One of the gifts of retirement, after having served as Bishop of Newark for twelve years, was returning to the Diocese of Western Massachusetts (where I served for fourteen years as Rector of All Saints, Worcester). I am deeply grateful to Bishop Fisher for inviting me to serve part-time Canon for Spirituality and leadership, a role I began in September 2019. Since that time, I have served on the Diocesan Vitality Committee, and done some spiritual direction and coaching. And until Covid shut things down, I made Sunday visits to congregations in the diocese that invited me. Bishop Fisher and Canon Simpson came up with a design that involved my visiting a congregation twice in the course of a calendar month, which provided time to build a relationship and explore together the mission, purpose and challenges of the congregation.
This format seemed to work well in the eight parishes I was honored to visit; and now that congregational life is opening up again, I am ready to re-engage this practice. A Sunday visit would involve my preaching, leading a congregational forum on a scripture passage that invites attendees to make connections between the challenges and opportunities our spiritual ancestors faced – and what we as Christian communities are facing today. I also sit down with the Vestry, and invite a conversation around three questions: what do you do as a congregation that you think Jesus would love? What do you see as the overall mission or purpose of the congregation? And -- what are your challenges? The purpose of the visit is to not to solve problems, but to open up imagination as to how we can more creatively be the local version of the Jesus movement, as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has repeatedly called it.
There have been remarkable demonstrations of creativity and imagination during this pandemic. I have heard some incredible stories of resilience and compassion from clergy and lay leaders about how they have kept their congregations together, and how so many have felt supported by one another and by the Holy Spirit --despite the isolation of the past year and a half, and the emotional and psychic exhaustion that has come along with it.
I grew up in the Episcopal Church, which was for years unofficially devoted to an attractional model. In the late 1950s and early 1960s of my youth, the expectation was that if the church door was red, the sermon was 15 minutes or less, and the music was on-key, people would automatically come. And they did. Those days have been gone now for nearly the entirety of my ordained life – which is 41 years. And like so many of us who grew up in the attractional church, it is hard to let that model go. People should be coming, we think, because what we do here is so special and life-giving.
And it is. But so many people, in our increasingly secular age, don’t know that.
During my years as a diocesan bishop, I was introduced to a missional model of church. And I didn’t want to hear about it – at least not at first. I was too wedded to the model of church I grew up and was ordained in. The missional model doesn’t negate or cancel the desire to attract people to church. But it adds something vitally important to what it means to be church: to see where God is working in the community and to join God there. Jesus challenged people to go more often than he invited them to come. I have slowly become a convert to the missional approach.
And, what I have discovered in my Sunday visits is that people have been going out to join God – in unique and life-giving ways: providing midnight meals during exam time for students at the college that surrounds the congregation; building relationships(and providing food) with local veterans who are seeking a non-judging community; building relationships with the families who send their kids to the day care center in the church; offering regular witness to peace and justice at the edge of the church property as nearly the entire town drives by during the course of a week; being the site for the weekly farmers’ market. Those are missional enterprises. They empower the people who engage in them, as well as deepen their faith. Relationships are created. The altar of hope, reconciliation and care comes out into the world. It grows the church in unexpected ways.
I welcome the opportunity to be among you, and to engage with one another and how the Spirit may be nudging our church communities as we edge out of the pandemic. Lainey Hurlbut in the bishop’s office has been a magician in managing the schedule for my visits.
LHurlbut@dioceswma.org. Feel free to reach out to her.
