There is Hope
Last night, my stewardship class took a field trip to the Episcopal Church Center (which is essentially the home office of the Episcopal Church). Our instructor, Terry, is the Stewardship Officer for the Episcopal Church and her office is in the Church Center.
Terry invited two of her colleagues to join us for a portion of the class. Rebecca, the head of the Deployment office, talked to us first. She has been in this position for about a year and has been doing a major assessment of the current database system that is used to post job listings in the church. It was developed in the early 70s, before we had women clergy or any serious ethnically diverse congregations. Rebecca is developing an entirely new system to help congregations create an identity that is accurate and to help clergy to do the same. With these identities established, her office will then be able to help match clergy and congregations effectively. She talked about all the research she has done regarding various personality profiles and had lots of great things to say about the eharmony.com profile. She has incredible vision and enthusiasm. She is even working to change the name of her organization from “Deployment” to “Transition” seeing that it is a more accurate reflection of the work that they do.
After hearing from Rebecca, we met Anthony who is the director of the Latino Ministry. Anthony talked extensively about the growth of the Latino population in the Episcopal church. He mentioned that Latino congregations tend to focus more on ministry than on rubrics - getting the gospel ‘done’ as it needs to be done, rather than worrying about who is doing what and if it is being done ‘properly’ (i.e. wearing only black shoes when acoltying).
Of course, Terry, our professor is also an incredible visionary with great enthusiasm. She really understands the gospel in a powerful way and is always proclaiming it.
I’m feeling so much hope for the Episcopal church since having been to the Episcopal Church Center and meeting these visionary leaders. It was so encouraging to see that the leaders in our Church are thinking about the future and about ways that we can be innovative and creative in how we proclaim the gospel. Sometimes seminary can be so steeped in the past and so caught up in the ‘tradition’ and ‘the way things have always been done’ that I worry that our focus on the ‘old’ will make us even more irrelevant to the average American than we already are.
