Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

At one of our Mardi Gras celebrations, a cook set up his fancy digital camera and it shot one frame every five minutes to create a time lapse video of the event, from start up to clean up.

With the program year approaching, I am thinking I might do the same thing to capture a week in the life of St. Andrew’s.

It would take multiple cameras because so many different spaces would be involved. The one in the sanctuary might actually capture the least amount of action. Sunday would be a blur with the altar guild arriving at 7:00 am, followed by the 8:00 o’clock parishioners, then the choir streaming in for practice then segueing into “big church.” A forum might get set up and shut down then a brief period of stillness until the evening worship team came to set up for the 6:00 pm Taize service.

The image from the sanctuary might be taken for a still photograph until Thursday night choir practice and some stillness again until the Saturday morning bustle of altar guild prep and flower guild arranging. You would then see Mr. and Mrs. Mac, our cleaning team, come through at midnight to spruce everything up.

The parish hall and kitchen camera would catch a whole different set of activities. Two coffee hours and a children’s Creation Day on Sunday morning then a youth group meeting Sunday night will dirty up the kitchen and hall only to watch it cleaned up twice or three times in succession. Then during the week the volunteers would come and go for Pro-use Produce, our fruit drying ministry. They would dance around the Wednesday Teen Feed crew preparing a meal for homeless youth who would share space with the Wednesday night chef fixing the meal for the Center at St. Andrew’s classes held that evening. Thursday a staff member would whip up lunch for our 11-person team as we break bread and plan for church life.

The library camera would capture the Sunday morning forum, the newsletter team on Tuesday slamming together 550 Logs and labeling them for bulk mail, the Monday and Wednesday yoga classes, the Monday night Education for Ministry class, the Wednesday Center class, the Thursday morning elder gathering called the Friendship Circle followed by the staff meeting. We wore out the carpet in that room and I can see why.

The Chapel camera would see Children’s Chapel on Sunday morning, Centering Prayer on Wednesday evening, the noon Eucharist on Thursday and then an interspersing of rehearsals throughout the week: Leon working on his one-man play of the Gospel of Mark, young people practicing their instruments for our Youth Orchestra, the Sunday Evening Music Team working on Taize arrangements.

What about the camera in my office? My favorite shot of the whole movie would be the kids hitting my Tootsie Roll basket hard after church school ended. But the camera would also capture a parade of parishioners, volunteers, staff, and newcomers drinking coffee, coffee, and more coffee and talking (sometimes in greatly animated ways) about a million different creative ideas or concerns. You would see my desk explode each day with papers, mailings, bulletins, post-it notes on TO DO stacks, and twice or three times a week you might see this explosion in reverse as I put it all in order and away or piled in the OUT box.

It would be fun to see those 168 hours boiled down into a 20-minute film. It would show a weekly dance with its own rhythm; individual dancers having their own choreography but combing into the work of God’s people in fast motion. I need to do some work on the right sound track and get this thing up on YouTube.