Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I just realized something, and it’s a game changer.

For a while, I’ve been working on developing collaborative relationships with other local Episcopal congregations. Frankly, it makes no sense to me why we continue to prop up a one-parish/one-priest system while, at the same time, so many of us so often drive in and out of established, though irrelevant parish boundaries: my dry cleaner and gym is in one parish; my daughter’s school in another; go-to grocery store in a third. I also realized early in my time at St. George’s, Valley Lee that we could grow (which we continue to do) and we could increase participation and giving (which we continue to do) but we’d have a difficult time overcoming the structural challenges in our global and national economy (think: health care and rising energy costs).

That explains the need to collaborate. But simply saying that something’s not working doesn’t bring it to an end. Anyone who’s served on a church committee, for instance, knows the profound power of tradition over against growth strategies.

What we’ve done in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, then, is to start collaborating in ministry. File this under the “you’ve got to start somewhere” category. With those local Episcopal congregations who are willing to play together we’ve been doing as many non-Sunday morning things together as we possibly can: senior lunches, vacation bible school, occasional liturgies, and adult formation series. We’re also moving toward scheduling sporadic Sunday morning pulpit swaps and developing a more empowered Multi-Parish Council, about which I’ll write in future posts.

Collaborating in ministry also puts us in a better position to respond to emerging leaders and recruit potential disciples. Even if we could grow enough to make enough why would we want to? Why would we stay in our quaint, local places when those entrepreneurial, creative young adults – the key target audience for sustained growth in the Episcopal Church – do not, themselves, inhabit one locale and are pretty amenable to gathering wherever, whenever.

But collaborating in ministry, alone, without dealing with the one-parish/one-priest system is only getting us halfway there. Simply defining the need, as I’ve done, without envisioning the opportunity is only a partial contribution.

Real collaboration – that is, collaborating both in our ministries as well as institutional structures – is really also an opportunity to honor the past. What I realized recently is that we’re in this position because of what our immediate forebears did in the allegedly halcyon decades of the Baby Boom. They expanded existing institutions and built lots of new ones. They also took risks and pushed toward a vision, in many ways even though that vision was unrecognizable to their immediate forebears. Back in their day, they didn’t follow yesterday’s playbook and they embedded what was, for them, a missional spirituality in new institutional structures.

In fact, if the Episcopal Church didn’t do what it did so successfully in the 1950s and early 60s, our contemporary attempts, yes, risks to more robustly collaborate wouldn’t be so hope-filled. Rather, they’d be marked by a turning inward and articulated need to hoard and shore up existing resources.

I, for one, am going to stop “Boomer bashing.” Many of those key leaders really were visionaries in their own time. They can be allies and assets in our own.