From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

As I’ve worked on the annual meeting address, it occurs to me that it does not feel like one address. It feels like several years’ worth of addresses in one! I know that for many of us, life in general feels that way. It feels a bit stuffed with a hodgepodge of different things. 

Some things we chose, some we didn’t. Some things we’d planned for, others we hadn’t. Some relationships changed, some were lost, some new ones started.

It’s been a full year. 

I’d imagined that with the vaccine a switch would flip. I thought we’d be “back to normal” by Christmas. We’re almost there. Maybe?

While I don’t envision us ever going back to the types of lockdowns that 2020 brought, I also am not quite able to conjure what is next. I have some predictions. I have inklings. I certainly have prayers.

I suspect that the pandemic will accelerate trends happening already in most congregations. My sense is that the pandemic has not revealed new things in congregations so much as it’s distilled them to a clearer point.

I think that’s happened for individual Christians, too. I imagine that the experience of the last couple of years has deepened longings that were there, exposed hurts that were being untended, revealed rifts and connections more clearly.

The pandemic sent people back to the drawing board, or the dining table, or the bath tub—back to wherever they make important decisions. We’re seeing mass resignations and job switches. Big, weighty decisions are just coming into focus for folks as they process what’s happened and what is happening.

It’s been a full year.

The idea of taking on even more seems unpalatable. But what if the more we take on is the work of figuring out how to do less? How to do fewer things more intentionally? How to go deeper? How to do what we do with more compassion and clarity? How to tend and build on what matters most?

I think the coming year, and I’ll talk about this in my annual meeting address, is going to involve strategic planning around ministry, mission, and Saint Philip’s campus. It’s going to involve reassessment of staffing structures in light of where we’ve been and where we hope to go. It will involve committee and program restructuring to acknowledge the fact that how people volunteer, participate, and attend has changed.

It’s been a full year.

Part of what has made it feel so full is that we’ve been holding three things in tension. We’ve been holding what was, what is, and what might be in a kind of cobbled, juggled, slightly awkward way as we try to figure out what the best thing is to do.

Ultimately, the right thing to do is going to be to trust that Jesus has this in hand. We’re going to need to settle our hearts and souls to the point where we can recognize that we are where we are—and that’s the only place we can minister right now. We can’t hold all the things together in some kind of stasis as we wait for the pandemic to pass.

We’ve done that. Now the call is to something different. We’re going to need to give thanks to God for being with us along the way and offer to follow wherever he leads.

It’s a season when so many are reassessing where they’ve been and where they’re going—churches will be no different. If we can’t quite imagine what “next” looks like, that’s okay. I expect God, as God always does, will surprise us!

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert