Rector's Study May 2009

From the Rector's Study ~

A beautiful future is unfolding before us, this community of ECR. Our own Pentecost experience is happening right here in our midst. Not with the same sensational rush of a mighty wind, yet the same Holy Spirit, the same igniting of God’s Love and Power, the same blessing of surprise that accompanied the first Pentecost for Jesus’ first disciples are manifesting for us even now. The Episcopal Church of the Resurrection is welcoming a wider variety of voices, speaking of God’s Good News from a wider variety of backgrounds, each proclaiming the Gospel as only he or she can put it into action, can put it into words. Christ was raised for all, and here at the Church of his Resurrection, we are putting this miracle into action. This is part of how we got here:

In April of 2005, the Vestry and Ministry Leaders of ECR identified a need and claimed the desire to expand our campus with additional parking capacity and an additional building to provide more space for ministries, education, and fellowship. It has always been a priority with me as rector that our parish community would understand the reasons for such expansion, and to know that expansion for its own sake was not reason enough. This priority continues today and I am happy to note that it is a priority also amongst our Vestry and Ministry Leaders.


Almost exactly one year later, the Task Force that had come focus on the building and parking lots was disbanded. It had done its initial work, its early fact-finding. The focus turned next helping ECR’s Leadership identify the priorities of this community and any deficiencies that it might wish to correct. A sophisticated process call the Congregational Planning Process was found through the Church’s national headquarters, and form amongst our leaders here a group was formed and named appropriately: the Congregational Planning Process Committee. This committee, working with many others who staffed particular roles and took up specific responsibilities systematically interviewed ECR’s Ministry Leaders, collated the answers, analyzed the results, and, in May of 2007, reported to a gathering of the Vestry and Ministry Leaders.

The information described ECR’s high valuation of worship, i.e. all that is involved with providing inspiring and good quality worship services that honor God and motivate God’s people. Fellowship was also identified as a major focus of the community’s interests, to the point that worship and fellowship are, for us, nearly interchangeable. ECR also highly values Outreach, i.e. service rendered to others, honoring the dignity of every human being, doing to others as we would have others to do to us, sharing with a brother, going with a sister the extra mile. The report also confirmed a general desire to strengthen our educational offerings for all ages, and to help ECR become intentionally more evangelistic in its entire culture, i.e. able and equipped to share God’s Love and invite people to it with a natural ease and almost instinctive confidence in doing so.

Throughout the process and since then, the Congregational Planning Process Committee (CPPC), the Vestry, the Ministry Leaders, and I have been helping one another and the parish community as a whole stay focused on the ‘why’ for the expansion of ECR’s campus. Our goal is not to recruit new members for ECR. Our goal is not create new parking lots or a new building so that we can look at it and feel proud. Our goal is to open up the physical campus of ECR so that it better resembles the spiritual character of this community: namely, open, welcoming, accessible, engaged with, and active in, the world around us in the Name of Christ Jesus our Savior.

Through the latter part of 2007 and most of 2008, the CPPC and the Vestry have been working with an architect to help us know what is reasonably feasible for meeting our goals. Last year, the Vestry finalized approval of ‘site plan,’ a lay out of the campus as we would like to see it in the future. This plan has continued to be tweaked with the help of many of our Ministry Leaders and others serving on three sub-committees. These groups have been invited to pray and work toward articulating the vision and mission that calls and inspires ECR, the details of what the building and campus grounds should look like upon completion, and specific purposes and ministries to which we are trying to respond in building, i.e. in equipping the saints for ministry.

In April of this year, then, ECR's Vestry and Ministry Leaders met for an annual Retreat. It was a powerful and holy experience. The retreat help us all come to greater understanding of bias, prejudice, and discrimination, of our own unintentional participation in these, and of how we individually and collectively can help ourselves and ECR to move forward past these sins of ignorance and evil. We learned more about expressing ECR's spiritual gift of welcome and hospitality to wider range and variety of people. Nearly 40 of our Vestry and Ministry Leaders attended this powerful program.

At the conclusion, we engaged a process of discernment of ECR's new Mission Statement. This step in our Congregational Planning Process called for us to raise up from our hearts and minds, from God within and around us, a statement that would express ECR’s mission in a way that fits ECR especially well, and would not so easily fit just any congregation.

The final two and half hours of work focused on this single effort. They were fun, lively, frustrating, messy, and rewarding. They found us all as one determined to finish this multi-year effort, and to do so well. There came a moment when the group as a whole noticed that something had happened, a 'Holy Spirit moment,' and we knew that we had arrived at the Statement.

And that’s the other part of how we got here. The Holy Spirit moved through the room that evening, just as surely as it moved through the upper room in which the disciples were gathered after Christ’s ascension, waiting for further word from God. Little did they expect that the word from God would be spoken by themselves. Such are the mysteries of the ways of God.

The Vestry will soon officially introduce the new Mission Statement. When they do, I think we will all recognize that this statement represents our community very particularly and very well. Please give thanks to each and al of ECR’s Vestry and Ministry Leaders. And join them in giving thanks to God.
I hope you that you will see also how our Mission Statement reflects the way that our future here is linked well with the future of the Episcopal Church as a whole. Our Church is broadening and brightening and my prayers and efforts as rector are oriented toward seeing to it that ECR, with our spiritual gift of hospitality and welcome, is a community in this city and of this diocese that is well prepared to be grow forward with the larger Church and with God.

I speak to this elsewhere in this month’s edition, and next month’s, of the Radiant Cross. I will name and address there the two most publically pressing matters of the Church at this moment in our history, especially at the upcoming General Convention in early July this year. I suggest there that the Church’s emerging resolution of these matters is a sign of God at work amongst us and through us.

In the meantime, my thanks go out to our Vestry and to our Ministry Leaders, to the Congregational Planning Process Committee, and to the members of the sub-Committees; and my thanks go up to God for each and all. Finally, I thank you, dearly beloved community of ECR, and I thank God because I know that we have a beautiful future opening up before us.

God’s Peace.
Jim +