Harundale Presbyterian Church participated in the 2026 Innovation Lab, presented by a partnership between the Presbytery of Baltimore and PC(USA)’s Office of Innovation.
Learn more – Apply for 2027 Innovation Lab Cohort

If you attended service at Harundale Presbyterian Church (HPC) one of the first three weeks of May, you heard about the Innovation Lab experiment HPC was honored to be a part of. Baltimore Presbytery offered a several month training class teaching congregations about how to pursue faithful innovation.  Per the guidance of the Lab’s instructors, the HPC team sought to listen to hear how the Spirit was uniquely moving in our congregation, and then take a step of faith and create an experiment to see where that led.

After hearing many congregants talk about where they’d seen the Spirit moving on our campus, HPC’s team chose to interview congregants who had been unable to attend for a while, and ask where they had seen the Spirit move.  With the permission of our interviewees, we videoed the interviews and then edited them to share the videos with the larger congregation.

The four questions asked of each interviewee were:

• How did you get involved with Harundale?
• What did you love to do at Harundale?  (Boards, serving, …)
• Share your faith story: how did you come to faith or when did you recognize your faith as your own?
• What advice would you give our younger congregants?  What path would you like to see Harundale take in the future?

Each interview was held in the congregants’ home, recorded using cell phones.  All videos were then edited to just a few minutes to support playing them as part of the larger service in the weeks leading up to Pentecost where we celebrate the first disciples receiving the Holy Spirit.  As each video was made by a different member of our innovation team, each member of the team got to learn how to edit videos and how to share them with the AV team.  We quickly discovered that captions were useful for our congregation, and so worked out means of doing that, as well.

Each week of May, we shared a new video, and the congregation looked forward to who they’d next get to hear from.  As we introduced the video, we talked about the innovation process and the desire to find new ways to help us share our own faith stories. The process became a way to help us share our homebound seniors’ faith stories and help them be part of the service, while reminding us all that we are called to take the good news to the world. 

We thank Pat, Iolette, and Harryet for their willingness to share their faith stories and for helping us experiment!

– Tina Coleman, Harundale Presbyterian Church