas in 1980.

Although he is already meeting with ministers by regularly attending cluster meetings, he wants to bring together the ministers in a retreat setting for 24 to 36 hours of prayer and meditation. He also wants a similar annual retreat for ministers and their spouses.

Lynskey is keenly aware of the stress and strains ministers face, especially in Disciples churches. Because the average congregation size is 150 to 200, most churches have enough money to hire only a minister and perhaps one other support staff member, he said. That means most ministers face an imposing workload.

Helping churches attract new members is an integral step to increasing funds for more ministers and outreach programs, Lynskey reasons. And it would mean more contributions to the area’s annual budget of $230,000 that can in turn fund new programs. The annual budget funds Lynskey’s salary and that of an administrative assistant, as well as administrative costs, the Good Samaritan program and other causes.

Before returning to Houston as area minister, Lynskey spent four years in Austin working for the southwest region of the Christian Church dealing with recruitment, ordination and other ministerial concerns. The region, headquartered in Fort Worth, includes Texas, New Mexico, the Oklahoma Panhandle and a portion of Kansas.

A major denominational concern is the graying of the ministry, Lynskey said.

"We are not educating as many ministers today as we have in the past," he said.

In 2000, the region sponsored an assembly of young men and women interested in the ministry at the denomination’s Brite Divinity School, which is part of Texas Christian University.

The gathering in Fort worth attracted 89 people under the age of 25. "Even if they choose not to come into the ministry, part of what we have done is educate some top quality lay leadership for future years," he said.

"It is good to have a minister of ministers," said the Rev. Max Hickerson, pastor of First Christian Church, which provides office space for Lynskey. "Preachers have an awful lot of work to do, and they quite often don’t have anyone they can go to. Lynskey will be strong in ministry, and that is what we want and need."

But it will take more than qualified ministers and concerned laity to reverse the decline, said Lynn Mitchell, religion scholar in residence at the University of Houston. The denomination is not particularly strong in Texas, he said. Moreover, many Disciples are not knowIedgeable about the denomination’s history or doctrines, he said.

The denomination began in the 19th century through the works of brothers Thomas and Alexander Campbell and a later merger with the work of Barton Stone. The ministers thought Protestantism could be unified and "restored" through churches that were basically autonomous. They

commemorated the Lord’s Stipper weekly and accepted "believer’s baptism," which meant a believer had to be old enough to understand Christian tenets.

The denomination suffered schisms over the years, including a split in the 1930s that divided the conservative Churches of Christ from the more liberal Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ).

The Christian Churches pursued ecumenism and social service, which has led to softening of doctrine in the denomination, Mitchell said.

Lynskey’s proposed emphasis on spirituality and outreach would be "a breath of fresh airy’ Mitchell said. "Some of the past area ministers have not been interested in anything except social concerns."

Lynskey said the denomination’s history is both a blessing and a bane. The denomination’s emphasis on individual and local church autonomy has produced a frontier-style independence that sometimes undermines cooperation.

"Sometimes the fierce independence that we have allows people to pull back when they want to or don’t understand something," he said. Disciples cooperate because they are in covenant or make "a holy promise to work with one another."

"That only works as people are willing to do that," he said.

The denomination has appeal in modern society because it runs the theological gamut from ultra-conservative to liberal, he said. The denomination does not have the whole "truth," but part of it, he said.

"We are part of the Christian family taking in all of Protestantism and the Catholic Church," Lynskey said.