Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

It’s that time of year again in most Episcopal congregations – time to fill out the parochial report.

There’s a lot of good to this report and, in general, I like having reasonable metrics and a disciplined pattern of going through the books, if only to give me and the parish leadership a bird’s-eye view of what, most of the time, feels like slightly organized chaos. It’s good to figure out just what happened in the year that’s past. It’s good, say, to see how many funerals we did versus the number of baptisms, weddings, and confirmations. It’s good to check in with the Average Sunday Attendance (ASA), and compare that number to previous years.

There are some pronounced limitations to the Parochial Report, however, and I suspect that most people who do the bulk of the report grin and bear it and give thanks when it’s over. Kind of like taxes, and I don’t really blame them.

But I also believe that revamping the Parochial Report – I mean, really revamping it – would be a good kick-off and clear indicator that we’re really serious about restructuring and reimagining and revisioning, or whatever it is we like to say we’re doing these days. That is, I have this wild and crazy idea that instead of denying that we are an institutional church, instead of trying to become more a movement and less a spiritual corporation, we could, instead, used the patterns and disciplines of our, yes, very institutional church to move forward the conversation about mission and flexibility.

Nearly two full years ago, I published an essay on my personal blog titled “The Stupid Parochial Report.” It got a lot of hits and sparked some good conversation, back and forth. I’m not certain that a General Convention resolution, as was suggested by one respondent, would be a good way to really jump-start this conversation; I suspect what this requires is a groundswell of people in every local context to just mess with the report, now, and in 2015 start doing things differently. That is, if the people who have to do this annual report start to do the math differently – if they budget their money in different ways, collect pledges (or not) in different ways, and report their assets and expenses in different ways (all of which I’ve been writing about and, in my context, doing for some time now) – they will create something that cannot be stopped. And, indeed, the Parochial Report will cease being an exercise in mind-numbing routine and become the kick-starter for a veritable movement of entrepreneurial followers of Jesus who begin to coalesce around a new and vastly more sustainable institutional shell.

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