Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Last week, my colleagues and I began compiling “the stack,” a sizeable tower of completed applications to ECF’s Fellowship Partners Program. As the stack rose higher and higher, it quickly became clear that this year we’d had a bumper crop.

We have received more than twice the number of applications this year than last, a fact which leads me to believe that the Holy Spirit has been particularly active over these last few months, inspiring individuals from across the Episcopal Church to dream big, take risks, and frame innovative projects for the future of the Church.

I’ve since had a chance to read every one of those applications, and I’ve come away from this task genuinely inspired, reinvigorated, and hopeful. I also know that it will be very difficult for our selection committee to choose just three.

The ECF Fellowship Partners Program is one of the longest standing programs of the Episcopal Church Foundation. Since 1964, ECF has been offering grants on a yearly basis to three or four emerging academics and ministry leaders in the Church. Until very recently, these grants have focused exclusively on supporting emerging scholars, though today we’ve expanded this to include individuals who are engaged in transformational ministry projects. As my former colleague Anne Ditzler put it, “This program, at its core, is a ministry of encouragement, risk-taking, and investing in potential...Our hope is for an ECF Fellowship to be a ray of light, encouraging the yet unknown future of an individual and his or her ministry.”

(Click here to learn more about the ECF Fellowship Partners Program, and here to see a full list of ECF Fellows.)

In many respects, those who’ve applied to become an ECF Fellow vary greatly, including differences in methods, proposed areas of study, and backgrounds. Yet there were also some startlingly common threads. Here are three themes I noted while reading the applications:

• The Episcopal Church is great place to come back to: While congregational leaders are frequently concerned about folks who wander away from the flock for a while, many applicants described these periods of wandering – oftentimes as young adults - as one of the most fruitful parts of their spiritual journeys offering them experiences, perspective and skills which they are now bringing to their current efforts in the Church. This was so often the case that it made me wonder whether our anxiety over this issue is displaced. Might we begin to bless this wandering, seeing it as part of a much larger life journey?
• Beyond the red doors: While some applicants wrote about how their studies and projects would influence the lives of Episcopal congregations, many wrote quite clearly about how their studies/projects were taking into account a widespread distrust of the institutional church and its most powerful symbol, the church as physical plant. Proposed studies and projects focused on how we encounter God when we move beyond the red doors, into our neighborhoods, into refugee camps, on hikes, and beyond.
• Our future is bright (though also lean, uncharted, and somewhat scary): One of the benefits of this sort of application process is that we get to hear from many, many thoughtful leaders about what they think the future of the Church is. This is frequently stated explicitly and implicitly. Many academics chose not to presume full-time teaching jobs at Episcopal seminaries, though the ECF Fellowship Partners program began fifty years ago with full-time Episcopal seminary positions as a sort of assumption. These academics spoke of carrying out their teaching careers in a whole variety of other contexts, sharing their passion for their subject across a wide cross-section platforms and places, and frequently they spoke of becoming bi-vocational academics. Secondly, it appears many leaders are presuming a day, one very near in our future, when the local congregation can no longer serve as the primary locus of Episcopal identity.

I came away from this process inspired, invigorated, and hopeful for the future of our Church. I also came away feeling frustrated that we cannot offer more support to many of these individuals. A new Church is being birthed even as we speak, and it’s a privilege to be able to be even a small part of that process.