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I received a phone call last week from the current Senior Warden at the parish where I first set foot into the Episcopal Church. When I arrived in 1996, the round, small, church was filled with about 80 worshipers singing and praying at the top of their lungs. I mentioned the number of people because the capacity of that church is about 70 people and, as I found out later, having a full church every Sunday with overflow seating was the norm.
In my 15 years at Saint George, we were always strong and small in number, yet with an oversized impact in the community. The membership was active in civic and religious events and had become quite a fixture at the local university. However, as the 1990s and 2000s came upon us, attendance at this small church had shrunk to sometimes 10 or 12 people on a Sunday morning. They had gone through some rough patches with various pastors and attrition had its natural effect with the numbers in the pews. In the midst of this struggle, they discovered they could no longer afford a full time priest and made the painful decision to downsize into a mission congregation. With additional support from the Diocese, this small but mighty community persisted even in the face of further shrinking of the church.
Where similarly situated parish communities had begun to throw in the towels of defeat, that community where I found such hope and vision for the church never let go of its commitment to each other and to the mission of the Gospel.
In my conversation with the Senior Warden, I learned that through the years of minimal attendance and a poverty of pledgers, Saint George had ventured yet further on the path of trust and resurrection. With visionary leadership, the community spent time invoking the Holy Spirit, asking in what ways their neighbors could benefit from their practice of the Gospel. Never allowing for fear, this community kept asking the questions of how and where the spirit of God would lead them. They never lost courage.
A few new people started showing up at that church who had an allegiance to two communities of estranged and marginalized people. While it started only as a minor outreach for them, the call of the Spirit became more than they could ignore. With a long history of advocating for liberation and justice, the people of St. George discerned this new group calling them to new avenues of activism.
My friend’s voice became perceptibly more animated over the phone as she recounted for me that from the small seed of a few new people venturing into their church and because St. George had a history of listening and trusting the Holy Spirit, Saint George once again is filling its pews every Sunday. Upon learning about the ministry in this parish, local families and neighbors had come and found Saint George to be a place with mission and a place for comfort. Old people and young found there a place of resurrection and life.
Below my signature is a brief article by The Rev. Canon Whitney Rice, Canon for Evangelism & Discipleship Development in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri
who identifies this kind of resurrection in parish life. Though she is promoting a particular program available to parishes, I am not recommending it at this time. However, she entails how, once committed to the process of prayer and with a commitment to listen to the Holy Spirit, parishes who choose to be wise and zealous find resurrection and not death. What she says is born out in parishes and Dioceses across the Communion. Reports of the death of the Episcopal Church made by pundits and statisticians may be grossly premature. When open-hearted parishes seek and find their calling to do the work of the Gospel in their neighborhoods, new life returns – perhaps not the life remembered from decades past, but a life of vitality and excitement for which the Episcopal Church is again being identified.
I believe that presence of Tapestry Farms may be that gift from God which offers hope for long term vitality and viability for Trinity Cathedral. We share common vision and mission by caring for the immigrant and for neighbors who are poor. We both keep our arms open wide in welcome to any who come to this place. Members of Trinity Parish already are participating with Tapestry Farms – helping with educational needs for children, facilitating links between new arrivers and local services, and by sharing space with them and by being present at fund raisers.
This kind of vision and mission holds great potential for Trinity Cathedral. Saying “Yes” to the invitation to participate in the programs which Tapestry Farms offers the community gives us an opportunity to Do Christ’s Work with each other and alongside the dedicated people of this life-giving agency.
Please go to WWW.TapestryFarms.Org to find out what opportunities are available to you. There are some simple activities and some which require more time. Nonetheless, there are many. The likelihood that you well see familiar faces when you volunteer is very high.
The results of this partnership are not guaranteed us. It may not add people to our congregation. It can be predicted, however, that with Tapestry Farms, we will have a greater impact on our neighborhood. We are a community of charity and justice. The more people see us active in that capacity harkens to the holiness in us all, and will attract others to do this work with us.
Christopher +
Say it Out Loud: The Church Is Dying
Why are you sleeping? — Luke 22:46
Average Sunday attendance: down.
Average membership numbers: down.
Yearly pledge income: down.
The statistics don’t lie. For the past 40 years and accelerating like a train down a mountain for the last 20, The Episcopal Church and indeed the entire Christian mainstream has been losing strength, losing growth, losing life. If you asked an average American, “What’s an Episcopalian?” they would have no idea if it was a geological age or a specific kind of hedge fund.
This decline toward death has led to a deep underlying anxiety in our churches. We have been sitting by the hospital bed of our dying church, mourning it and blaming ourselves for its failure.
But there are two distinct options here. There is death that ends in death: here lies the Episcopal Church, crumbled to dust and irrelevance.
And then there is death that leads to resurrection. That is a death freely entered into, an embrace of the Cross that is undergirded by the knowledge that God will call us into and through this death into new life.
The point of openly acknowledging the decline and death of the church is not to lock the doors never to open them again. The point of embracing the death of the church is the same as it is for us as individuals—Jesus’ death on the Cross was above all the source of our liberation. This is the choice that is laid before us: death leading to death, or death leading to resurrection.
Every time we embrace a death—the death of our pride, the death of our old goals, the death of our privilege, the death of our preconceived ideas of what a church should be and do, the death of our desire for “success”—we will find that resurrection is breaking forth everywhere around us. Investing in the path of death and resurrection, the terribly difficult and joyfully liberating path of discipleship as the Body of Christ, will awaken in us a vitality that is far more compelling to seekers than all our old, self-serving, desperate, half-believed-in “strategies.”
If we can embrace membership in the dying Body of Christ, we the Church can know the joy of being the resurrected Living Body of Christ. All we have to do is take Jesus’ words to heart: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
What To Do About It: Requiem or Renaissance
Do you want to be made well? — John 5:6
Once we’ve named the struggle and realized that it gives us an incredible spiritual freedom, we can start to have courageous conversations about what this means and what we’re called to do about it. Requiem or Renaissance is a structured forum for those conversations to happen, in the form of an 18-month discernment and skills-building program. One of the key principles of Requiem or Renaissance is hyper-contextuality—it has to work for you, where you are, and who you are right now.
In this program, congregations enter a discernment process that will help them determine God’s call to them: to a Requiem, a holy ending of this congregation’s ministry in this location at this time.
Or, a Renaissance, a church re-plant with a new vision. As they are discerning, they will build skills to live out the call they articulate. Most congregations who have already taken part in this program have found themselves called to Requiem AND Renaissance, allowing some aspects of their ministry to go to holy rest while new ministries rise up.
Any and all outcomes are on the table, including starting from scratch with house church meetings, to closing and selling buildings, to collaborating with other ministries or secular partners to revitalize, and no doubt many other possibilities we can’t imagine yet.
We want our congregations to walk into their futures with eyes wide open and clear self-determination—not be forced into fewer and fewer options by declining money and membership.
Both the Requiem path and the Renaissance path are intended to lead to resurrection—but just as in the gospels, the resurrected Body of Christ will probably look unfamiliar and different from what we used to know and what we expected to see.
Dioceses across the Episcopal Church are discovering new creativity and drive to innovate, to experiment, to risk. We are willing to follow the Holy Spirit into uncharted territory as we search out the future of the church in this time and place. Guided by God, collaborating with one another and our neighbors, we seek to answer that question through both Requiem and Renaissance. We will say goodbye to what needs to go to a holy rest while seeding and nurturing new expressions of faith and community among us, knowing that resurrection is rich on both paths.
The work is urgent and the time is now. As St. Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.”
The Rev. Canon Whitney Rice
Canon for Evangelism & Discipleship Development
Episcopal Diocese of Missouri
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