Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

“I didn’t see you when I came in last week,” I said to my postmaster the other day. “Did you get some time off?”

“No,” she said with a weary look on her face, “I was doing some regional work.” She looked so worn down I asked her what was wrong. She went to tell me that they’ve added two more small local post offices to her oversight, bringing a total of four offices she now manages.

Ever since I moved to southern Maryland – a place where a lot of folks, including me, need a post office box mailing address – I’ve thought a lot about the demands on my postmaster’s time. Her job looks straightforward and might even sound appealing to some people, but I have no earthly idea how she balances everything: hospitality, small-town chit-chat, putting mail in P.O. boxes, overseeing delivery routes, maintaining supplies, handling transactions, taking care of people’s more complicated shipments, and raising and lowering the flag every day! And now due to cutbacks, she’s also handling the staffing and the back-office business work for three other local post offices. You might think she’s pretty close to maximum burnout, although you wouldn’t know that, as she is incredibly pleasant and professional.

Some years ago, I often used the post office as a case-in-point when the Episcopal congregations in St. Mary’s County and southern Maryland started to discuss greater institutional collaboration more seriously. I often observed that similar issues confront both the institutional church and the post office, both financial and generational.

If collaboration is a way to continue to do what the institutional church has always done by having fewer paid personnel to do it that can be a recipe for institutional collapse. Collaboration has a very pernicious underbelly: if it’s carried out as a universal institutional fix – especially as resources and the application pool for clergy leaders gets thinner – it might take away from local congregations what they really value – namely, the relative independence of local parishes to determine and give shape to a great deal of their common life. And, it will create a situation in which ordained and lay leaders are forced to manage a simply impossible set of expectations and realities.

But the Christian church is not at all in the same situation as the post office. Both institutions have standards of excellence and traditions of historic practice. In our Episcopal tradition we also have an expectation that there are professionals – paid professionals, at that – who will lead and manage the local, lived expression of this larger institution. But the Christian church, unlike the post office, believes that the professional is there to build up the capacity of the people who are not only members but, more so, disciples and followers of their common Lord. The Christian church has an inherent nimbleness by which it may change directions when needed, when it might ditch a non-functioning operating system in order to replace it with a newer, better functioning one. It’s not always so apparent in the church, of course!

It’s time to start talking in real terms about collaboration, and how we can start to put in place more functional operating systems that accord with what we’ve been taught in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Specifically, I’m talking about doing this right here, right now; in the local congregations and core institutions of our church. Instead of waiting to hear the next, formal declaration of TREC (the Task Force for Reimagining the Episcopal Church), why don’t we start to examine everything in our common life on the ground and begin to stop doing things which are obviously not reconciling the world to God in Christ and start doing some new things which might do a better job of executing our Gospel calling?

The truth is that every person in The Episcopal Church can start doing this right here, right now. In establishing congregational budgets for FY-2015, for instance, every congregation can have hard and big conversations about why we fund certain things and, if it’s not clear where the Gospel is in that line item, that congregation could have an even more serious and prayerful conversation about ceasing to fund it. Doing so wouldn’t necessarily mean that that ministry or event wouldn’t happen. On the contrary, it simply means that ministry or event will be set free from the core operating system of the institution called ‘church.’ Maybe, if the Holy Spirit is really breathing through that ministry, it will continue because it’s been set free.

The greater danger would be to forget that our methods of operation and traditions of historic practice really are the same as our Gospel calling to reconcile the world to God in Christ.