St. Bartholomew's Church

The following is the transcript of the “State of the Parish” speech given by Fr. Jerry during our 2010 Annual Meeting this past Sunday.

This evening marks my sixth annual meeting at St B’s.  It is hard to believe that time has past so quickly!

LOOKING BACK

2009 proved to be a very interesting year. It was salted by the death of five members of our community that have contributed to the life of our body for decades. We remember with gratefulness and much sadness the ‘graduation to glory’ of Maggie Ward, Bert Hardwick, Mary Peebles, Henry Martin, Jeannie Hunter and of the death earlier this year of Tom Howard. “Rest Eternal Grant unto them O Lord, and Light Perpetual Shine Upon Then.”

Their deaths have reminded many of us of the significance that each and every member of our faith community has in our unfolding life together. It has also proven to be a reminder of, as the Prayer Book says, “the shortness and uncertainty of human life”. Sadly, many of us are not as prepared as we should be for the inevitability of our own, or our family members, deaths. I encourage all of you to become proactive in the alignment of your affairs, personal, financial and spiritual, for your own sake and for the sake of those who may be left behind mourning your loss. With the help of Tony Morreale we have been offering regular ‘Finishing Well’ seminars which are intended to help ask the right questions to help to think ahead. We are reminded that it is said that in order to live right we need to know how to die right!

2009 was the first year in my 34 years of ordination that a vestry deemed it necessary to cut the operational budget of a parish in which I was ministering. This proved to be much more difficult than anticipated, particularly given that the budget was established in faith and after much prayer.  The leadership of the parish did not take this task lightly as we knew that a $150,000 slash would affect most every aspect of our community life. The final decision as to where these monies should be found, was left to me as rector.

There are those of you who still will argue that I should have decreased our apportionment payment to the Diocese or asked one of our two missionary families to return to America. I believed then, and I believe even more tonight, that if our family decision is that cutbacks need to be made, then those cutbacks need to be felt so that the impact will be fully known. Calling missionaries home (or simply cutting their support) or decreasing our diocesan support would not affect us in the least. Life here would continue on just as normal. I have serious ethical issues with this way of thinking.

Among other things, I opted, as you all know, to cut one staff position. Fr Randy was, and remains one of my closest friends in Nashville. Eliminating his position on staff was in many ways, like cutting off my own arm. He was an integral part of our pastoral team, so not only did I lose a friend but I increased my own workload along with the loads of Fr Dixon and Carla Schober. I also know that my own credibility has been seriously damaged in some of your minds as a result of this decision. I am sorry for two reasons about this, firstly because of the loss of our primary pastoral care giver, a good friend and a large asset to our community and secondly because some of you have lived with resentment about this decision and have not come to talk with me about it.

Losing Randy has set us back enormously and the ripple effect has proven, in some cases to be more of a tsunami. All this being said, if I had to go back and do it all over again I would make the exact same decision.

I am personally grateful that vestryperson Dorman Burch quickly stepped up to the plate and has been offering great assistance in the delivery of pastoral care in the absence of an assistant priest.  He has established a great team of people that are visiting and ministering to a number of our folks who cannot make it to church regularly.

In the end, 2009 was the best financial year St B’s has ever had. In spite of the small deficit in our operating fund, the total financial contributions to the parish, general and designated, were the highest they have ever been in the history of our faith community. You contributed over 1.8 million dollars to the work of the Kingdom in this parish last year! Congratulations!

LOOKING AHEAD

According to an old cliché, ‘the new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows where the dirt is’! I now fall into the category of being an old broom at St B’s. In fact, with this sixth annual meeting under my belt, I will have been here longer than any of my predecessors, save the famous Fr Murphy. I am now of the opinion that I am beginning to know where the serious dirt is in our parish. My role as rector affords me the opportunity to have a view of or faith community that most of you are not privileged to have. I have begun to see the patterns, the rhythms of our life together that have brought us to where we are and in some cases, prevent us from moving ahead.

I believe that it is time for us to face the giants that are hindering us (or in keeping with the metaphor of rising to greater heights, maybe the sandbags that keep us from flying), and time to begin to engage in a more enthusiastic and intentional walk with God that will allow us to move into a fuller understanding of what it means to be the Body of Christ in this community.

What are our giants?

1.  believe we are a community that at the same time longs for and yet fears intimacy. In our estranged culture we have a variety of misunderstandings of what intimacy is to look like. Consequently when we read that the early believers enjoyed a depth of fellowship that allowed them to “share everything in common” (see Acts 2 & 4) we both envy that and fear it at the same time. Our hearts were created to live in genuine community where we become increasingly aware of the unconditional love of God through one another.

The fear of losing control of the life to which “I am entitled”, prevents many from making the step to begin this aspect of the journey into this expression of the Kingdom of God.

The fear of becoming vulnerable with people who just may ‘up and leave’ for whatever reason, also prevents us from working on this type of genuine commitment. 

The solution to this must include the invitation to everyone to commit to the journey we are on together and help them (or this may be you) to understand the value to both individual and community formation of long term commitment, no matter what the cost.

2.  There are those in our community who are apprehensive of what is happening at levels in our denomination that are far above our ability to control. This has always been the case and forever will be. There comes a time when we need to simply realize that Christ is the head of the church which is His body on earth. There may be times when limbs and organs in the body chose to act independent of the whole, or even of the head, but that does not give us permission to sever ourselves. I will remind you of what I have said many times: the bible speaks much more intentionally about the spirit of judgment and division than it does about most anything, and we need to be cautious that in the name of an altruistic motive we don’t fall into the very trap of the Pharisees and lawyers of Jesus day.

The national church is not the enemy any more than the giants in the land God was leading the Israelites to were enemies. After all we believe that nothing is impossible for our God!

3.  One of the interesting cycles of this parish includes significant growth and then it seems to hit a ceiling with force before attrition sets in. In fact, when I first hired an assistant priest back in 2006 a long standing member of the parish told me that his only fear was that we would eventually have to let the assistant go because growth was unsustainable in this parish. Is there a giant that whispers in our ears that we cant get any bigger that we are? Is there some sort of glass barrier that we hit and rebound off of that then leaves a stinging pain that prevents us from trying again? 

At some point this becomes self fulfilling prophecy, just like those businesses that think they can’t afford to advertise are in fact the very ones that can’t afford not to advertise, this parish finds itself afraid to take the next steps to legitimate growth by providing the infrastructure we need to sustain growth. An infrastructure, by the way, which takes more than most volunteers can manage.

4.  I think the biggest giant that causes fear in many is the giant that asks us to trust the leadership even when we may not agree with them. This parish has a long history of very strong lay leadership and I believe that it is difficult for many to release control of some long held traditions. I am also apprehensive to say this, but I think there is an inherent distrust of authority, which is not unusual for those influenced by the seventies favorite theology of “the priesthood of all believers”. That theology by the way, announced that we all share equally in the ministry of Christ, but we do not all share equal authority or responsibility. Paul would argue that we are all members of the Body and we all have gifts and talents to be used for the development of the body, but not all are the same. Sometimes we act as if we are afraid of trusting others to do what they have been trained and equipped by God to do. We act as if we are afraid to give up control and we develop a multitude of good (and even theological) excuses for our actions.

The way were are going to be able to move forward as an active growing part of the Body of Christ is to own our fears and then allow God the Holy Spirit to empower us to walk into the inheritance granted us by God and face those giants as the Israelites faced the walls of Jericho. 

The only other option, the one that is easiest and often taken, is to head back to the wilderness for a generation. Even in the wilderness the Israelites were God’s children. That is not in question. Even in the wilderness the Israelites experienced the daily provision of God (manna, quail and water) but they were still in the desert. The wilderness is not the Promised Land.

God calls us out of our Egypts (our bondages) and these are most always identified by the immediate emotional characteristic of fear. Fear of heights prevents people for scaling new mountains; fear of flying prevents people from exploring new lands; fear of poverty prevents the people of God from sharing God’s heart of hospitality; fear of lost of control prevents us from surrendering our all to Christ. 

Our way ahead, the invitation of the meeting to ascend to new heights, is to realize that God is bigger than all of our fears. In fact scripture is quite clear, “perfect love casts out all fear”! Jesus and Jesus alone is Perfect Love. The more we get to know Jesus, the less place fear has in our lives. Our movement ahead, our ability to rise to new heights, will be equally proportional to our discarding of the weight of fear that holds us down.

When the Powells made their decision to follow God to Germany, when the Chapmans made their decision to move to Liberia and when the Martins decided to engage in Sudanese translation ministry, it demanded that each of them face head-on the fears that would otherwise prevent them, and then allow God to dispel that fear with a greater revelation of His Love for them.

Whenever anyone feels the call to full-time vocational ministry, it is often rational and irrational fear that attempts to thwart God’s plans for their lives.

I think of the Sudanese lost boys who left the familiarity of their families and homes, at age 6 or 10, and travelled hundreds of miles through the unknown countryside without food or tools to provide for themselves, and I realize that what God is calling us to is much much simpler.

They did it in order to flee certain death, we do it to embrace the fullness of life that our God has called us to.

You will be able to talk with the Powells and Chapmans when they are here on break this summer and you can talk with Deborah Martin most any Sunday about what this is like. You can introduce yourself to any number of Sudanese on any Sunday as well. They will all attest to the same thing - God dispels fear but only as we begin and continue the journey. Fear will raise its head at any number of corners if we stop and look for it!

Can I publicly celebrate the team that we have who will help us move to these new places with God? I am thrilled to work with such remarkable people. Dixon Kinser, Carla Schober, Erin Somerville, Eric Wyse and Pamela White form the core of a remarkable staff that have a vision for us to be what and who God wants us to be. The support staff amassed around them are also key players in the unfolding of God’s Kingdom in this place. And your vestry all have hearts for God and His Story and have proven supportive and faithful in the tasks assigned to them.

I invite you to let 2010 be a year in which you face the fears that are holding you down and embrace the Grace of a Loving God that will empower you to be the people He is calling you to be. 

Faithfully,

Jerry+