Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I started the annual meeting this year with the Parable of the Sweaters.

I brought the sweaters in question in a reusable grocery bag. All are knit by me, and only one of them is finished. The one that is finished is the first one I ever knit, and it has a few dropped stitches to prove it. It’s the one that showed me and the world that I could knit a sweater. I was so proud and excited, I immediately started three more. That’s right: not one, not two, but three. For the last year-and-a-half, I’ve been knitting three sweaters.

All of the sweaters are far enough along to be recognizably sweaters. One is my meeting sweater, which I knit to keep my monkey brain under control at diocesan meetings. It’s very close to finished. One I just had to start immediately because my mother gave me some very beautiful wool that her sheep farmer neighbor spun by hand. It is missing sleeves, and the neck is all wrong. Much as it pains me, I’m going to have to unravel the neck and do it over. The third sweater is done except for one sleeve. I’ve forgotten how the lace pattern at the cuffs goes, and what gauge needle I was using, but soon I’m going to find the book that had the pattern in it (of course I wasn’t following the pattern exactly)...

I brought my sweaters to the annual meeting because they illustrate my best and worst qualities as a rector. I am enthusiastic, and capable of doing several things at once. On the other hand, I am enthusiastic, and not everything I start has a clear timeline to completion. The sweaters were a way of telling that truth, laughing at it, and giving us a story to tell together.

It’s all about experimentation these days in church. Our time-tested ways are falling apart faster than we can track. We don’t have the luxury to knit every project to completion before we try something else. But sometimes church feels like a pile of unfinished sweaters, and that really drives some people nuts.

What stories do you tell to keep things real about the challenges and frustrations of life in your congregation? How are you managing experimentation? How do you help people track where things are with different projects? Do you have the courage to unravel and start over when something isn’t working? Are there things that you need to focus on, maybe by putting other things aside?