This month we offer five reflections on hybrid church and digital ministry. Please share this digest with new members of your vestry and extend an invitation to subscribe to ECF Vital Practices to receive Vestry Papers, blogs, and the monthly digest.
The Episcopal Church needs to ask bigger questions.
Pastoral training has long taught us to look for the bigger questions: Is this person really upset about the color of the new carpet or does this person feel that too much is changing too quickly? Is this person really angry about last week’s sermon or is there something going on at home?
We are more effective pastors when we identify underlying issues and address them directly. The same principle applies when we take our place in the councils of the church: If we ask the bigger questions, we will get better results.
ECF’s Vital Practices’ recent focus on “transformative tools” got me thinking about what really makes transformation possible within a faith community.
ECF provides wonderful tools that hold transformative power, including the Finance Resource Guide, Racial Justice Resources, the Congregational Vitality Assessment, and the entire Vital Practices website.
As a congregational consultant, I carry a toolkit jampacked with means for exploring mission, vision, values and strategic priorities, for developing stewardship ministry and even for conducting successful capital campaigns.
In my previous blog, we discussed the absolute importance of eliminating gossip as the first step to transforming ourselves, and in so doing, our parish communities. I mentioned at the close of the blog that engaging the work of eliminating gossip was itself transformative.
If you’ve taken on the challenge of improving parish-wide communication, congratulations. This is a truly significant accomplishment that will yield extraordinarily positive results. As I reflected on the next logical step to help us advance, it occurred to me that perhaps we’ve not fully understood how limiting the past two years have been, and in some ways, continue to be.
Transformation. From a cynical perspective, it’s nothing more than another buzzword that’s been overused by consultants like me.
Yet when I read how various dictionaries defined transformation, my heart softened. When we talk about being transformed, we’re talking about a making a significant change – a radical change – as some sources say, for the better.
As we begin to emerge into a post-pandemic world that will most certainly still include COVID, the church is right to consider what being transformed will look like. How do we transform as a church writ large and as individual parish communities?
My first challenge as a new rector was a common one: How do I make this team into my team?
I would have plenty of opportunities to recruit new staff in subsequent years, but I had to begin my ministry with a team that had been assembled by someone else. My first step was to establish core values: teamwork, dedication, and excellence.
I wish I could say that my new colleagues and I discerned these principles together, but we didn’t. This was my way of letting the existing staff know the new rector’s style, of establishing baseline expectations that would apply equally to all of us, and of reshaping an existing system to achieve new outcomes.
Church growth and vitality will continue to be an issue for congregations in the new year as it is today. Whether congregations are urban or rural, racially diverse or not, large or small we all need to find hope for the future church.
Many are especially concerned with recent reports that the U.S. church membership had fallen below majority for the first time. In 2020, 47% of U.S. adults belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque, down more than 20 points from the turn of the century.
Additionally, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church – Parochial Report Data 2019 reports that the Median Average Sunday Worship Attendance is now 51 congregants.
“No, I did not get ordained online.” Let’s add that to the list of phrases I never thought would hear myself say.
I recently officiated at a destination wedding. About an hour before the ceremony, the audio technician asked me to do a sound check. Needing something to say as he pressed buttons and turned knobs on his control board, I began reciting from memory a passage that we would all be hearing later that evening: “Dearly beloved: We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of…”
“That’s enough,” he interrupted. “You’re a real pro.”
“Thank you. I am actually a professional. I went to seminary and everything.”
“Really?” he asked with a blend of shock and incredulity. “Most of the officiants I work with got ordained online.”
A lot has been thrown at church leaders since the onset of this pandemic. I don’t need to rehearse all the ways we’ve turned on a dime, improvised, and modernized. It’s been amazing to watch The Episcopal Church toss on its lifeless head that worthless, old adage: “We’ve never done it that way…”
All that said, however, there are a number of things we’ve truly lost during the pandemic. Or things we’ve nearly lost, and can very well lose entirely if we’re not intentional about actively working to cultivate and restore them, once again.
One of those things is our bonds of fellowship – “church membership” is the institutional term that comes to mind. Pre-pandemic, we were loosey-goosey about membership requirements, even though we all read the literature that growing churches are growing, in part, because they have clear and high membership standards. Some Episcopalians thought about trying to work on better, higher standards (I’m in that group) but we were just as soon reminded of those sweet, if not dated Anglican values – how important it is to the quality of my ministry that I am also locally planted and available, and thus we consented to that funeral or welcomed that baby at the font.
Early this summer, the Church of England’s Vision and Strategy group released a plan addressing the continuing decline in church attendance in England and proposing a path forward for growth and vibrancy. The plan calls for the planting of an ambitious number of churches - 10,000 by 2030 to be exact - that would be predominantly lay-led. The release of this plan hit a very tender spot when it targeted educated, ordained leaders and beloved ancient church buildings as “limiting factors” that are holding back the growth of the church. Following the release of this plan, a social media maelstrom ensued, wounded clergy people cried out in pain, and a movement called “Save the Parish” began to defend parochial structures and fend off the “emergence of a church … not want(ed) or need(ed)” (The Rev. Marcus Walker, Spectator Magazine 8 July 2021). An ocean away, I watched it all unfold on my laptop, feeling ripples of resonance in the diocese that I serve in The Episcopal Church.
“What’s going on in the news?” my father asked a shopkeeper on a beautiful summer’s day in my childhood. “Well,” the shopkeeper replied, “not much aside from the hurricane that’s going to hit us tomorrow.”
There was no sarcasm in the shopkeeper’s response. We were staying on a rural island off the coast of Maine in the days before internet and cable news. It was easy to become disconnected. In fact, disconnection was part of the attraction to island life. We received our news through the original social network: Neighbors telling neighbors what they needed to know.
I returned to that same island this summer as part of my sabbatical in the hope of finding another weather report – this time for the church.
Depending on where you look, or what news you follow, we’re either wrapping up this pandemic or deeply mired in it. Even with increasing vaccinations, there’s trouble on the international stage – dramatic numbers of caseloads in India, for one. U.S. teenagers are now approved to get vaccines, but scores of Americans are still hesitant or altogether resistant. And some fully vaccinated people simply aren’t returning to what used to be perfectly normal, mundane activities – grocery shopping, eating inside a restaurant, going to church among them.
This is already a challenge for the church. It has been, and it will continue to be. Over the next several years, if not decades, these new emerging patterns will pose an even greater challenge for the institutional church. Nowadays, we operate on dual platforms – meeting gracefully those (fewer) who come in-person as well as reaching those who feel safer at home. No one’s said anything about a comprehensive mission strategy, and there’s even less mention of funding models for this uncertain future.
One year ago, we watched in horror as George Floyd was murdered, those images still scarred in our memories, captured by a strong, faithful witness. We had been in pandemic lockdown for so long, so much festering and boiling over. Then face-to-face with a veritable series of pandemics – deep systemic injustice, especially around issues of race in our nation, and Covid-19, as well.
The Episcopal Church will mark and mourn this anniversary, and rightly so. Our church stood, then, and stands up, now, against “the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” and “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” The Episcopal Church, shaped as we’ve been these past several generations by the words of the baptismal covenant, not only knows the words by heart but carries them into the public square. Of this, I am proud to be an Episcopalian: striving for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human person.
Searching for a new Rector for your parish is a significant undertaking. Searching for a new Rector during a global pandemic amplifies the significance exponentially.
Our previous Rector’s final Sunday was our last in-person gathering for worship in March of 2020. No one knew how long that closure would last; most of us – myself included – assumed we’d be through the worst of the pandemic by last summer. How wrong we were.
Given video conferencing technology, the challenge we faced was not how we, as a Rector Search Committee would meet, but rather how we would define who we were, who we are, and who we hope to become.
I find a lot of hope about the changing Church and its role in the changing world in those coming from outside our tradition. What do these folks have to say to us? Lots, it turns out. Can we hear it and respond in ways-appropriate-to-our-context? That's the big question, and much of what I have dedicated my life and ministry to. I issue this warning as when I work with parishes, vestries, bishops, seminarians, or whatever group of Episcopalians will have me, and then I share with them the seemingly bleak news that we must change or go home, believe it or not, they don't always thank me for being such a harbinger. That said, if you can keep an open mind, heart, and, well, ears, I think there is a lot of value, hope, and inspiration for where we are and where we are headed.
The invitation was simple: “No agenda, just conversation. No pressure, just invitation.”
With these words, the rector and newcomers coordinator at Church of the Holy Communion in Memphis invited the members of St. Elisabeth’s Episcopal Church in nearby Bartlett, Tennessee to a service of Evening Prayer followed by a time of conversation. St. Elisabeth’s was about to close, and Holy Communion was not sure how best to help.
There is plenty of literature about how two congregations can start journeying together, but our story is not grounded in any particular theory. We just listened to each other, and we built a model that worked for us. Other churches in other places could easily do the same.
At long last, the two congregations I serve as rector are now one church – one church, we say, in two locations. Church of the Ascension in Lexington Park, MD and St. George’s Church in Valley Lee, MD are now two churches, two campuses of Resurrection Parish: the Episcopal Diocese of Washington’s newest parish, indeed the newest parish in our entire Episcopal Church! It’s been a long time coming, not to mention an incredible process; I’ve blogged extensively about our discernment around this initiative on ECF Vital Practices.
To be very technical, we merged two parishes into one parish. That may not seem super groundbreaking unto itself, but let me provide some context. St. George’s in Valley Lee is Maryland’s oldest continuous Anglican / Episcopal worshipping community – dating back to 1638 – and it became the parish church of William & Mary Parish when, in 1692, the colony was subdivided into 30 Church of England parishes (so much for Maryland’s heritage of religious toleration; we, too, got an established church not long after our founding). Church of the Ascension, meanwhile, was planted in a brand-new, post-WWII suburb as a mission chapel in the 1950s – along with so many other Episcopal church buildings and institutions in American cultural life – and it became its own full-fledged parish (Patuxent Parish) in 1968. Thanks, Baby Boom!
You won’t find it in the Guinness Book, but we’re setting a world record that hopefully won’t be repeated. Normally the season of Lent lasts for forty days, after which we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter. But what I see is that Lent began on February 26, 2020 and never finished. We’ve been locked down in the pandemic for a whole year, and it hasn’t let up yet.
The Book of Common Prayer tells us that for more than a thousand years “it’s been the custom of the church to prepare for Good Friday and Easter by a season of penitence and fasting.” (p. 264) Lent is a time for stepping back to take a look at our lives, often giving up a comfortable habit for a while to see how that feels. In doing that, we’re following Jesus on his forty-day vision quest in the desert, when he was tempted by Satan and waited on by angels. Then after the darkness and agony of the crucifixion the glorious resurrection comes, as reliably as the sun rising in the east.
Picking up some scattered debris around the churchyard, I paused at Kitty’s grave. It had warmed a bit, welcome after too much ice and cold, so I stayed there a while. I remember her fondly, and miss her, too. I said a prayer then carried on with yard cleanup, an unexpected chore that morning, nice to be outdoors. Nearby Kitty’s grave is Betty’s, and on the other side of the belltower is where JoAnn lies in rest. I said a prayer for them as well, and called to mind the picture of their faces, the sounds of their voices. I remembered how truly alive they were, all of them dear, funny, strong, faithful Christian women. They were widowed for some time, all of them. None, I thank God, knew the devastating impact of this past year: pandemic, shutdown, fear and anxiety.
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