If asked, how do you explain Ash Wednesday and/or Lent to friends? Our friends at Busted Halo are again sharing their video Ash Wednesday & Lent in Two Minutes.
Please consider sharing this video with others in your congregation.
I haven’t been intentional about bringing my kids to Ash Wednesday services. To be honest, I couldn’t fathom the idea of the priest—their father and my husband—crossing ashes on their forehead and saying, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
This says a lot more about my own spiritual maturity than it does theirs. I have had other talks with the children, but I’m not very good at talking about death. I know intellectually that mortality is a part of the cycle of life, and I believe in my heart that there is life after death. But I just haven’t figured out how to think and pray about that chasm, much less explain it to children.
But I am convicted of the importance after spending time reading and reflecting on two recent blog posts. Both are part of a new online initiative called Grow Christians, which aims to inspire and encourage people to practice their faith at home.
Ben Irwin explains why his family will talk about some of the hard concepts of Lent. “We’ll consider our mortality, our frailty, our vulnerability. We will lean into the darkness rather than run from it.
Because the painful yet glorious truth that Jesus demonstrated for us is this: the only path to resurrection runs through the grave.”
Our recent Vestry Papers article
Two weeks ago, in advance of winter storm Jonas, the forecasters in the mid-Atlantic began their steady drumbeat of winter weather analysis mixed with heart-stopping projections.
Meteorologically, they knew something was going to happen but, whatever it was, it wasn’t going to happen until Friday of that week; I’m sure they said as much in their ‘round the clock reporting. In the minds of area residents, however, the psychological situation had already begun to shift.
I became aware of this on Tuesday when, for instance, the altar guild reported that they were going to set up for Sunday worship on Wednesday afternoon and then hunker down in their warm homes and see me the following week. Or maybe sometime after Groundhog Day!
I’m not one to freak out about weather, so I went on about my week, even popping into the local grocery store on Wednesday afternoon to pick up some supplies for bible study. There, I noticed the meat counter was nearly empty and long lines poured out of every available register. I don’t know much about weather, in general, but I do know how to read a community! And that’s when I knew that no matter how many inches of snow landed on the ground, Sunday morning church was in serious jeopardy of happening.
And that’s also when I remembered a friend talking about doing what she called “conference call church.” On bad weather weekends, or at random points throughout the week, she’d set up a conference call, using one of the many free online conference call services. She’d let folks know the phone number and access code and then wait on the other end with Morning Prayer and sermon on the ready.
Creating a vibrant and vital vestry is an ongoing task. The period following your annual meeting, when newly elected members join the vestry, is a good time to review and renew your congregation’s vision statement and to think about what putting this vision into practice looks like. This month our articles support you in these efforts, with our fourth article sharing a practice designed to free up meeting time to address these important issues.
We encourage you to think about how the ideas presented in this and every issue might provide an impetus for evaluating and reflecting on what you might learn from the experiences of others. To help in your discernment, at the end of each article we offer a list of the resources related to the topic. If you have a resource to share, please email me at [email protected] with the link or add it to the site using the Your Turn feature.
If you are interested in Spanish language content, please visit our searchable index for our Spanish content here.
Please share this issue of Vestry Papers with your colleagues and to invite them to subscribe to ECF Vital Practices and Vestry Papers. Subscriptions are free. New subscribers are asked to fill out a short registration form to have Vestry Papers and ECF Vital Practices content delivered twice a month to your email inbox.
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Jesus is still encouraging us to let the children come to him, not least because they can explain the new features of an iPhone.
The Church as a whole has a mixed record when it comes to fully embracing children as equal participants in the body of Christ. We value them, sure. We love them and revel in the sweet voices of the children’s choir or their first tentative attempts at crucifer. But we’re sometimes reluctant to entrust them with significant or complicated projects.
Enter Jack Whittaker, a fourteen-year-old from California. He approached Forward Movement late last year with the idea of programming a mobile app for Lent. We took a chance.
Apple approved the app last week, and it’s live and ready for your Lenten devotion. The app, Journey Through Lent 2016, brings Forward Movement’s popular Join the Journey Through Lent daily coloring calendar to the digital world. The app provides daily images and reflections illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Jay Sidebotham, offered alongside daily Eucharistic gospel readings, a space for journaling, and the option to add color and share your images.
Does this sound like a typical church check list?
Dear congregational leaders, it’s not that you don’t deserve some relief, but perhaps it’s time to consider stewardship as a year ‘round ministry. God’s abundance is not a once-a-year occurrence, and our response to it shouldn’t be either.
There is so much to learn and to celebrate, why confine the experience to just the same few weeks of the year? Stewardship is Christian formation, deepening spirituality and faith as people consider all of God’s blessings. Its lessons are for all people, regardless of age or financial capacity.
Consider the widow and her pennies. More importantly, consider how Jesus spotted her… He was watching what people were giving! He knows how difficult it is for us to keep our priorities straight, to trust Him in all things.
Lessons regarding our relationship with God certainly can start in childhood. I wonder how many churches still give Lenten coin collection materials to their children? It is simple but can be a profound exercise to teach young people that when they share, they will receive even more, perhaps in unexpected and delightful ways.
When answering the question, “Who is your target audience?” most church leaders will say young people, or Millennials, or young families, or the unchurched. Very few will say their churches are focusing on people over 75. Yet look at the people sitting in the pews, or serving on altar guilds, or ushering, or pledging, or manning the food programs. Many are nearing 75 or are already in that age group.
Can a church be vibrant if it offers well-rounded activities for all ages, but targets older people? A church in Pennsylvania is exploring that question:
At a recent retreat, the lay governing body at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Montrose, Penn., decided to focus the church’s ministry on older people at the church, in the community, in two senior living apartment complexes, and in one nursing home. St. Paul’s, which was founded in 1831 and is housed in a historic worship space, made a gallant effort in 2008 to create a ministry for young people that included additional personnel, new furniture and redecorated space, curricula, and supplies. After four years, the vestry concluded that other churches in the area were better equipped to serve young families. St. Paul’s has decided to approach their new ministry to older people carefully, beginning by asking church members and people in the community what they want or need. They intend to begin slowly, and build a ministry that can be sustained.
Our parish administrator’s office is a bit more cluttered than usual these days, the top of her desk buried under piles of papers and boxes. Not only has she been pushing out the giving envelopes for the year ahead, she’s also printing and delivering year-end giving statements to parishioners and friends and, well, nearly everybody who’s given something to St. George’s in the past year. It’s tax time, after all.
This is a perennial duty I’d bet and it’s a strain on every one of our congregations. Big or small, urban or rural, the annual routine of pushing out the Year-End Giving (Tax Deductible) Giving Statements is a big deal. The fact that gifts to churches are tax-deductible isn’t the reason people give to our congregations, but it certainly is an added bonus. And ensuring that each congregation has sufficient administrative capacity to record and honor each person’s gift and present to them a final report for their tax prep is all part of doing our job.
On the one hand, then, this blog post is a great big shout out to those parish administrators and bookkeepers and clergy and other office help who are doing this work, right now. It’s meaningful, important, and sensitive work, and it’s one of those otherwise unnoticed duties that’s actually part of the glue of our common Christian lives.
One of my favorite television shows is the BBC show, Sherlock. It's all about Benedict Cumberbatch's flashy and clever version of Sherlock Holmes, and of course his partner, John Watson. While the show is about Sherlock, it is just as much about Watson. It wouldn't be any fun to watch if it weren't for him.
This past Sunday we read 1 Corinthians about the body of Christ: “The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this.”
I think it’s natural for our eyes to be drawn to certain people. The clever or eloquent, the people who naturally take the lead. But you also need the quieter and reliable people who make sure someone is around to unlock the doors and unfold the chairs and move the tables.
These roles are not set in stone, of course. On Sunday morning I went to All Saint’s in Park Slope, where the rector, the Rev. Steve Paulikas, pointed out that not only are we different parts of the body, but we may be different parts of the body at different times in our life.
Last December, the Acts 8 Movement released a video which could be customized and shared via social media to proclaim the gospel and invite people to worship.
After it came out, I posted a tutorial about how to do just that, providing video for you to follow along as I customized the video for the church I serve and created the Facebook ad. (Full disclosure: I'm on the core team of the Acts 8 Movement and had advance notice that the video was coming out.) My goal was to help others use the ad in their contexts.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xA52CkfVgP0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
With the press of the holidays and the start of the new year (which includes a few significant initiatives which I will share soon) it took me a while to go back and analyze the outcome.
If you didn't read the tutorial post, you need to know:
My goal was primarily to learn from the experience. And I did!
Here's what I learned:
Are you interested in practical, spiritually grounded resources for your congregation?
Subscribe to ECF Vital Practices: A collection of articles, tools, and resources by and for congregational leaders. With a subscription, you’ll receive 12 issues of Vestry Papers as well as the monthly Vital Practices Digest delivered to your inbox.
In this month’s Digest, we’re offering 5 ways to help your newly forming vestry get off to a strong start, with the 5th resource to help your congregation strengthen your practice of year-round stewardship.
If your vestry is planning an annual retreat, make sure you include some time for prayerfully affirming or discerning one or more of these key elements of your congregation’s identity: Ministry Strengths, Mission, Values and Vision.
Ministry Strengths are gifts for ministry. God gave you these, whether they are talents, a location, or a heart for a particular cause such as homelessness. Identifying strengths is strategic because it helps leadership recognize what naturally makes sense for you to do.
After all, since God assembled your strengths in your church, it’s wise to take some time to discern what he wants you TO DO with them.
That means, defining your Mission – what you DO – what you are called to do. Your congregation’s mission is the second part of its identity. Maybe you articulated a Mission Statement years ago. It is healthy to pray about it every year. It is still valid? Does it align with your ministry gifts?
Editor’s note: Do members of your church have an opportunity to offer public testimony of what their faith – and their church – mean to them? Many associate this with appeals for participation in annual, capital, or other campaigns. Today ECF Vital Practices shares testimony from a newer member of an Episcopal church – and while it was given during the congregation’s annual stewardship campaign, Holly’s message is also one of personal transformation. I invite you to consider ways for members to share their transformation stories throughout the year.
Please join me in prayer.
"Loving God,
"We who gather here at St. John’s are no longer strangers because we have been welcomed by this “Church of the Open Door” in your name. By your love we are bound together in our care for one another and this holy space.
"As we consider our life here at St. John’s, help us to give from the heart and to the best of our abilities, willingly and with hopefulness. We pray that our giving would not be hindered by fear or a spirit of scarcity.
"Fill us with your grace, that, as joyful stewards of this calling you have set before us, we may have the strength, the will, and the imagination to fulfill your vision for our Church; in Christ’s name we pray. Amen."
(Campaign prayer used by all speakers)
Good morning. I'm Holly Stoerker. It was two years ago that I first came through the Open Door at St John's. And today is my one-year anniversary of joining this parish as a member.
Shortly after I was asked to give this stewardship talk, I quite by accident stumbled upon an article written by a Harvard Business school professor. It was called “Four Questions Fundraisers Must Be Prepared to Answer.” I was delighted! “Now,” I thought, “I have some authoritative insights to share.”
According to this article, fundraisers should address 4 key questions when making their pitch:
But.... then I read our Gospel lesson for today. Today we heard Jesus say, not once, but twice... “My kingdom is not from this world.” … “My kingdom is not from here.”
While Professor Stevenson may be right on the philanthropic mark when it comes to fundraising for charitable organizations, devoted to all sorts of worthy causes... frankly, it's not what speaks to either my heart or mind in a stewardship message at church. “God's kingdom is not from this world.”
So why do I give to the church, to this church, to St. John's?
“Why don’t these younger people start doing more around here?”
It’s a common refrain I’ve heard for years, perhaps one of the most consistent things I’ve heard throughout my ten years of ordained ministry and generally uttered by someone who’s been doing some certain job in the church for a stretch of time. Now, let me be honest. I’m never sure this means that the speaker, in fact, wants to give up what she or he has been doing, and I’m not at all certain that it means that the speaker is willing to let the thing cease being or change if he or she does get let go.
To be honest, when these statements come – and they come surprisingly often – they’re often one of the more turbulent things I experience. Maybe it’s just me, but these moments trigger an odd, nearly full-dose mixture of pastoral sensitivity and strategic thinking. Those aren’t often happy bedfellows, at least not so much in my brain, and I suppose such tensions are what makes a faith life, not to mention a faith community an exciting thing.
The stress that goes along with an increasingly aging church is no mere perception; it’s a real thing. About as real as it gets. The Episcopal Church itself reports “a large majority (73%) of Episcopal congregations report that more than half of their members are age 50+. 27% … report that more than half of their members are age 65 or older.” Episcopalians are “older than the general population. Overall, 31% of Episcopal members are age 65+, as compared to only 14% of the U.S. population.” Also, we have far more adults and older adults, than children, youth, and young adults. And these skewed demographics impact our overall growth and vitality on the congregational level: “Episcopal parishes and missions with greater proportions of older members (age 65+) tend to be smaller, and are more often found in rural and small town settings.”
The reality is those younger families, youth, and young adults who are members of our congregations not only have increased demands in the whole of their lives, given economic disparity and all the other demands, but they simply cannot live up to the needs and wishes of those aging members of the congregation who (kind of) wish to stop doing what they’ve been doing for the past thirty years.
Two weeks into the new year, and many resolutions already have gone the way of the dodo bird. Failed resolutions aren’t for a lack of try; change is really, really hard to execute.
That’s why I like the words of Michael Ramsey, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s and early 1970s. His keen insight is particularly helpful this week, as the primates of the Anglican Communion are gathered with the current Archbishop of Canterbury, struggling to figure out their own resolve about the bonds of unity in the wider church.
Thank God. Often and always. Thank him carefully and wonderingly for your continuing privileges and for every experience of his goodness. Thankfulness is a soil in which pride does not easily grow. Take care about confession of your sins. As time passes the habit of being critical about people and things grows more than each of us realize. …[Ramsey suggests the practice of sacramental confession]. Be ready to accept humiliations. They can hurt terribly but they can help to keep you humble. [Whether trivial or big, accept them he says.] All these can be so many chances to be a little nearer to our Lord. There is nothing to fear, if you are near to the Lord and in his hands. Do not worry about status. There is only one status that Our Lord bids us be concerned with, and that is our proximity to him. “If a man serve me, let him follow me, and where I am there also shall my servant be” (John 12:26). That is our status; to be near our Lord wherever he may ask us to go with him. Use your sense of humour. Laugh at things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh at yourself.
It’s easier to avoid the difficult stories. We know this in our personal lives, of course: no one really likes to talk about their divorce, or the time they got fired. It’s also true in communities: we don’t talk about the families who left because of theological disagreement, the split in the vestry a few years ago. Telling these stories feels like gossip or dwelling on the bad moments, but perhaps there is a time and a place to tell them.
As my wife and I prepare for our baby, I’ve begun reading books about raising children. In the book I’ve been reading recently called The Whole Brain Child, the authors explain that children need to tell stories. It helps them make sense of their experiences.
It’s tempting to simply distract children from their difficult moments with ice cream or to insist that they are now fine so they shouldn’t worry. But recounting again and again the time they fell off their bike or got sick at school helps them move forward. The story doesn’t stop at the painful experience, but continues on to how mom or dad took care of them, how the painful moment was resolved.
This is relevant to adults, too, and communities. Just as we sometimes need to talk about things with a friend or partner or therapist, sometimes a community needs to talk things out. While we don’t want to recount stories that are none of our business, neither do want to simply distract ourselves from the difficult times or pretend that they no longer matter. This never gives us a chance to come to terms with the painful things that happened and why, and also how they were resolved. If we never have a resolution, then they still feel threatening. We need to tell the story because the story is how we make them into a meaningful narrative.
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