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I. How I Got Here

Just a little bit more than one year ago I received a phone call from then Sr. Warden Gary Chausee inviting me to become the next Rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Puyallup, Washington. Church deployment professionals say that when this happens, you are supposed say thank you for the offer and to ask for at least one and not more than two days to prayerfully consider the call. So that’s what I did. I told Gary thank you so much for the offer, could I please have a day to think it over and to pray for guidance regarding this very important decision. Gary had obviously been reading the same Church deployment professionals I had, because he seemed to be expecting the question and said of course, he would look forward to my call once I’d had an opportunity to prayerfully consider.

Gary, I have a confession to make. I never spent a single minute of that day you gave me in prayerful consideration. I was only trying to go by the book, when in reality I had already decided—had decided in fact long before you called—that if Christ Church would have me, I’d count myself lucky and go. Most of the important decisions in my life get made that way; an intuitive leap towards what I know is the most interesting next chapter. Such a decision making process doesn’t leave a great deal of room for prayerful consideration, like the book recommends, but it does allow for as many prayers of thanksgiving as you care to offer, and I have offered many since then.

II. What I Found Here

I arrived in Puyallup on Wednesday, April 25th and celebrated the Eucharist here at Christ Episcopal Church for the first time on Sunday the 29th. From my very first experience with Christ Church and throughout the search process I found the people chosen to represent this place uniformly friendly, welcoming, and quietly sure of the good thing they had in this community. Actually arriving here and beginning to take part in that community confirmed this first impression. On that first Sunday and throughout the month of May our shared process of getting to know one another reassured me that, any lack of prayerful consideration notwithstanding, I had ended up in the best possible place to end up. That elusive recipe that produces harmony between priest and congregation had been prepared well and baked exactly right, and the resulting confection has been nourishing me these past nine months.

Our time together these past months has been incredibly gratifying to me. Conventional wisdom on church leaderships says that new rectors are wise to not introduce significant changes during their first year of tenure. Further, whatever significant change you might want to make, you should make the most important first, just in case that change uses up whatever goodwill you’ve generated and you have to compromise on the rest. Like most conventional wisdom on church leadership, I find this advice pretty useless.

First of all, no matter how hard I might try to not change anything, it is impossible not to. No matter how many times I tell the Liturgical Commission that I want to do this or that liturgy exactly like you did it last year, it manages to come out different. Just me being here and doing things I know how to do produces change, because I’m a change. When I read Ed Miller’s Sr. Warden report, I was a little taken aback to read that he is under the impression that I have introduced many changes that have all been accepted positively. Honestly, I didn’t know I was making all those changes. They didn’t feel like changes to me, they just seemed like good ideas that—while they may have been mine to start with—made sense to the people and ethos of this church. The fact is, not changing anything for a year is impossible, for all of us are alive, and to be alive is to change, at least in the small things. All of us living here together means that we will inevitably change as we go along.

Secondly, this idea that whatever big change I most want to make I ought to try and accomplish first seems to me unnecessarily confrontational. I have seen priests make this kind of move; seen them come into a new parish with an idea already fixed in their minds: something they’ve seen or done in a previous place and which they are certain is the best thing for this new church. Sometimes it works, I admit, and they are right either by coincidence or luck, but most of the time this pet project, however well intentioned, becomes the focus of their time in that parish and even when they leave five or ten years down the road there will still be people who resent that imposed change. The agenda of the next search process then becomes whether or not to try and undo what has been done.

I assure you that I have no such personal projects hidden up my sleeve. I have thoughts, of course, ideas and even dreams for things we might do here at Christ Episcopal Church. Yet whatever we end up doing, we will end up doing together. I firmly hold that whatever course of action or change I might suggest becomes not mine as soon as I suggest it. To offer a dream is to give up sole ownership of it; if I tell you what I see on our horizon, that vision is no longer mine, it is ours. I take my job as a leader in our community very seriously, but never without the awareness that a captain who sails where he will at whim and without the support of his crew will end up sailing poorly at best, and into mutiny at worst.

So, all of those disclaimers and histories out of the way, I propose to share with you today three things. First, I want to tell you what we have here, in this church, from my perspective. Second, I want to tell you three specific ways that I think we can grow what we already have into something greater during the coming year. These three things are in the areas of communications, financial planning, and liturgy. Third, and briefly, I want to tell you what our future looks like to me, right now, from where I’m standing.

III. What We Have

First of all, what we have. I hope this is going to seem pretty basic. I hope you are going to nod in agreement, if not in exasperation that I would bother to state something so obvious. We have two gigantic assets here in this church, and I want to name them before we go any further. We have a profound and honest sense of community, and we have a unique and valuable faith tradition. Both of these might seem obvious, or worse might seem as if they are things which every Episcopal church must also have. I assure you that this is not so.

A. Our Community

The nature of the community spirit and closeness which we have here at Christ Episcopal Church is indeed rare. Unfortunately so, as Christian community is one of those things we are all supposed to be doing in our churches. Yet for better or for worse, the community here is one a level well above the average. I am not saying this to flatter you, or to assert something that I think ought to be true but maybe isn’t, quite. On the whole, spread out through every member of this congregation that I know, you people like, tolerate, and care for each other better and more often that in any other church I have ever been a part of. I mean that, sincerely. Love is an amorphous quality difficult to define precisely, but I will take the bold step of saying that what I see in this community of faithful is real love for one another. “They will know we are Christians by our love,” is a well known line of song in our tradition, but unfortunately is less often true than it ought to be. It is true here, often and in many different ways. I cannot overstate how important this is—how huge a treasure this is for our community gathered here and those who will join us in the future.

B. Our Faith Tradition

Our second asset is even more bold to claim as uniquely ours since in theory every Episcopal church ought to have it. Yet bold or not, I want to say that our faith tradition, the liturgy and music we share on Sunday mornings and other occasions of worship, is several cuts above average here in this place. This is due to many different factors which all feed into our worship. We have a beautiful and functional historic building. These three features: beautiful, functional, and historic, are not necessarily features that always go together, but they do for us. We have an excellent worship space.

Another factor in our faith tradition is liturgical music that we have to support our worship. I think it is important to acknowledge that for a church of this size, given our membership, our annual budget, and our all volunteer vocal performers, that Christ Episcopal Church has a far better music program than we might be expected to. From the Soul Purpose band, to the Choir, including our volunteer instrumentalists and our two very part time paid music staff, our liturgical music program supports the worship in this place far more effectively and beautifully than many other churches in our position. (I don’t mean to leave the eight o’clock service out of this either; the choice to not use instrumental or vocal music and instead engage in the more austere charism of silence and group reading is an intentional choice, and not a case of less important.)

A third factor in making our use of the faith tradition above average is the ability to combine a formal and ancient set of rituals with a warmth of delivery and accessibility. I will take my share of the credit for this, since it is something I seek to do, but I will also insist that you are part of that as well in the way our sense of community injects itself into our formal liturgical structures.

The bottom line is this: as Episcopalians we posses a worship style that is unique and powerful amongst Christian denominations, but we posses it here at Christ Church in an exceptional way. It is an asset for us who benefit from it week after week, and it is an asset to in our mission to share this life of faith with others.

IV. How We Can Grow this Year

How then can we take these two assets, our sense of community and our faith tradition, and improve upon the foundation they build for us? What can we do this year, not to change ourselves into something else, but to make ourselves into a better, deeper, and truer version of what we already are? To put it in theological language, how can we help God create us in God’s image? There are three areas I see as places where we can do good work this year, in communications, financial planning, and liturgical growth.

A. Communications

First, communications. There is a part of each of us that likes church because it doesn’t change all that much or all that fast. This is particularly true in a church like ours with a historical liturgical tradition. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I think I’ve already mentioned that it is neither possible nor desirable to avoid change altogether. Yet it is acceptable to value those parts of our tradition that don’t change much or quickly. Our liturgy is such a gift to us because those who have gone before us adapted it to our modern context with great care and deliberation. The moral values that we seek to live by as Christians also evolve slowly and with great consideration and debate. There are parts of the church where change ought to be made slowly if at all. The area of communications is not one of those parts.

What we have here at Christ Church is a good thing. We need to share that. We need to share it amongst ourselves, and we need to share it with the wider community. Our means of communication ought to be varied, up-to-date, and multi-level.

You have seen some of my enthusiasm for this already. Because of how and when I arrived here, I made a serious effort to share many things with you folks very quickly. After just five Sundays last April and May, I took a leave for all of June in order see my wife graduate and move us both out here to the great Northwest. Knowing I had just five weeks, I hit upon the idea of writing a personal letter to everyone I could get an address for. This way I could share a great deal about myself with the largest number of people, even if they couldn’t make it to church that week. The production of such a letter, especially every week and from various places across the country as we moved, would have been onerous for our office staff and volunteers as well as expensive. So, The Friday Letters would be an old fashioned style personal letter send by a new fashioned method.

The Friday Letters have been very successful and continue to serve a useful purpose. The means of e-mail distribution has been improved using a mass e-mail marketing software that uses industry best practices for reducing spam and giving recipients power to control the e-mails they receive and when they receive them. This is a great step forward in communications, yet if you think me sending you an e-mail is progressive communications technique, allow me to shake your world up a tad: e-mail is at least three steps behind the cutting edge. Perhaps I send you e-mail, but I don’t send you text messages on your cell phone, we don’t chat using instant messenger programs, and there is no social networking website of which Christ Church is a part of. These newer means of communication may or may not be of use to us, but they are out there and should be considered.

Alongside The Friday Letters I have been sending out a newsletter called The eClarion. Little online sibling to our venerable paper version of The Clarion, it is time for The eClarion to grow up. With the effectiveness, both in terms of distribution and in cost, of e-mail communications, there is no reason why you should be getting a calendar two weeks out of date in your mailbox one time each month. This is not a criticism of The Clarion, or of those who produce it. It is just a fact of the modern world. We can have a high quality, up-to-date e-mail newsletter published every week for less effort and less money than we are spending on the paper version.

A note, before I continue, for those of you who do not have, use, or want e-mail. I still love you. You will not be left out. Already copies of The Friday Letter are available in paper format on Sunday morning and mailed to a few who cannot get it in other ways. There is no reason this cannot be done with The eClarion as well. In fact, included in my calculation of cost savings is the premise that we would print and mail, first class, copies of The eClarion to those who don’t have e-mail. We could do that for upwards of thirty people and still save money, though saving money is only a side benefit in my mind. Currently The Friday Letters are mailed to just two people who can’t get them online or at church.

Next topic: our website. My thanks to Mark Loffer who assembled and maintained the website that was in use when I arrived here. My thanks also to Margaret Clayton who has set up a new internet home for our website. There is lots of room for more progress with our website, and making that progress is a high priority for me. Our website is our yellowpages ad, and it is the first place most people will look for information on our church. We do not need a huge, complicated, or labor intensive website. We do need an accessible, up-to-date, and easy to find website. That needs to happen this year. Nobody I know of goes to a particular church because they have a great website. On the other hand, lots of people I know have not gone to a particular church because they couldn’t find or use their website. A website isn’t the work of the Gospel, but it can certainly enable that work.

B. Financial Planning

The next area of growth I want to address is financial planning. Out of the three areas I’m hitting I put this one in the middle because my grade school teachers always said to put your weakest argument in the middle of a five paragraph essay. This is not a weak topic, but it is less glamorous and perhaps uncomfortable. Nevertheless, here we go:

Our financial status here at Christ Episcopal Church is great with need for immediate improvement. We have essentially no debt. We have an annual operating budget that is almost entirely covered by the tithes and pledges and gifts of our members. We are not being propped up, or spending our future, or being irresponsible. We have an all volunteer financial leadership team that does good and conscientious work on our behalf. We even have the beginnings of an endowment fund; it’s not much, but it’s something to start from.

What we do not have is a sufficient reserve to maintain our building through major repairs without having an emergency fund raising campaign. We also do not have a organ that is adequate to support the music program we currently have, not to mention one we might wish to grow. And, we do not have anywhere to park.

A maintenance reserve is something we can do, and are starting to do. It is only a matter of financial discipline. The finance committee is considering it, the Vestry will act on it, and all of you ought to hold them and I to accomplishing it. Taking care of the gift we have in this historic building is part of our stewardship of the gifts God has given us.

As for the organ, it seems to me that we’ll need a new one in the next five years. Sooner if things go well. There’s little to be gained in maintaining or upgrading an instrument that isn’t all we need it to be in the first place. This is less urgent than other things perhaps, and being married to an organist undoubtedly skews my perspective, but this is something I’d like to start us thinking about this year.

Ah, parking. One of the first things I learned about Christ Episcopal Church of Puyallup was that there was no parking lot. Five spots, if you count generously, and those not even proper spots at all. Frankly, I’m not that excited about parking. I’ve seen downtown churches with little to no parking be hugely successful community assets. On the other hand, providing access to our facilities to those who are less mobile is something I do care about, and the fact that we don’t have a single ADA approved parking space is a concern.

Here’s the thing about parking: if we want some, we have to buy land. There is no other way this equation works out. If we want parking, or more space, or a youth center, or a playground, or anything else at all, we have to buy land. That’s why this is a financial planning issue. When the house next door comes up for sale, we have to buy it. We have to have the money on hand to finance that. I don’t care if they want an unreasonable amount of money for their house, it’s a sellers market at that point. We have to be ready to buy any property that comes up for sale adjacent to our church.

In order to address these three areas, a maintenance reserve, a plan for the organ, and savings for new property, I’m encouraging the finance committee to formalize the small endowment fund we have, and I’m going to encourage the stewardship committee to begin planning to fund it. There are two families on record who have this church in their wills. More people need to be on that list. I need to be on that list. You needn’t be wealthy to remember Christ Church in your will, you just need to remember.

C. Liturgical Growth

The last of my three areas for action this year is liturgical growth. I have already insisted that our worship here is one of our two biggest assets. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room to enhance and build upon that asset. There is a sense in me, and in others who are paying attention, that our culture is on a spiritual search. The shelves of bookstores labeled “spirituality” are packed with many and various methods, means, and maddnesses designed to help you on your own personal spiritual journey.

This culture-wide desire for spiritual growth has become something of a meta-narrative at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. This is good news for those of us who are already in the spiritual journey business. We at Christ Church cannot meet the needs of every seeker out there. We are not experts at Zen meditation of Sufi dancing. We do not know about Hindi goddesses or the astronomical calendars of the primitive druids. What we do know, what we own in a particularly valuable way, is the best of ancient Christian liturgy combined with a modern intellectual freedom.

We have what people are looking for. The Episcopal liturgy can be as mystic as Zen Buddhism, and as nature reverent as paganism. We have stories to share that are the foundation of Western civilization, and a faith that draws from ancient belief and modern inquiry both. We do not need to change who we are in order to be relevant to the next generation of seeking believers. All we need to do is to be ourselves; to be the best and truest version of ourselves that we can be.

You can see my inclinations in this direction, I hope, just by attending worship. I take our rituals very seriously, without taking ourselves too seriously. I have offered extra non-Sunday services drawn from our own past. In the Taizé prayer service offered during Advent and again during Lent I have sought to begin the offering of complementary worship opportunities.

Sometimes we forget that when you get right down to it, the point of a church is to worship. This is not to say that we ought not be involved in outreach, or potluck dinners, or educational offerings. Yet at the core of who we are is our liturgy; we are here to worship. That worship feeds all that we who are already here do, and it is the primary draw for those who might come to join us.

All that we can do to make our liturgy that reflection of the truest and deepest parts of ourselves is worth doing.

V. Our Future

Some of you already know that I came to join the Episcopal church because of an Episcopal summer camp I attended during Jr. High and High School. By the second or third summer I spent at Camp Cross on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene I had decided I wanted to be a priest when I grew up. I mentioned that to the chaplain of the week one afternoon as we were gathered on the steps of the dining hall waiting to go in to dinner.

That priest, whom I have happily forgotten the name of, said to me that it was fine if I wanted to be a priest, but that I should have another career in mind, because in all likelihood by the time I was old enough to be a priest there wouldn’t be a church left to support full time clergy. He was convinced that the church as he knew it would come to an end before I could be a part of it.

I have since encountered a similar sentiment a number of times. Generally from older male clergy who have spent their lives in the church and are terrified that it isn’t the same now as it was when they joined up. You can hear talk of this kind all over today, as we struggle to come to terms with modern issues of human sexuality and biblical authority.

I could talk about the arrogance of assuming that you could know the end of an institution that has stood for two thousand years. I could talk about how that chaplain was obviously wrong, since here I am and here the church still is too. But what I want to talk about instead is that he was right, although not in the way he thought.

The church doesn’t die, but it also doesn’t stay the same. The church you knew as a child isn’t the same being as it is now. The church I have come to know and serve today will not be the same animal when it comes my turn to retire and to advise the next generation of clergy hopefuls.

We like to think that this is our church, but it isn’t. We don’t own Christ Episcopal Church of Puyallup any more than we own God. We are only stewards of this place—shepherds of the sheep that come here looking for safe pasture. We are caretakers of this lighthouse, for those who come seeking its light and for those who rest here looking out on the world by its shining.

The stewardship of this place is a sacred mission, deceptive in its simplicity. I am proud and humbled to say that I am a leader of this community, and I ask you to share in that pride and humility. This is the Rector’s Report, for the Annual Meeting of Christ Episcopal Church of Puyallup, February 10th, 2008. AMEN.