Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Over the weekend I made beer, or what I hope will become beer. This involves hops and yeast and cooking mash and pots full of something called wort and a lot of temperature taking.

I tend to get a little anxious about getting the measurements just right. This goes for recipes, as well events and even liturgies. Despite my anxieties, it often turns out that there’s a little wiggle room. When making beer, apparently, it’s important to get the temperature right. If your water measurement is a little off, however, you can just add a bit more later. No big deal.

Learning what components needs to be just right, and what allow for a larger margin of error, is an ongoing process for me, and for churches as well.

The pastor of my church, St. Lydia’s, is out of town for a little while on vacation, so we’ve had guest preachers. St. Lydia’s combines dinner and church and uses it’s own unique liturgy, and so the priests and pastors who come in to help are somewhat, though not entirely, familiar with what a typical Sunday at St. Lydia’s is like. Sometimes the pacing of the service is a little different. Sometimes a parishioner has to fill them in on what to do next. Most of the prayers, however, are the same as always, because they are carefully constructed and at the heart of our liturgy.

Of course, I tend to get anxious when the service runs longer than it should, or something doesn’t start at the right time. I try to tell myself to relax, and only worry when something really important goes wrong.

This process of learning what needs to be exact and what can change a bit from Sunday service is something the Episcopal Church has been doing for hundreds of years with its common prayer, and the larger Church for two thousand years.

There will always be things that don’t quite go as planned. Sometimes you just adjust, just add a little more water, sometimes you have to be conscious to keep things at the right temperature, or the yeast won’t rise. The trick is to pay attention when things don’t go exactly as planned without getting anxious, and to differentiate what is truly important from what is not. It’s an ongoing and communal process.