Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Next week I celebrate 30 years as an Episcopal priest, but I feel like I am just getting started. Time has flown by. At my 30^[1] reunion at Yale Divinity School this past fall, a large number of us gathered and relived memories that were as fresh as yesterday.

As fast as time has passed incredible changes have come to the church in that time. Back then, the 1979 Prayer Book was brand new. The Eucharist was only then replacing Morning Prayer as the predominant Sunday morning service. The huge fights then were over women priests and altars facing the people. The diaconate was a fledgling order just then being reconstructed from the ancient past. To nearly all of us the Anglican Communion was new concept, based entirely on the Lambeth Conference and tea with the queen.

I began my priesthood at age 26 equipped with my Masters of Divinity and a Masters of Social Work setting out to save the world. I plunged immediately into working to end homelessness, nuclear proliferation, and the civil wars in Central America. The purpose of the church was to save the world. I felt myself to be part of a new vanguard with unlimited possibilities.

Thirty years has taught me limits but I still have unlimited hope for the church. In those early days I was an outsider, fighting to be sure the social agenda of the church didn’t get lost in an ecclesiology of self-preservation. Today the entire church recognizes our responsibility to the poor and disenfranchised.

Now in my final years as a priest, I want to return to the internal work of the church in a way that surprises me greatly. I purposely went back into parish ministry because the overall priorities of our denomination had changed to the ones I felt were most important. But those changes had come at a great cost in the loss of membership, financial support, and confidence in our church’s future.

All church is local, so it is now in the local parish that I give my time and effort. If we do not have strong congregations, strong convictions won’t matter much. I am now about the business of building up our membership, increasing our giving, deepening our commitment to the individual gifts God has given each of us. The world needs the Episcopal Church. But the world needs a church that is healthy, strong, growing and that loves God. It needs to begin in the pews before we can take it to the streets.