As sure as Santa Claus directed the crowds into Macy’s at the end of the Thanksgiving Day parade, we can expect to be swept up into the rush of the “the holidays.”
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited, “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word.” (BCP)
Today we claim the song as ours, belting it out full throttle, especially today as we celebrate All Saints Day.
“I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true, who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew. And one was a doctor and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green: they were all of them saints of God—and I mean, God helping, to be one too.”
(If you’re primed to sing the rest, go ahead and turn to page 293 in the 1982 Hymnal of the Episcopal Church).
Congregations everywhere are concerned with their growth. There are books, magazines, and inspiring speakers who all share strategies for growth, and church leaders diligently listen, plan, and implement. This is a good thing. It is important that church leaders be diligent and intentional about growing their communities. It is also important, however, that the growth of congregations be not only numerical but also spiritual.
I hesitate saying this. I know many churches who use “spiritual growth” as a crutch for excusing their lack of growth in the areas of evangelism, formation, and leadership development. As with most things in life, it is not one thing or the other. Growth in a congregation, a sign of life and vitality, is about all kinds of growth at the same time. Spiritual growth is not measured by the increase in warm feelings, nor by engaging in passionate discussions about religious matters, but it is measured by the way a person, or church, lives. Living in Christ and bearing fruit to God’s glory is a mark of discipleship (John 15:4-8). And how is this expressed? Through our love—again not an emotion but an action, loving our neighbors as ourselves, seeking to serve Christ by serving our neighbor, and serving the least of these (Matthew 25:40).
For most of my ministry, people have been wringing their hands about the decline of mainline churches. From my first days of service as a priest, I heard people say that we’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The image prompted a cartoon in six frames: As the ship disappears into icy waters, one could hear words from the top deck, one word per frame: We’ve… never… done…it… that…way.
I’ve wondered about the decline. Does it have to do with style of music or liturgy? Is it due to a lousy spirit of welcome? Is it about formality among the frozen chosen? Does it have to do with divisions on social or political issues? Or with indisputable hypocrisy, with shortcomings and abuses by church leaders, too many to number.
The message heard loud and clear at our monthly UBE (Union of Black Episcopalians) meetings at different congregations throughout the Diocese of New Jersey was how difficult it was to fill all Sunday services with a clergy person. The reasons were varied; the congregation may have been in transition, or the full time clergy was on vacation, on sabbatical, or even ill.
One idea stood out from all of our discussions. A clergy person suggested we re-embrace layperson led Morning Prayer as a legitimate form of Sunday morning worship. Response was mixed. Anglicans from the Caribbean or Africa experienced Morning Prayer often, due to less frequent clergy availability due to the number of congregations to be served. Older members had positively experienced Morning Prayer as common practice in times past. For others it was a harder pill to swallow, as they believed if there was no Communion then we didn’t really have a Service. There was also feedback that Morning Prayer was unfulfilling and it some cases even boring.
Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry new video is here. (3:58)
Note: The following is the transcript of the Presiding Bishop’s video message in English and Spanish.
We’ve been talking for a little over a year now about being the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement, and somebody recently said to me, “As a bishop, why don’t you paint us a picture, give us a picture of the Jesus Movement so that we can see it?”
I’m writing this on the day after Labor Day, also known in our household as our daughter’s first day of third grade. In our community, most school-aged children have been back in school for a while now (my daughter’s school does things a bit differently), but summer’s unofficial ending is now past.
In the church, as well, we’re gearing up for another year of Sunday School and formation. Our Sunday School Kickoff Sunday is, as it’s been, this weekend, right after Labor Day. I’m very proud that St. George’s, as a community, has grown a heart for formation ministries. When I arrived as rector nine years ago, there was a dedicated team of teachers and a great, but small crew of children and youth. They followed the one-room-schoolhouse approach, and critical numbers weren’t strong enough. Teachers on the search committee told me they didn’t have enough volunteers to help so, in their words, “we all wear several hats.” In my first few years, as part of investing in this community – not just the congregation I saw regularly but the wider networks of people, many of whom have deep ties to this church – I met lots of children, and learned that this area is, in fact, teeming with young families and young children, and I also came into contact with a lot of gifted and spiritually deep adults, many of whom are currently some of our best teachers. Our Sunday School has grown from one class to four, from probably a handful of children to nearly 40. I’m proud that the addition of a regular Sunday morning adult forum has seemed to stick, too.
Justin Martyr, First Apology
She’s been going through a particularly difficult time – “rough,” I’m sure any of us would say. A significant death in her family, struggles with her job and making ends meet, and add to that internal strife within the remaining members of her family have left her nearly broken. “I’m not nearly as bad as where I was some time ago,” she said, referring to an even darker period, “but I’m not well, either.”
We thought we were going to have to cancel it, just like another local congregation did for theirs. This summer’s Vacation Bible School, held at St. George’s and sponsored by both Church of the Ascension, Lexington Park, and St. George’s, Valley Lee, was on the calendar for a while. Our congregation’s VBS coordinator and, all around, VBS cheerleader was getting stuff ready. The starter kit was purchased, and plans were being made. The roadside banner was ordered, and the website set-up.
But no one was registered. A few registrations started to come in in the past month or so, one after another. But just a few. A bunch of our congregation’s regular kids and families were busy that week, they said, or they couldn’t otherwise commit to attending. Some were out of town on vacation or work trips. Should we cancel, too, we wondered?
Instead of cancelling, we decided to expand it. I told the VBS coordinator that I, for one, was ‘all in,’ and even if we had just a handful of kids it’d be well worth it. I was looking forward to a great week of formation and fun – and looking forward to helping touch the lives of those whom we know already, and those whom (I hoped) we didn’t yet know. Instead of 9 am to noon, or during the evenings, as some congregations tend to do, we even expanded the whole day, starting at 9 am and running to 3 pm – and leaving time for the parents to drop off the kids beforehand and pick them up anytime after the close-up time. Lunch and snacks were provided, we told the parents.
Our local postmaster inspired this idea last summer, at least in my head. “Why don’t you guys have a day camp?” she asked me last year, admitting that she was looking for a safe and positive place to bring her two children during the days and, plus, she drives past our church every day on her way to the Valley Lee post office. My answer made sense to me, and it’s probably what a lot of church leadership says: “It’s too much work and we don’t have the capacity to pull off a day camp.” Like I said, that answer made sense to me and, to boot, it was technically correct. But it’s not the answer she was looking for, nor is it, I think, a satisfactory statement on the part of the Body of Christ.
Richelle Thompson is vacationing with her family. While she’s away, ECF Vital Practices is offering ‘reruns’ of some of her more popular posts, this one from May 31, 2011.
Campers could share a lot with parishioners when it comes to building community.
We travel frequently with our children – my son was seven weeks old when I flew to New York City for a business trip. I wasn’t ready to leave him yet, so we packed the Baby Bjorn and gave him an early taste of Times Square. The kids have been to Disney (World and Land), San Francisco, Niagara Falls, and lots of places in between.
But invariably, when we ask their favorite vacation, the reply is instant and unanimous: camping.
I thought about this over the Memorial Day weekend, as we rented our small slice of the outdoors for a three-day retreat.
Campers build community quickly. After all, they’re only around for a couple of nights – there’s no time to put out tentative feelers. It’s jump-in and take-a-risk community-building. The folks at the next campsite run out of dishwashing soap and instead of making a run to Wal-Mart, they cross five feet into the next site and ask if they can borrow some. When another driver is struggling to back into a site, fellow campers hop up and start guiding him. During the outdoor movie, people sit together and laugh; they share popcorn and mosquito spray.
Blanche Dubois might always depend on the kindness of strangers, but I am inspired by their faithfulness.
In an airport lounge, I took a seat next to an older couple. The man wore a clergy collar, so I asked if he was Episcopalian. For the next half hour, we talked about vocation. He started the conversation with a quote from Mark Twain: The two most important days in your life are the day you’re born – and the day you discover why you were born. For him, the second day was when he decided he had a call to the priesthood.
Ordained for more than sixty years, he told me about his ministry with the Cherokees and his father's experience of being mentored by David Oakerhater, a saint on the Episcopal calendar. Oakerhater’s legacy – and that of Harriet Bedell, another Episcopal saint, propelled him to compassion and commitment. Since retirement, he said he has served in more than fifty congregations, filling in between priests or serving in small congregations. He shared about receiving a call for a two-month gig at a Mandarin congregation on the West Coast. It turned into six years of service, and even though the church no longer meets, he is that community’s pastor, baptizing, marrying, and burying his flock.
Let me show you some of them, he said. And he reached into his suit jacket. I expected a cell phone (How else do we share pictures today), but he pulled out a stack of photographs held together with a paper clip. Here was a wedding. A baptism. A young Asian boy looking into the eyes of this elderly Caucasian man. That, he said, is my godson.
"But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ..." (Ephesians 4:15)
This morning I attended the funeral of a former parishioner of mine at St. Francis Church in Holden [Massachusetts]. I'll call her Jane, because that was her name. Her obituary can be found here.
Jane was a hearty, independent New Englander through and through. She was the kind of saint that every healthy congregation needs and hopefully has. As my successor put it so well in his homily, Jane was "a truth-teller with a sincere and faithful heart." A lot of that truth was directed to the clergy - but always in love.
When I was a young new priest who thought I knew everything, Jane Howell helped me to grow up. She had a way of coming directly to me. You'd never hear it second hand from a parking lot conversation. She could be wrong, but more often she was right - or at least mostly right. She loved the Lord, her church, and the clergy - in that order. And she had lots of opinions about how I might do better to build up the Church and to serve the Lord. But as the preacher noted today, she loved God enough to speak the truth to him in love. (In fact I was very happy to hear she had not played favorites with me, but that in just a couple of years she had helped form him too! And I know of at least one other friend, now in the House of Bishops, who would say the same thing.)
When I was first ordained, I wasn't so sure that I liked the term "baby priest." In my case I was quite literally kind of a baby - heading to seminary right out of college. But even for later vocations, even for people who have had fancy careers and are then ordained in their forties or fifties, the truth is that priests are not fully formed after the bishop puts her or his hands on our head. It takes time and practice to truly form a priest: a good theological education, faithful mentors and colleagues and lots more. Someone said to me once that it takes at least ten years of prayer, and listening, and loving the people with whom we share ministry, and that seems about right.
When a two-year-old is antsy and curious, parents squirm. Especially when it’s the day of the younger brother’s baptism and the entire family is in the pews, the church is full, and you have imagined this moment as perfect. Mom’s arms are full with a newborn, and Dad is wrangling two other preschoolers.
As parents, most of us have been there. We try to summon superpowers so that the glare from our eyes will magically curtail the exploration. We marvel at the superpowers of our children who can suddenly make their bodies completely limp and boneless when we try to pull them off the floor, out from under the pews, and in from the aisles. We wither a bit inside as our children choose this day, this moment, to explore, to fuss, to wander.
But here’s the thing: They’re kids. And this is their church too.
I’ve been to churches and with parishioners who still espouse the philosophy of children as seen but not heard. I remember the chiding from a fellow congregant when my children were little. I was feeding my 10-week-old, and our three-year-old wiggled out of the seat and to her father, who was preaching. He scooped her up and continued. After the service, the parishioner told me I needed to control my child and heaped on other digs about my poor parenting. My hurt and indignation burn a decade later.
I recently came across an intriguing statement from the twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth: “I don’t believe in the empty tomb,” Barth is rumored to have said; “I believe in the risen Lord.” According to those who know Barth’s work well, “he is known for down-playing the empty tomb, both in print and in verbal answers to questions” – this according to my new favorite Facebook page, Karl Barth for Dummies. This is the case, according to Barth, because the resurrection isn’t strictly an historical event; it’s a theological, indeed an eschatological (that is, end of time) truth.
I’ve never really understood Barth, although I’ve long been drawn to his manner of thinking. For him, if I can put it in a decent nutshell, God isn’t something we can imagine or readily engage; nor is God’s will something we can reasonably discern. God is Other. And we are, from time to time, utterly foolish when we try to draw the Other closer, to make it more like the ‘ground of our being.’
As I said, I don’t fully get it, but what I do understand is that there is a passion, a drive, and a conviction behind and within him. There’s something other-worldly which undoubtedly inspired Barth, and it seems he kept pursuing that truth throughout the whole of his life – as a teacher, as a pastor; above all, as a follower of Jesus. Even though Barth scholars will always have much more to say than what I just described, I find the most interesting thing about his thinking is where it comes from in his life. Whatever led this man to write, literally, volumes upon volumes of dense theology was the power of one lasting inspiration, the power of one idea.
And one great inspiration can, it seems, change the world.
Sunday School is a tough challenge for smaller churches. There are Sundays with no kids in church. There are Sundays with one baby, two toddlers, an 8-year old, and a middle schooler. Neither scenario lends itself to an easy classroom scenario, even if we had a consistent pool of volunteers, and someone to organize curriculum, prepare materials, etc. Those are issues too…
To further complicate things at St. Mary’s, we are a congregation that has been mostly English speaking for the last fifty-plus years, and now most of the kids come to the Spanish service. So even when the English-speaking parents who grew up with traditional Sunday School get together to try to revive Sunday School, there are issues of timing, and varying cultural expectations about what to do with kids in church.
What we have come up with is not perfect. But it’s quite a bit better than nothing. We created a kids’ corner. It’s at the back of the church, using a cozy-ish space that was previously used to store folding chairs. It’s immediately visible when you walk into church. We added a rug, a rocking chair, a small table with colorful little-people-sized chairs, bookshelves with donated books, an old wooden giraffe from a long-ago carnival set-up, a kid-sized altar that the Sunday School used to use, some colorful biblical art, and lots of paper and crayons.
Here’s what’s great about it:
Holy Week, the seven days preceding Easter, commemorates the suffering and death of Jesus, as recounted in Christian Scripture. Like all Anglican churches, Trinity Church Wall Street offers a variety of services that have long history and tradition.
In this series of videos, members of Trinity’s liturgical staff present descriptions of the significant days of Holy Week, the liturgies connected with them, and the reasons why they can be so personally meaningful.
Palm Sunday
Tenebrae
Maundy Thursday
Good Friday
Great Vigil
Like all the videos Trinity produces, these are intended to be a resource for other communities. Please use and share them however you would like. We hope you find them inspiring and useful.
Thank you to Trinity Wall Street for giving ECF Vital Practices permission to share these videos.
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We’ve been having a great deal of success with our Sunday morning adult formation at St. George’s in Valley Lee, and it doesn’t have anything to do with new people. This year we tried something new, something a little bit bold, but I wanted to see if it’d work. And it has, so far.
A little bit about our immediate past: as is the case at many congregations, a Sunday morning at St. George’s is a busy and wonderful time. There’s a lot to do and catch up on, but save for Children’s Chapel and Sunday School classes for kids and youth, there’s not a lot of intentional formation going on. Worship is part and parcel of formation, I know, and meaningful worship and lively music and rich fellowship remain strong and central to our Sunday morning offering.
In previous years, we tried to offer an adult bible study. Oh, we tried everything: lectionary series, intensive 36-week study of one book, a co-teacher, and various hosts for various sessions of the class. But, year after year, the trends repeated themselves: it’d start off strong in September, maybe 15 people gathered in the conference room, and those numbers and, more so, that energy and commitment kept up through October, and then numbers would start dropping, one by one, leaving only a few really committed adult students a few weeks by the first Sunday of Advent. The week we’d resume in January, most of them forgot all about it – Christmas having erased their brain, I guess – and it’d stall out right then and there.
At some point in the late summer, as I was praying about and gearing up again for this program year, I felt a sudden call – an urge, really. We were being called, I sensed, to put all the energy, all the time, all the resources of our church – or at least what we do, and why we do it – into discipleship making. If those things don’t fit the fairly loose category called “Making Disciples” then we weren’t going to do them, or at least we weren’t going to stress about them. If those things were about Discipleship 101, even if they had the faintest, loosest connection to it, we were going to shine greater light on them and move them to the center.
Although the early numbers for 2016 seem pointed in an even more exciting direction than we previously thought, there are still some issues we need to work through. But working through them as part of an overall church growth strategy, such as we’ve learned to do for so many years, is not what we’re being called to do. Not now, that is.
This past fall, you see, St. George’s, Valley Lee went through a rather intense series of discernment. For one, we kicked off year one of a three-year financial stewardship campaign we’re calling ‘Growing Generous Givers.’ We wanted to be honest about our overall growth patterns – and there has been much growth, and much to celebrate – as well as naming the potential consequences for not continuing to grow, or failing to re-think church entirely. Some folks found this a welcome breath of fresh air – “Finally, we’re naming the elephant in the room!” (meaning, probably that we were finally naming overall financial vulnerability and confronting the need to change) – but a great many people found this campaign too aggressive, too pushy, too much. Honestly, for my part, I get the sense that there are so many issues around financial dynamics and stewardship in the life of a given congregation that any talk – let alone the fairly straightforward talk we were doing this past fall – would set off a whole host of anxiety and hand-wringing.
Another thing we did back in October and November was have a more public discussion about the future of this congregation as a stand-alone, self-sufficient, relatively independent corporate entity. The fact is we’ve been talking for years and years in this part of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington about the need to collaborate more intentionally and, indeed, to collaborate institutionally; that is, to get beyond the restrictions of the mid-20th century “one-parish / one-priest” model. The other fact is that we are growing, and not just in vibrancy and ministry-focus but in numbers; actual people and money and time. Our position is that we need to continue to do this work, and that we need to get ahead of the inevitable demographic curve that’s headed our way, and so we’ve been talking about collaboration at vestry meetings and in region-wide gatherings and with our diocese for at least seven years now. But, to be fair, we never really talked about it publicly, broadly, and with what seemed to be consequences for avoiding the issue.
In recent weeks I’ve been baking bread in my free time. I’ve tried out French bread and some wheat sandwich bread and rolls. These recipes are from Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, and require a lot of time and patience and sometimes the process takes a few days. I find the practice relaxing, even meditative, a fitting activity for Lent.
Last weekend I tried Sicilian bread, which is supposed to be shaped kind of like an “S.” An important part of preparing the dough is making sure you don’t handle it too much and degas it, or let all the air bubbles out. Shaping dough into an “S” without degassing it is much harder than I expected. I made the bread over three days, and I ended up with something that looked like two flattened circles rather than the loaves shown in the photo. Oh well. It tasted pretty good.
I’ve only recently begun to learn about bread and to practice making it, but I’ve already learned it takes a lot of patience and it’s a lot more enjoyable if I relax. As Reinhart says in his book, homemade bread is always a hit. So far, it’s all tasted good even if the loaves aren’t exactly beautiful.
We in the church spend much of our time making things that are beautiful—liturgies and vestments, music and sermons—especially those of us at large churches with lots of resources. Growing up in a church with a very small staff and a volunteer choir and organist, all of that was secondary to Eucharist and the simple act of coming together on Sunday mornings. Even when our choir was out of tune I often loved them because they were clearly trying so hard. Breaking bread together in the Eucharist was more important.
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