Greetings from Key West, Florida!

Yes, I understand that this is a strange greeting from your new supply priest that lives and works in Wisconsin! My wife Tania and I are celebrating our 30 year wedding anniversary and somewhere warm, sunny, and fun was just what we needed.  

As much as I am saddened by having to leave this beautiful place, I am equally excited about our shared ministry over the next several months. I am very much looking forward to leading the services at All Saints and getting to know all of you as we embark on this new leg of our journeys together.

While we celebrate long relationships in our lives and in our communities, in the church, relationships come and go. A long time member leaves or dies, a new member becomes part of the community, a child is born, clergy come and go, and laity take on different roles. In each of these, the relationships change, lives are disrupted, and there can be uneasiness in what the future holds.  

I want to let you know a bit of what to expect of me as I enter your space for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. 

First, we will be gathering to worship. Worship for me is a gathering of the faithful to remember we are all children of God, to give praise and prayer to God for all of the gifts and challenges we have, and for guidance in how to live out our lives as God's children. In this worship, I try to fully use the ministry of the laity and clergy as best as I can. You will notice that there are more people around the altar as we celebrate communion. You will notice my presence in and amongst the congregation as we pray and sing, most especially at the homily and announcements. And, at the announcements, I will ask if anyone would like to come forward for birthday or anniversary blessings, travel mercy blessings, or healing prayers. No one must come up for a blessing or prayer, but you are always welcome to. I simply want to offer you the opportunity. 

Speaking of homilies, this is the second thing I wanted to mention. I tend to preach from the center crossing (or wherever the mics let me!) My sermons are full of stories, learnings, and, I hope, thought provoking and challenging messages. I will ask questions, offer historical context, and challenge us to address some of today's issues as we try to live out our lives. My questions are often not meant for you to answer publicly, but if you choose to answer, I welcome your involvement. There won't be tests, no prior reading is required, but I will likely push your level of comfort a bit. Please walk with me in that struggle if I push us out of our comfort zones. My homilies are meant to make us think about God, our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we will navigate through the scripture lessons and see how we might be God's hands, hearts, and feet in this world we live in today. Oh, and my sermons are short. I grew up in a Baptist Church where the sermons were 30 to 45 minutes long. I do my best to keep my sermons between 8 and 10 minutes...but sometimes I do go over a little.

Finally, at least for this message, I am always asked what people should call me. For me, this is all about the context in which we find ourselves. Most people in the church call me Fr. Kenny. I find it personable, yet at the same time respectful of the role I am occupying at the time. But please know, I in no way demand that be what you call me. If you don't like the title "Father", then a simple Kenny will suffice....after all, that is what all of my family calls me.

Well, it is time to leave this beautiful island and head back to the frozen tundra. I will be arriving back in Milwaukee before the end of the day (Dec 17, 2025.) I look forward to meeting each of you and I am very excited to see what is in store for us over the next few months as we journey together.

Blessings,
Kenny+

My dear family in Christ,
 
In cleaning out a stack of old papers, I recently came across a single question scrawled across a torn scrap of paper from a small notebook, in a handwriting that I didn’t recognize, but which is definitely not my own.  The question on this tiny paper is:
 
“How has the leadership of this parish cultivated a cohesive vision for the congregation?”
 
I’ve no idea how long ago I folded up this note and tucked it away amongst other bits and pieces of things to hold onto … but it’s impossible not to feel how timely and urgent the question is in our present moment.
 
Back in 2023, the Vestry and I hammered out what I’d hoped would be a new vision statement for All Saints.  It became instead, at the time, a “statement of direction.”  In retrospect, I now think it was more a statement of identity ~ at least a statement of an identity to which we as a church community would aspire.
 
That 2023 statement read:
 
“All Saints Episcopal Church will strive to be a Christian community that is 1) theologically orthodox, 2) unapologetically Anglican/Episcopal, and 3) welcoming, inclusive, and fully affirming of all persons, regardless of ~ for example, but not limited to ~ race/ethnicity, background, socio-economic status, level of education, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”
 
Two years and change down the road, it’s probably time to revisit this statement.
 
Not in the sense of changing or replacing it ~ not remotely.  It captures, I believe, the highest ideals we truly aspire towards in our parish community.  But it’s time that we take a look at ourselves and ask what progress we’ve made towards becoming the community that we’ve said we would aspire to be.
 
To put it another way, we decided a while back what kind of community we want to be.  That in and of itself is a hard thing to do, but we did it, together.  The next hard question is: how exactly do we make those aspirations come to life?
 
The good news is that I think the first item is well in hand.  Our prayers and worship follow the Book of Common Prayer (always a good guideline!), and from what I’ve seen in Bible studies and Christian formation workshops and classes, we are very well grounded in the Scriptures and the core teachings of the Christian faith.  There is always room for more worship, more study, more practice, truly this is a faithful and knowledgeable community!
 
The second item from our “statement of direction” is also pretty well in hand, I would say, both in terms of our liturgies and in spiritual practice.  We are very much an Episcopal (and therefore Anglican) community.  It must be said, though, that our communal identity is deeply and widely enriched by the members of our congregation who have come to us from other Christian traditions.  One of the great gifts of our Anglican approach is that our famed “via media,” or “middle way,” is that it allows us sometimes to say, theologically, “both/and,” rather than always having to choose “either/or.”
 
That said, the whole of the Anglican tradition of which we are a part is vast, offering many time-honored ways of connecting with God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.  Prayers and practices refined through centuries of use, some going all the way back to the Apostles themselves, are part of our heritage and present a myriad of ways to become ever more nearly conformed to Christ.  So, as Anglican and Episcopal as we already are, we still have much to explore within this rich tradition.
 
Perhaps the hardest item to consider is the one that seems the most timely in the present moment:  our aspiration to be a truly inclusive and affirming community, welcoming ~ and joining together with ~ everyone as we strive “to seek and serve Christ in all persons, respecting the dignity of every human being.”  It’s a challenge, because on one hand, we already do that.  To my knowledge, All Saints has never turned away anyone on the basis of race/ethnicity, age, socio-economic status, gender identity, or sexual orientation, at least not in living memory.  That’s pretty remarkable.
 
At the same time, is it not also appropriate to ask if we could do even better than we already are?  What specific steps can we take, what particular things can we do, actively to encourage folks who have, either historically or presently, often been left unwelcome in (or even outright excluded from) Christian and/or Episcopal spaces?  Jesus didn’t wait for marginalized people to come to him; when they did, he of course welcomed them, but he also actively sought them out, often causing scandal amongst the established and respectable religious folk of his day.
 
My friends, I don’t know, off the top of my head, how to do that here and now, in 2025 in Appleton and the Fox Valley.  But I do suspect that this third aspiration from our “statement of direction,” to become an actively inclusive and affirming community, especially for folks who are often marginalized in our present society, is our greatest opportunity for growth.  
 
The challenge, then, is to come up with some things to try, along those lines, and then actually try them, trust the Holy Spirit to guide our hearts and bless our efforts.  Imagine what our church could be ~ a haven for folks who need Jesus the most.
 
I look forward to hearing your thoughts, questions, and ideas for new things we might try, as we aspire to become more fully the community God has called us to be.  Please call, text, and/or email ~ I can’t wait to see how the Spirit inspires us!
 
Fr. C

TREASURER TRANSITION

As many of you heard announced in church this past Sunday, our long-time parish treasurer, Tina Wilfer, has resigned from that position.

It is impossible to overstate the positive impact her tenure in that role has had upon the financial health and vitality of this parish. Her diligent devotion, and especially her emphasis that we embrace and adhere to established “best practices” ~ from day-to-day operations up to long-range forecasting and anticipation of future needs ~ have done more than merely to help us “get by.” 

Tina’s deep expertise and tireless work ethic made her an integral part of our Finance Ministry Team, and together the members of that team have seen us through a number of serious challenges, giving us as a parish a solid foundation for continuing to move forward from here, even as uncertainty looms around us. We owe every member of that team our thanks, and we are particularly grateful to Tina herself for all the incredible work she has done on behalf of All Saints.

And now, we enter a time of transition. The parish needs a new treasurer … and Tina is of course a tough act to follow. Her professional training and experience with accounting and finance were huge assets, and we were lucky to have someone with those particular gifts who was willing to offer them to our parish for so long.

But I want to emphasize that our next treasurer does not have to match Tina’s impressive credentials and expertise. A basic understanding of accounting is needful, plus a clear head for oversight and a sincere desire to serve and safeguard the financial resources of this parish.  Those latter qualities are the traits that, on top of her own invaluable professional experience, I believe best defined Tina’s gifts and made her time as treasurer so successful.

So if any of that resonates with you, or if you’d just like to talk a bit about what the role of treasurer might entail moving forward, please reach out to me at [email protected] ~ let’s sit down and explore the possibilities together.

Yours in Christ,
Christopher+

My dear family in Christ,
 
In my last newsletter column, I wrote about patterns of decline that churches sometimes experience, and I shared with you what some researchers have identified as possible warning signs of decline.  The good news was that many of those warning signs did not apply to All Saints.  Unfortunately, though, some of them do.  So we need to begin exploring what we can (and should!) do to revitalize this parish that we love so much.
 
There’s already been a great response to that column ~ some of y’all have already reached out to share your ideas, and that’s really exciting!  Please keep those calls and texts coming!  The Holy Spirit is definitely moving amongst us, stirring things up (as she’s wont to do).  One thing to bear in mind, however, is that whenever and wherever the Holy Spirit gets active, there will surely be changes coming. 
 
And change can be uncomfortable, unsettling, even scary.  But it can also be wonderful and invigorating.  Think of it like this:  do we want our parish to grow?  Phrase it that way, and the vast majority of us would say “yes, of course.”  Growth itself, though, is a change.  So we need to be exploring what things we would like to have change about our beloved parish ~ really lean into the possibilities that the Spirit presents to us ~ even if/when the process of change itself makes us a little uneasy.
 
To help get a handle on this prospect of possible change so that it can be something inviting and exciting, rather than something vague and scary, I want to suggest seven specific areas in which we as a parish might want to try some new things.  Please understand, these are not areas where we are bad or deficient.  Rather, these are aspects of our parish that I believe would be the best, most effective areas we can put new energy into, if we want to revitalize All Saints and see it grow.  So here they are:

1. Spiritual Revival
2. Marketing & Advertising
3. New Music Frontiers
4. Beautification & Bedazzlement
5. Lawrence University (mission field)
6. Appleton Downtown (mission field)
7. Creative Worship

 
Now, we don’t want to lose or replace what we already have.  No, the idea is to see what we can add, do differently, reimagine, etc., as a way of breathing new life into our shared community … and as a way of showing folks who have not yet joined our community what we have to offer.  Each of these categories represents a key piece of the ministry that God has entrusted to us.  The most important thing to remember, therefore, is that, in everything we do here, we are first and foremost ministers of God.  As it says in our Catechism (BCP p. 855):
 
Q. Who are the ministers of the Church?
A.  The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.
      
Q. What is the ministry of the laity?
A.  The ministry of lay persons is to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ's work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church.
 
And so, whether we are singing in the choir, or putting together text and images for advertisements, or leading a book study in a local coffee shop, or serving a meal, or collecting donated items for shelters or food banks, or tending the lawn, or decorating the walls, or marching downtown, or cooking for college students, or any of a hundred other things, what we’re really doing is proclaiming the Good News of Jesus and helping people find their way to his grace and love and redemption. 
 
The more serious we get about making that our mission, in everything that we do, the more vital, vibrant, and alive this parish will be ~ and the more people will want to come check us out and make this their church home.  We already do a lot.  But given the faith and passion of the people in this congregation, I believe we can do even more.
 
If any of the seven categories I listed above strike your interest, raise your curiosity, or just feel like the kinds of things you’d like to be more directly involved in, please let me know asap!  Call, text, email, or stop by, and let’s talk about what lights you up and gives you energy, and how your interests and passions can help people connect more deeply with Jesus.  I look forward to hearing from y’all soon!
 
Peace & blessings,
 
Christopher+
920.266.9262
[email protected]

“Spiritual Revival”
 
As we gear up once again for a brand new Fall Program Year, I want to re-share with you something I first published back in March.  It’s about how we can, as a congregation, come together to rekindle the fire of the Holy Spirit in our lives, in our parish, and in the larger community around us.
 
We know that we have experienced decline over the past several years.  All mainline churches have.  Even so, we have also welcomed many new members, and we have amazing potential for real growth in the next few years.  But how exactly do we get there?  Especially when so many of us feel stretched thin, wearied by the changes in our lives and in the larger society around us? 
 
So the $64,000 question is this:

QUESTION:          
How do we revitalize our parish, especially in these times when the larger culture around us seems so chaotic and stressful and, more often than not, openly hostile to the Christian faith that so many of us in the Episcopal tradition hold dear?

And here is the best answer that I can offer:

ANSWER:  
We need a spiritual revival to sweep through our parish and light us on fire with the Holy Spirit. 

Of course, that answer only raises more questions:  “Okay, Mr. Preacher-man,” I can hear y’all saying, “That’s all well and good … but what does it even mean?  What does a ‘spiritual revival’ look like?  How exactly do we get the Holy Spirit to ‘light us on fire’?  (And why would we want Her to?)”
 
These questions are all on-point, exactly what we all ought to be asking.  I shall attempt, as diligently and faithfully as I can, to answer all these follow-up questions … But before I do, let me pause to say:  I really want to hear directly from all of you!
 
I want to hear your ideas, your brainstorming, your dreams, your visions, and your experiences of what a renewed and “spiritually alive” All Saints might look like.
 
Please call, text, email, or catch me in my office or at coffee hour and talk to me about your experiences at All Saints, what makes this place your spiritual home, and what you would like to see here in our immediate future.
 
For today, I will say that before we try to figure out what a spiritual revival entails in concrete terms, we need to examine other parishes that have faced decline (as all parishes do, sooner or later), but that did not embrace the transformative power of the Spirit.  That did not turn things around.  That continued to decline … or even close down altogether.
 
Do such parishes have anything in common with each other?  Are there patterns of decline that work against revival, rather than seeking it out?  Are there warning signs that might help us avoid those pitfalls that lead to death?
 
Absolutely YES!, according to Thom S. Rainer, author of Autopsy of a Deceased Church and Anatomy of a Revived Church (full, and impressive, list of credentials here:  https://churchanswers.com/blog/author/thomrainer/ ).  
 
In his book, Autopsy of a Deceased Church, Rainer recounts his work with many parishes in either decline or crisis, noting the common patterns he observed in years of consulting work and examining which patterns correlated with continued decline and death (i.e., church closure), and which ones correlated with revival, new life, and eventual thriving.  Here, I want to share with you some of his findings in working with churches that did not revive but continued to decline, eventually to the point of closing down.  All of this material is taken from Autopsy.[1] Speaking of a particular church that died (closed down) as an typical case, here are eleven characteristics Rainer identifies as clear signs of a church that’s heading towards closure:

1. The church refused to look like the community. The community began a transition toward a lower socioeconomic class thirty years ago, but the church members had no desire to reach the new residents. The congregation thus became an island of middle-class members in a sea of lower-class residents.
   
   
2. The church had no community-focused ministries.  This part of the autopsy may seem to be stating the obvious, but I wanted to be certain. My friend affirmed my suspicions. There was no attempt to reach the community.
   
   
3. Members became more focused on memorials. Do not hear my statement as a criticism of memorials. Indeed, I recently funded a memorial in memory of my late grandson. The memorials at the church were chairs, tables, rooms, and other places where a neat plaque could be placed. The point is that the memorials became an obsession at the church. More and more emphasis was placed on the past.
   
   
4. The percentage of the budget for members’ needs kept increasing. At the church’s death, the percentage was over 98 percent.
   
   
5. There were no evangelistic emphases. When a church loses its passion to reach the lost, the congregation begins to die.
   
   
6. The members had more and more arguments about what they wanted. As the church continued to decline toward death, the inward focus of the members turned caustic. Arguments were more frequent; business meetings became more acrimonious.
   
   
7. With few exceptions, pastoral tenure grew shorter and shorter. The church had seven pastors in its final ten years. The last three pastors were bi-vocational. All of the seven pastors left discouraged.
   
   
8. The church rarely prayed together. In its last eight years, the only time of corporate prayer was a three-minute period in the Sunday worship service. Prayers were always limited to members, their friends and families, and their physical needs.
   
   
9. The church had no clarity as to why it existed. There was no vision, no mission, and no purpose.

1. The members idolized another era. All of the active members were over the age of 67 the last six years of the church. And they all remembered fondly, to the point of idolatry, the era of the 1970s. They saw their future to be returning to the past.

1. The facilities continued to deteriorate. It wasn’t really a financial issue. Instead, the members failed to see the continuous deterioration of the church building. Simple stated, they no longer had “outsider eyes.”[2]

 
My friends, I’m sure you’ve already noticed the good news here -- many items on this list simply do not apply to All Saints!  We have some community-focused ministries; we’re not particularly focused (certainly not “obsessed”!) with memorials; our budget is not given over simply to members’ needs; our business meetings are not typically acrimonious; we pray together all the time; we don’t spend a lot of time & energy idolizing a previous age of the parish (any more so than the Episcopal denomination, and really all mainline Churches, do, given the overall cultural decline of mainstream Christianity in our society); and while our facilities have “deteriorated” to the point of being a major problem, it’s not like we don’t see and notice that ourselves -- we are certainly not oblivious to the needs of our building!
 
All of that is immensely encouraging.  Be that as it may, however, several items on this list ought at least to give us pause for reflection:
 
Demographically, how much does our congregation actually look like the neighborhood/s around us?  We sit at the crossroads of Downtown Appleton and Lawrence University; is that what someone would see in our pews if they visit us on a Sunday? 
 
Do we have any “evangelistic emphases,” as Rainer calls them?  Other than broadcasting our Sunday worship online, what are we doing -- actively and energetically -- to proclaim the Gospel and call people to Jesus Christ outside the walls of our little parish?  Given that we’re not merely a social club or even an outreach/assistance organization, but a church, should not evangelism be the primary activity of this parish?  By, like, a large margin?
 
Despite the fact that our business meetings and budget discussions have tended to be respectful and constructive, even when at times they are stressful or even a bit tense, is the focus of those discussions primarily how to spread the Gospel and bring people to baptism, or has it been more along the lines of keeping the lights on, the doors open, the boilers working, and the roof from leaking?  All of those things are of course important, but when it comes to why All Saints Episcopal Church was called into existence by God, do we really believe it was to preserve the physical plant, or do we believe it was to do the work of God’s Kingdom in Appleton & the Fox Valley?
 
Which leads to the question I really want to emphasize today:  Do we have actual clarity (as a whole community) about why we exist as All Saints Episcopal Church?  Do we have and understand clear “marching orders”?  I.e., if a visitor were to ask “What’s the primary mission of your particular parish?” … would we be able to answer that question with a clear and direct sentence?
 
These are the questions I hope we can take up in this coming Fall Program Year.  They are not easy questions to explore by any means, but I absolutely believe we have the resources and faith to engage them, learn from them, and through them, to allow the Spirit to light us on fire, indeed!
 
As always, I welcome your thoughts, reflections, feedback, and comments.  Please let me know what you think.
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+
[email protected]
920.266.9262


[1] Available here:  https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/880741442

[2] This text is taken directly from a blog post by Rainer, which you can access here: https://churchanswers.com/blog/autopsy-of-a-deceased-church-11-things-i-learned/

My dear family in Christ,
 
Next Sunday, we change to our summer worship schedule:  a single morning service at 9:30, and a brand new Sunday evening service at 6:30.  We understand, and deeply regret, that the change will be a hardship for some of you -- thank you for bearing with us through this month and next.  But we also hope that as many of you as are able will take advantage of this opportunity to reconnect with your brothers and sisters from “the other service” as we all come together at the same time for these combined services.
 
I am particularly excited, though, for our new, experimental evening service.  We’re hoping to try a number of new things … and indeed this service may be a bit different week to week as we discover what works best.  But today I wanted to share with you the theme that I hope will run through all of the evening services.  It’s a line that comes from an old hymn … that ended up being reused by one of my favorite rock bands back in the ’90s:  “Lay down your burdens by the riverside.”
 
My hope is that, whatever the details of these services, the atmosphere and community that we create will put us all at ease and give us an opportunity to come together and, at least for a few minutes, lay our heavy burdens at the foot of the Cross of Jesus Christ.  I’m really looking forward to encountering Jesus with you all in new ways as we seek refuge from the many storms that beset us at present.
 
Please consider making this new evening service a part of your worship and devotion at the start of your week.  Hope to see y’all there this Sunday!
 
Peace & blessings,
 
Christopher+

My dear family in Christ,

As many of you know, I’ve been deliberating over the past several weeks as to what, if anything, to do with our schedule of worship services for the summer months. A number of folks have asked me when we can go to a single service at 9:30, as we did last year, because they particularly enjoyed a combined service and getting to reconnect with friends from the “other congregation.” On the other hand, I’ve also heard from folks who strongly prefer to keep the two services as they are during the regular program year. It is inevitable that, no matter what we do -- whether we keep the schedule as is, or whether we change it -- some of us will end up feeling frustrated. For that, I do apologize in advance…

This year, however, there is another factor that’s recently been brought to my attention: our roster of lectors, Eucharistic ministers, and acolytes is currently pretty small, and it’s likely to get smaller as we move into summer, with people travelling, vacationing, and otherwise being gone. So “staffing” two full services every Sunday morning may become a bit of a challenge.

In order to relieve that burden, here’s what we’re going to try: 

For July and August this year, we will do as we did last summer: a single Sunday morning service at 9:30. That time slot is exactly halfway between the two current services. Some of the 8:30 folks will not be able to attend a service that to them is that much later in the day. Likewise, some 10:30 folks will not be able to attend a service that is to them that much earlier. Again, I apologize in advance to the folks for whom this schedule change is a hardship.

But for the majority of our people, that “middle way” will be doable and will give us an opportunity to gather more fully, to reconnect with people we haven’t had the chance to worship with for a while, and to fill up our pews a little more fully that a two-service schedule allows. (The fact is that during this program year, we haven’t really had enough in-person attendance to justify having two services, anyway -- just something to bear in mind.)

But wait -- there’s more!

I want to offer you all something for Sunday worship that we did not do last year. So in addition to a single Sunday morning Eucharist, I will also be celebrating an evening Eucharist at 6:30 each Sunday. 

“Now, Fr. Christopher,” I hear you say, “you just told us we don’t have enough servers for two services on Sundays -- how is adding an evening service supposed to work?”

Excellent question! My plan is not to require any additional servers beside myself for the evening service. We don’t use extra servers at our weekday services, so the Sunday evening service should work just fine that way, too. 

Now, I have to tell you, I am super excited for the opportunities that I believe this Sunday evening service will offer. Folks who are not able to attend our healing Eucharist services during the working week may be able to come out on Sunday evening, for one thing … and folks who are eager to have the daytime hours free for summertime fun can do so and still be able to attend Mass in the evening.

More importantly, though, this service will give us a chance to experiment with different kinds of music, different liturgical practices, a more intimate and contemplative environment, and new ways to encounter the living Christ together. It will be a worship space in which we can get creative and reimagine how we connect with each other and with God -- a place where we can discover new life together in Christ. 

I very much look forward to exploring these possibilities and more with all of you! As always, if you have thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, or anything else on your mind or heart, I beg you to get in touch with me -- email address and direct phone/voicemail number below.

Peace & blessings, y’all!

Christopher+
[email protected]
920-266-9262

My dear All Saints family,
 
As we continue to explore new ways to revitalize, re-energize, and eventually to grow our parish, it is important to remember that our God is relentless in love, always yearning after us, calling to us, reaching out to us at all times and in all places.  So we should, for our part, always be seeking God, listening for the voice of the Spirit for new ideas, fresh inspiration, and exciting new ways of seeing, thinking, and being.
 
Whence this lofty and poetical introduction to this week’s column, you ask?  Well, I’ve been finding some inspiration is a place that is not personally familiar to me, and I want to share that with y’all.
 
Many of you know that for some time now All Saints has been providing space one night a week for a local chapter of Narcotics Anonymous, an addiction recovery program and support group founded in 1953 and modeled on the 12-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous.  The Twelve Steps to recovery have been around since the 1930s, and the individual steps may well be at least passingly familiar to a lot of us.  If you’ve never read through all twelve steps, or if it’s been a while since you looked at them, I highly recommend your looking them up.  They constitute a powerful spiritual journey, and completing them is far from easy. 
 
Although the Steps are written explicitly for and in the context of substance abuse and addiction, they are also unapologetically spiritual in form, intention, and methodology.  As such, they have much to teach all of us -- a point I will come back to more explicitly in just a bit.  But first, here are the Steps as written out, in the introductory booklet that’s given to new participants in NA, presented as “the principles that made our recovery possible”:
 

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of God as we understood Him.  [emphasis in the original]
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him [emphasis in the original], praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 
Now, other than the fact that God is explicitly mentioned several times, you might be wondering what all that has to do with us here at All Saints.  Well, setting aside the fact that problems with addiction are pretty rampant in our society, affecting many more people that we might necessarily imagine, take a look at what happens if we frame the entire process … by admitting that we as human beings, all of us, are addicted to sin.  To be sure, we may each of us be addicted to different particular sins, or patterns of sinning, or types of sin, and we may all be at different places in terms of managing our addiction to sin, but the addiction to sin itself is the great equalizer that puts us all on a level playing field (Romans 3:23 comes to mind).
 
Imagine what our church communities would look like if we understood the mission of the Church to be helping sin-addicts into recovery.  Imagine what our individual relationships with God would look like were we to root that relationship in acknowledging that we cannot free ourselves from our addiction to sinning, that we depend utterly upon God to free us.  Imagine if church were a place where it was safe to make a searching, fearless, and honest moral inventory of ourselves, without fear of judgment, scorn, or shame.
 
There is a particular paragraph in the NA introductory booklet that really jumps out at me.  I’ll reproduce it here, but I’m going to substitute the word “sinned” for the word “used” in the original:
 
“We are not interested in what or how much you sinned or who your connections were, what you’ve done in the past, how much or little you have, but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help.  The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting [emphasis mine], because we can only keep what we have by giving it away.  We learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean.”
 
Can you imagine what our church community would be like if that paragraph were our mission and mandate?  How that might invigorate our faith, both personal and shared, how it might reshape our parish’s relationship with the larger community around us, what we might be able to offer the folks God put us here to serve?
 
I would love to hear what y’all think!  Please call, text, email, or otherwise let me know!
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

My dear family in Christ,
 
Alleluia!  Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!
 
Happy Easter, everybody!  Despite unexpected illnesses (HUGE thanks, once more, to everyone who stepped up in my absence on Palm Sunday!) and other unforeseen challenges, our Holy Week liturgies and our Easter celebrations were beautiful, meaningful, and deeply spiritual.  It has always been such a joy to me to have the privilege of celebrating these, our holiest Mysteries, with all of you.  People of All Saints, y’all do worship well!  
 
So here we are, then, people of the Resurrection, living in the time of Resurrection.  In this first week of the great Fifty Days of Easter, we are called once again to reflect upon what all that means.  The world around us seems, to all appearances, little changed indeed from what we saw and experienced prior to Easter Sunday:  violence and conflict around the world; financial and social chaos abroad and at home; our society fractured deeply; the evil of fascism rising again both locally and globally; and the institutions we trust to protect us challenged, even outright attacked.  What does Easter mean, in the face of such real-world crises?
 
It means proclaiming hope, even - especially - when the hard circumstances around us virtually command us to despair.  Hope, real hope, is neither wishful thinking nor a denial of reality.  Real hope, Christian hope, is the understanding that there is a greater reality than that which the world around us has to offer.  Not an imaginary dream, but the actual reality of Resurrection.  It is no mere metaphor that we proclaim at Easter.  No, we bear witness to the fact, the fact, that Jesus actually was crucified, actually died, actually was buried, and on the third day, actually rose again!  It’s not just a story.  It’s not just an abstract idea.  It’s a fact.  A fact that puts the lie to the despair that these dark times around us tempt us to embrace.
 
When we say that, in rising to new life, Jesus destroyed death, what we mean is that death can never again have the final word for us.  Easter proves that even death cannot stop love - the love of God for us, our love for our God, and the love for one another that Jesus even still calls us to live out in our lives together.  Yes, our current moment in history is truly frightening.  So was the world of Jesus’s followers in the 1st Century, under the brutal boot of the Roman Empire.  It was in the midst of such darkness that the first Easter burst forth. 
 
Easter’s glory still shines today for us.  In us.  Alleluia!
 
Grace, peace, and blessings to you all,
Christopher+

My Dear Family in Christ,
 
We are drawing to the close of our Lenten journey this year:  next week is Holy Week, beginning with this Sunday, when we shall celebrate both the Liturgy of the Palms and the Passion of Our Lord.  We will then have our regular healing Masses -- Tuesday morning at 9:30 and Wednesday evening at 6:30.  And then we shall enter into the Triduum, the 3-day liturgy which begins with Maundy Thursday, includes Good Friday, and culminates in the Great Vigil of Easter.  The highest, holiest observance of the Christian year.  It is almost upon us.
 
This year, as we have sought to make our inward, spiritual journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, the outside world around us has swirled and roiled in even more chaos that usual.  To call our present times “unpredictable” doesn’t quite cover it.  Many of us are deeply, profoundly afraid; even those of us who are not must surely acknowledge the extraordinary levels of ambient tension and anxiety in the air.  I keep thinking of a quiet scene from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a scene perhaps more famous now from Peter Jackson’s film adaptation than from the original text.  But the language of the novel captures something that not even the remarkable film can fully translate…
 
The heroes of Tolkien’s epic tale are small and all but powerless.  In the scene I’m thinking of, the main character, Frodo, is learning just how dark and dire his situation and circumstances are, now that he’s been caught up in great and terrible tides of history, power, and war.  The great Wizard, Gandalf, is explaining things to Frodo.  Gandalf says:
 
‘Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.’
 
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
 
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’
 
Wise Gandalf makes it sound so simple.  But Gandalf, like his creator Tolkien, understands deeply that “simple” and “easy” are very often not the same thing.  Still, the wisdom of his response to Frodo’s admission (a confession that I strongly suspect hits close to home for many of us in the real world right now) cannot be overstated.  No matter how much we would prefer otherwise, we do not get to choose the larger circumstances within which we find ourselves.  Our first challenge, in challenging times, then, is to remember that we can still make choices, even if those choices seem to us to be small or even insignificant.
 
Many of you chose to come out last Saturday to the “Hands Off” demonstration/protest in downtown Appleton.  For those of you who weren’t there, let me tell you it was a pretty amazing experience.  I’ve read an estimate of 2,500 people turning up over the course of the couple of hours scheduled for the demonstration.  I’ve been to a couple of such gatherings in my time in Appleton, but I’ve never seen a single demonstration that was this big.  Or, moreover, that brought out so many different people, and different kinds of people -- different ages, backgrounds, looks, costumes, &c.  Fear, anxiety, uncertainty -- these things all have the side effect of isolation, of making us feel alone and cut off from support.  It was quite something to see a tangible example of the principle of unity in diversity, of e pluribus unum.  
 
And yet … the first question to arise after Saturday was, “So what did all that demonstrating accomplish?”  Well, from a short-term, pragmatic standpoint, perhaps not a whole lot.  No policies got changed on Saturday, no executive orders got rescinded, no deportees got returned, and so forth.  The status quo in the following days was, in tangible terms, not a whole lot different than it had been in the days leading up to Saturday.
 
And yet … something had happened.  Something important.  The experience of unity and solidarity extended beyond 2,500 people gathered in Appleton.  The demonstration here was but one of hundreds, maybe thousands, around the country.  I’ve seen estimates of nearly 3 million people turning out across all 50 states last weekend.  That happened.  And the fact that it happened has been reminding me of another passage from The Fellowship of the Ring.  After Gandalf explains to Frodo just how desperate the situation is, Frodo agrees to accept the near-impossible quest to save the world.  He then tries to set off on his quest without dragging all his friends into the dark tangle of destiny with him.  But his friends will not have it:
 
‘It all depends on what you want,’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway: there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid – but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.’
 
Elsewhere, Gandalf has already informed Frodo that:  “There are other forces at work in the world … besides the will of evil.”  And here is what I think is one of the best examples of that truth.  We are not alone.  We are called, and brothers, sisters, family, in Christ into community with each other.  This is God’s will for us, and it is the path God offers us to human flourishing.  Tolkien, a devout Christian himself, understands this truth deeply, I think.
 
My dear friends, next week is Holy Week, and that will lead us up to the Cross and Death.  And it will lead us beyond, to the inconceivable glory that is Easter.  Though we may live in uncertain times that we wish had not come to us, we live in them together, and we face them, not as isolated, powerless individuals, but as a covenant community drawn together by the grace, compassion, love … as well as the might, majesty, dominion, and power … of Jesus Christ.  Reach out to each other; hold onto each other as Christ reaches out and holds onto us.  For Easter is coming!
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

My Dear Family in Christ,
 
The season of Lent is upon us once again.  Ultimately, this is good news for us, for it means that we have begun once more, in earnest, the great journey that leads us to the incredibly glory of Easter!  At the moment, however, we are in the first week of Lent, at the very beginning of that journey.  Glory, it would seem, is still a fair ways off from where we find ourselves at present.
 
Our Lectionary appoints specific readings from Scripture for each individual day in Lent, and the Gospel appointed for the Wednesday in the First Week of Lent is very much on-message for the start of a season of fasting, self-denial, self-examination, reflection, conviction, confession, and penitence:
 
When the crowds were increasing, Jesus began to say, “This generation is an evil generation; it asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation. The queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the people of this generation and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here! The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here!” (Luke 11:29–32)
 
The early days of Lent tend to focus on our sinfulness, the imminent arrival of God’s justice, and our urgent need for immediate repentance.  The “sign of Jonah,” as Jesus explains, is a sign that reads:  REPENT OF YOUR SINS AND CHANGE YOUR EVIL WAYS BECAUSE JUDGMENT IS COMING!  Indeed, says Jesus, it’s already here:  the Queen of Sheba sought out Solomon for his wisdom … and “something greater than Solomon is here”; likewise, Jonah went (eventually) to Nineveh, the city of his people’s enemies, and the Ninevites heard his proclamation and repented of their sins … and “something greater than Jonah is here!”  In Jesus, God is right here, standing in front of us in the flesh.  Why, then, do we not seek his wisdom and believe his proclamation and repent of our sins?
 
That’s a tough Gospel for any of us at any time, I think.  It feels especially tough this year, in this moment, though.  With everything we see and hear that’s going on in our world just now -- war in Europe, social and economic and political chaos at home, open & actual fascism surging all over the world, severe weather driven by climate change, and rapidly shifting cultures that make it hard to believe there’s much solid ground left to stand on -- the last thing I personally want to hear about is God’s judgment on me for my sins.  How about y’all?
 
And yet, if we read our Scriptures closely and faithfully, we discover something about God’s judgment:  God’s judgment is mercy.  God sends Jonah to tell Nineveh to repent or else be destroyed.  The people of Nineveh repent and their city is spared (much to the consternation of Jonah, it must be noted!).  Even when the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden leads to the consequence that they must leave paradise never to return, God’s judgment is to provide them the means to survive and make their way in the world (even though they will now have to work for that in ways they did not before).  At the time of the great flood, God’s judgment was to call Noah to save and preserve as much life as possible from the deluge to come.  And in the fullness of time, when our disobedience and sin had broken the world beyond repair, God’s judgment was to come among us as one of us in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, to let us do our very worst to the Son of God in the flesh, and then, through his unjust suffering, to grant not only forgiveness but redemption and everlasting life.
 
God’s judgment is mercy.  And in the meantime, God’s gift is presence.  Living the Christian Way certainly does not protect us from all suffering or prevent suffering from happening to us and those we love.  Indeed, to live authentically as Christians in this world can sometimes dramatically increase our suffering.  But we do not do so alone.  We follow and worship a God who experiences and feels and knows everything we do -- everything -- and so the One we follow is always with us and beside us, sharing the burdens as well as the joys.  But perhaps even more importantly, when it feels like everything’s falling apart and the Judgment must surely be at hand, we can rest assured that God’s judgment will bring mercy.
 
In the meantime, as brothers and sisters in Christ, we try to embody that grace to and for and amongst each other.  So if you’re struggling this Lent with anything, please come join us on Monday nights at 6:30 for our current Living Christianity series, where we wrestle, in confidence, with the trials of our present circumstances and seek the Grace to sustain us through the chaos.  And as always, please reach out to me by phone, text, email, or face to face conversation to let me know what you need, and what I can do for you in addition to keeping you all in my prayers.
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

My Dear Family in Christ,
 
There’s a very old joke, familiar to cynics and students of sarcasm alike, that purports to be an ancient curse from [insert “exotic” culture of your choice] and says:  “May you live in interesting times.”
 
The notion, of course, is that the most interesting times throughout history -- interesting, at least, in terms of reading about such times as one relaxes in a comfy chair with maybe a nice, warm mug of chai latte close to hand -- are those times in which many dramatic and monumental events are happening in rapid succession:  societal upheaval, governmental collapse, revolution, natural disasters, “wars and rumors of wars,” &c.  Very exciting reading indeed!  Ah, but to have to live through such “excitement,” boots-on-the-ground, as it were?  That would be a very different proposition, wouldn’t it?  Hence the “joke” of the “curse.”
 
My dear friends, it doesn’t take a whole lot of deep searching to begin to suspect that we ourselves are now living through some extraordinarily “interesting” times.  Longstanding norms and values that our society has at least nominally held up for generations now seem rather “up in the air,” and many of our foundational institutions seem to be under direct, open attack.  Given the unprecedented nature of the last couple of months, it’s all but impossible to imagine what might be in store for us in the next few months, much less the next several years.  The future is of course “always in motion,” as the famous movie quote goes, but at the present moment, the future seems less predictable, certainly less certain, than ever before in living memory.
 
So what does it all mean?
 
First and foremost, it means we need each other, now more than ever.  We need to do what Christians have always done, are always called to do, in times of crisis.  We need to gather together to hold and support each other.  We need to do what we can to strengthen and encourage each other to go out and minister to those around us -- the suffering, the vulnerable, the hungry, the lost, the oppressed, the victimized, the desperate -- in the name of Christ.  We need to remind each other daily to lay our burdens, fears, worries, and outrages at the foot of the cross and rely utterly on Jesus to heal us and our world.
 
Sounds good, doesn’t it?  That description captures, in my opinion, the Church at its very best, the Church as it ought always to be.  But how do we get there?  After all, despite being created and called into existence by God, the Church is made up of people just like ourselves -- folk who are just as scared or anxious or angry or confused or whatever as I might happen to be on any given day.  Well, that truth may in fact be our greatest strength.
 
Y’all, we don’t have to have all the answers!  We don’t even have to have anything resembling an unshakable faith to be God’s people -- just look at the examples from Scripture!  All we have to have is a simple feeling of yearning.  A longing after God that draws us closer to each other as we seek some connection, or some deeper connection, with our Maker. 
 
That’s it.  That’s the secret.  And it’s the basis for the new Living Christianity series that’s starting up on Monday, March 3rd:  a weekly gathering in which we’ll take time to connect with each other where we are -- wherever we are in that moment each week.  If that means ranting and raving about everything that’s wrong in our community, our nation, and/or our world one week, then that’s what we’ll do that week.  If, the next week, it means rolling up our sleeves to brainstorm what practical, local actions we can take here in Appleton to combat some of the terrible things that are happening around us, then that’s what we’ll do for that session. 
 
We will go where the Spirit leads us, week by week, and we’ll do it together, leaning on each other and especially on Jesus … and if some of us happen to feel that our faith in Jesus doesn’t seem to be all that strong some weeks, we will know that our fellow seekers are there to hold us up and help hold us together.
 
Folks, I’m really excited to see what a program like this might be for us, during such chaotic and unsettling times, and to see what it might grow into.  If you’re even the least bit unnerved about the “interesting times” in which we find ourselves these days, I truly hope you’ll come and be part of this new ministry.  It’s designed for you.  And I think it’s something we all need just now.  I hope to see you there next Monday!
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

A follow-up to my special message after the 2025 Annual Meeting
 
My dear family in Christ,
 
My deepest thanks to all of you who reached out to me in response to my post-Annual Meeting message last week.  The energy and enthusiasm that our parish meeting and my subsequent reflections about the path ahead seem to be generating are exciting! We are already exploring opportunities to make spaces in our building available to different groups in our community who are doing work we’d like to support (and who might be able to help contribute to our parish via rent or donation), and we’re hoping to get very creative this year about putting ourselves out into the larger community around us.
 
This week, I wanted to offer a follow-up to one of the points that I emphasized in my message last week:  that we at All Saints have something that so many people in the neighborhoods and communities around us are truly hungry and thirsty for -- we have Jesus!  What I mean is that, as Episcopal Christians and as heir and stewards of the Anglican branch of the Christian Faith, we bear an authentic witness to the life, death, resurrection, and teachings of Jesus Christ as first received by the Apostles, and as guarded and preserved by the Church for two millennia. 
 
In many ways, this Jesus whom we know and seek to follow now seems rather distinct from (if not in outright contrast to) the false images of Jesus that fill up our popular culture.  Here’s an example:  part of the backlash to Bishop Budde’s homily at the National Cathedral (in which she implored the most powerful man on Earth to practice mercy towards the least powerful and most vulnerable peoples in our society) included a number of religious leaders and teachers sharing warnings against the “sin of empathy.”  Folks, there is no such thing as “sin of empathy.”  Empathy is not a sin!  It is, on the contrary, the heart of the Gospel and the key to the entire message of Holy Scripture.
 
But people who don’t know the Scriptures, who haven’t been brought up in the Christian faith and teachings of the last two thousand years, might not know that.  And if all they hear, out in public or on social media, are the rants and pontifications of self-proclaimed ministers about the “sin of empathy” … and they therefore think that’s what Jesus is all about, they will almost certainly reject Jesus and Christianity.
 
Unless someone shows them a better alternative.  A truer, more authentic Christianity, with empathy for the suffering of others not just as an allowed option, but rather as the key to the entire faith.  People are actually hungry for that Jesus! 
 
And that is the Jesus we know and seek to follow here at All Saints.  That is the Gospel we proclaim every week, all year long.  That is what we have to invite people to come be part of.
 
On the idea of inviting people to come to church with us as a challenge and a goal for 2025, let me also say this:  you don’t have to feel like you have all the answers in order to invite someone to come to church with you.  Heck, you don’t have to feel like you have any answers!  One of the great “selling points” of All Saints, and of The Episcopal Church, is that we are a place where it is not only safe but actually encouraged to ask questions and explore, even challenge, ideas! 
 
You might invite a friend to come to church, and your friend might say, “Well, I don’t know if I believe all that stuff, y’know?  I’m not sure I believe any of it.”  If that happens, let your friend know that that is a perfect place to start.  “Come to church and bring your questions, doubts, skepticism, and everything with you!”  Let them know that our parish community is a place where you don’t have to be certain about anything, and you can ask whatever questions you want.  If your friend asks you questions about Jesus, or the Bible, or anything church-related and you don’t know the answers, invite them to come to church with you to ask and explore.
 
I’ve said in many sermons that we can’t share what we don’t have.  I stand by that truth.  Maybe you’ve never (yet) had a life-transforming encounter with Jesus like our beloved sister, Faith Sealy, had and so often shared with others.  Most folks haven’t.  But what do we have?  If what we have are questions and doubts, then that’s what we can share with other people out in the larger community who are dealing with questions and doubts.  You never know how healing it might be for someone to discover that … they are not the only ones with questions and doubts!
 
And if you have happened to have a dramatic encounter with the risen Christ, then let’s definitely share that with folks, too! : )
 
The point is, inviting people to come to church with us doesn’t require us to be fanatics, or to feel or act like we have all the answers.  It doesn’t require us to be anything other than who and what we actually are, and to share a little bit of ourselves with other folks.  If we can train ourselves to do that as a regular practice, I think we’ll be in for an amazing journey in 2025 and beyond!
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

My dear family in Christ,
 
This week, we launched the latest course in our ongoing Living Christianity faith formation series:  an extended workshop focused on discerning our specific spiritual gifts.  As I introduced the course and laid out some foundational concepts, I realized that much of what we covered last Monday applies to the nature of just being Christian and trying to live a Christian life -- particularly, the work of discernment.
 
In The Episcopal Church, broadly speaking, we tend to associate the word “discernment” with some very specific activities:  rector searches, the elections of bishops, capital campaigns (or just general stewardship), &c.  But probably seven or eight times out of ten, when people in Episcopal circles bring up discernment, we’re going to assume that they are talking about exploring a potential “call” to Holy Orders (to priesthood, in the vast majority of cases).  Naturally, y’all will be able to think of exceptions, but I’m pretty confident in my claim that when most Episcopalians hear “discernment,” they think about a possible call to the priesthood.
 
That, my dear friends, is terribly unfortunate!  Not the call to priesthood itself, obviously -- we still have quite a priest shortage across The Episcopal Church; there are many more full time positions for priests throughout the country than there are priests to fill them.  What is unfortunate is that, in our boots-on-the-ground practice in our Church, we end up restricting the work and practice of discernment only to those folks who feel that God might be calling them to ordained ministry.  Now, why is that unfortunate?  Precisely because the work (and joy!) of discernment is what every single Christian is called, invited, and indeed commanded into in the sacrament of Holy Baptism!
 
It is not an overstatement to say that the entirety of the Christian life is meant to be defined and profoundly shaped by the constant, consistent, and ongoing practice of discernment.
 
Hmm.  After a blanket statement like that, I suppose I’d better get around to offering some concrete definitions (the former English teacher in me will only allow me to write so much before “defining my terms” as I should have done in the introductory paragraph…).  What do I mean by “discernment”?  Well, here’s the dictionary definition (from the website dictionary.com):

discernment [noun]
1. the faculty of discerning; discrimination; acuteness of judgment and understanding.
2. the act or an instance of discerning.

[to discern:  verb
(used with object)
1. to perceive by the sight or some other sense or by the intellect; see, recognize, or apprehend:
They discerned a sail on the horizon.
2. to distinguish mentally; recognize as distinct or different; discriminate:
He is incapable of discerning right from wrong.
(used without object)
3. to distinguish or discriminate.]
 
And here’s an Episcopal Church definition (from the website of The Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina):
 
“In recognition of our baptismal covenant, the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church provide guidelines for ministry of the laos (the people of God). The canons require each diocese to make provision for the affirmation and development of the ministry of all baptized persons, including assistance in understanding that all baptized persons are called to minister in Christ's name, to identify their gifts with the help of the Church and to serve Christ’s mission at all times and in all places. Specific roles express that identity in accordance with God’s calling to each of us to use our unique gifts in the service of God’s kingdom.”
 
So, to put it all together, all Christians, by dint of their baptisms, are called by God to perceive, apprehend, and/or distinguish, by whatever physical, mental, and/or spiritual “senses,” their unique, God-given gifts, and to discover the specific roles which express their identities in the use of those gifts as ministers in and of the Church and in service to God’s kingdom.  And the Church is instructed to make provision for this work of affirming and developing the respective ministries of all baptized persons (i.e., all Christians).
 
Whew!  That’s a lot much, isn’t it?  It is, indeed.  But it’s also extraordinarily exciting -- at least, that is how we ought to see it.  The work of discerning one’s spiritual gifts can be (always ought to be) incredibly inspiring, energizing, affirming, even healing.  Discovering your particular spiritual gifts is a process of connecting ever more deeply and specifically with the person, the identity, the Gift that God created you to be, that you already are (even if you don’t yet know it or fully understand it).  It reveals an intensely personal connection and relationship with our Maker, who not only made the heaven and the earth, but also and more to the point made each one of us, individually, each one a special, one-off, custom creation, called to particular roles and identities and ministries within the Body of Christ and in service to God’s world.  It’s not about the burden of work that we have to do; it’s about the ecstatic joy of getting to be what we were created to be.
 
So, in the short term, I hope those of you who were not able to join us last Monday for the kickoff of this latest Living Christianity series will be able to attend some or all of the workshops these next three Mondays (Jan. 20 & 27, and Feb. 3).  We’ll be rolling up our metaphorical sleeves and really digging into the hand-on practices of doing this kind of discernment.  It’s going to be exciting and very fun!  But I also hope that we as a parish will find more and more ways to integrate the ongoing practice of discernment into our daily, monthly, yearly cycles of life in Christ and in Christian community.  This kind of spiritual work is literally transformative, for individuals, for congregations, for communities, and ultimately for the whole world.  So join us, won’t you?
 
Yours always in Christ,
C+

My dear family in Christ,
 
When I was growing up and learning the unwritten rules of civil society, the number one, top priority, most important Prime Directive was that there were two topics that one is never to discuss in public:  religion and politics.  Interestingly, the two things that have our society most deeply divided at present are, well, religion and politics.  But I’m sure that’s just coincidence.  Er…
 
The notion, of course, was always that conversations on those hot-button topics always lead to disagreements, and disagreements lead to stress, conflict, and strife, and we’ll all just get along better if we never go there in the first place.  The thing is, as noble as it might sound, that notion is ridiculous.
 
Not talking about the things we may disagree about doesn’t magically make the disagreement go away.  Not communicating merely robs us of any ability to deal constructively with those disagreements that we already have. 
 
But there’s an additional side effect of decades of not talking about politics and religion, one that applies directly to church communities.  Avoiding such conversations in church communities creates the dangerously false impression that it’s possible to have a Christianity that is itself devoid of politics … and thus a Christianity that has nothing to say to or about the politics of our larger society.  In other words, a Christianity that is totally irrelevant to how we live our lives in this world.
 
As an ordained minister, I can’t tell y’all how many times folks have said to me (whether they were talking about me, personally, some other specific person, or ministers in general) that “preachers should keep politics out of the pulpit.”  In many places, that notion is widely accepted as self-evident wisdom and propriety.  But it makes me ask:  “How, then, is a preacher supposed to preach the Gospel?”  Especially, for example, the Gospel appointed for this coming Sunday, the 4th Sunday of Advent.  But more on that in a moment.
 
In August of last year, Scott Detrow of NPR interviewed Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, about Moore’s book Losing Our Religion:  An Altar Call for Evangelical America.  In the interview, Detrow asked Moore why he (Moore) thought that Christianity in America was (is) in a state of crisis.  Moore replied:
 
Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching - turn the other cheek - to have someone come up after and to say, where did you get those liberal talking points? And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would not be, I apologize. The response would be, yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak. And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.
 
You can find the entire interview online here:  https://www.npr.org/2023/08/05/1192374014/russell-moore-on-altar-call-for-evangelical-america
 
My dear friends, the Gospel is inherently political.  It cannot help but be political. 
 
You see, the term politics, properly defined, is just the name we use for how a group of people goes about making group decisions (what the group will do as a group, what the group will not do, what the group believes is important to the group, &c.) and how the members of the group are going to behave and how they’re going to treat each other. 
 
That is what politics is, whether the group in question is a clique of friends, a family, a county commission, a school board, a Christian congregation … or a whole entire nation.  Any group of people, however small or large, has to have a way of making group decisions and a way of determining how the members of the group will interact with each other.  That means every group of people, however small or large, engages in politics. 
 
Now, the Gospels have some very specific things to say about how we are supposed to make decisions as a group of faithful Jesus-followers in covenant with God and with each other.  And about how we are to treat each other (and all our fellow human beings—our fellow God-image-bearers) in this world.  Just take a close look at the Sermon on the Mount, or Matthew chapter 25, or the portion of Luke appointed for this coming Sunday.  Luke’s Gospel for Advent 4 for contains the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, one of the most profound political statements in the New Testament.
 
To be sure, politics ain’t the main point of the Gospels, not remotely.  The main point is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is Lord!  And that God broke into this created world in the flesh and person of Jesus to save us and redeem us from our sin (both individual and collective sin!).  It is because of who and what Jesus is—because of who and what Jesus incarnate reveals God to be—that his teaching matters and must shape our politics.  Because God takes sides:  God sides with the lowly, the poor, the oppressed, those who suffer injustice, those on the margins, those who are vulnerable … and God calls us to side with folks in those situations, too.
 
The Episcopal Church has often been accused of “pandering” to “woke progressivism.”  All Saints has been accused of that a few times since we became officially inclusive and affirming of LGBTQA+ folks (and put up our rainbow signs).  Some folks have even argued that the Church is “dying” because it’s supposedly more concerned with left-leaning politics than with the Gospel.  But I don’t think that’s accurate.  If we are in fact dying (and that can be debated!), it’s not because of some alleged “woke agenda.”  It’s because we as a Church have not been clear and enthusiastic about the Gospel message that we have been entrusted to proclaim far and wide.  A Gospel message that is as relevant and as engaged in the real world where people live their real lives now as it was two millennia ago.
 
As we conclude our Advent preparations for the birth of God among us, let us pray to God to rekindle in us that same zeal that burned in the Apostles to proclaim the Good News boldly, lovingly, enthusiastically, joyfully, to a world that walks in darkness still, longing for the Light of Christ!

My dear family in Christ,
 
This past Sunday, 1st December, was Advent 1.  It marked, of course, the beginning of our annual journey through the season of Advent as we make our way towards, and make our souls ready for, the Nativity of Our Lord, Jesus Christ on the 25th.  But it also marked the completion of my fifth full year here with you all as Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church.
 
Advent, like Lent, is a good season for contemplating endings and beginnings, and the connections between the two.  The Anglo-Saxons had a saying:  “The end and the beginning are not always alike”—but they are inextricably linked together.  Every time one thing ends, another thing begins.  And every time a new thing begins, whatever came before either ends … or changes and grows into a new thing, itself.
 
The world looked rather different when I arrived at All Saints in December of 2019.  For one thing, I drove up through a terrible ice storm to begin my time here in a “new world” buried under vast drifts of snow.  It seemed as if Fate had got hold of a book called The Most Predictable Clichés of the Upper Midwest and brought the first few pages to life, just for me, this Southern ex-pat now come to the Frozen North. 🙂 I was quite amazed that Spring, when the sun came out and everything turned green!
 
And then Covid hit us.  Nearly two solid years of being shut out of gathering together to worship … or do anything else.  We responded, as this community always has, with deep faith and a “Well, I guess we’ll have to do a few things different now, so let’s get going…” attitude that helped us weather the global crisis amazingly well, for as excruciatingly hard as it was.  And we launched a dynamic online ministry & kept on going.
 
Reopening to in-person gathering was, as y’all remember, incremental and not easy.  Constantly having to discern what was safe, what wasn’t, and what was “safe enough” was no easy task, and we had a lot of disagreements in lots of different directions.  “Too many restrictions” … “not enough restrictions” … “can’t we just be done with this mess?” … “you do realize that Covid is still happening, right?” … and so it went.  But we managed by the grace of God to stay together, and even to grow our community, during those hard times.
 
But we realized that, upon reopening, really to grow our parish meant inviting more new people to come be part of our community.  And we realized that, in order to do that, we needed to be able to let people know, specifically, what kind of community we were inviting them to join.  We had some serious discernment to do, and we stepped up to and into that challenge just as we had with the challenge of the pandemic shutdown.  Through Zoom discussions and Bible studies and Vestry meetings and parish gatherings, we discerned God’s call for us to become, officially, as fully welcoming, inclusive, and affirming parish, ensuring that, at All Saints, all persons, regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., are truly invited and welcomed into the full communal and sacramental life of this church.  An incredible milestone in the history of All Saints.
 
So we have a little bit better idea, at least, of who we are as a worshipping community now.  And maybe, just maybe, we’ve started to get somewhat accustomed to this crazy Southern ex-pat who’s been sojourning among us for five years and counting.  Or maybe not.  Either way, we’re turning once again to a new set of present challenges … and opportunities.  Being an inclusive and affirming congregation means perhaps a bit more now than it did a year ago, with the recent “climate change” in the larger social and political environment around us.  Our commitment that All Saints is to be a truly safe place for all people, but especially for people who are members of marginalized and/or targeted groups is no longer as abstract and idealistic as it might formerly have seemed.  It has real-world consequences and carries real-world obligations.
 
But it’s also the right thing to do.  The Gospel thing to do.  And if what we’ve seen and experienced and learned of the Holy Spirit over the past two thousand years holds true, it might just be one of the ways that, as the Body of Christ in this place at this time, we help to shine a light in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.  My dear friends, people need the light of Christ now as much as ever.  We need it, ourselves.  Our families, friends, and neighbors, and those who are alone, need it.  The people of Appleton, the Fox Valley, Wisconsin, the U.S., and the whole world need it.
 
From what I’ve seen firsthand in my time here so far, this parish community has always had a deep and abiding love for Jesus Christ.  I haven’t seen that change in five years; I’ve only seen it grow.  And speaking of that, my heart tells me that the deeper and more fully we lean into that love of Christ, and the more courageous we get about showing it do the community & the world around us, the brighter Christ’s light will shine here, and the more our parish will thrive.
 
So let us not merely anticipate with eagerness the coming birth of Our Lord this Christmas; let us yearn after God, let us long for Christ Jesus to be born and nurtured in our hearts, so that we shall be moved to seek and nurture Christ in everyone around us.  Let us find a way to believe in miracles.  And let us be the miracle for all those who are hurt and lost and lonely in our midst.
 
Yours always in Christ,
Christopher+

My Dear Family in Christ,
 
Bishop Matt recently shared the following, somewhat lengthy, quote from Ethics, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
 
“The church confesses that it has not professed openly and clearly enough the message of the one God, revealed for all time in Jesus Christ and tolerating no other Gods besides. The church confesses its timidity, its deviations [referring to nationalism], its dangerous concessions. It has often disavowed its duties as sentinel and comforter. Through this it has often withheld the compassion that it owes to the despised and rejected. The church was mute when it should have cried out, because the blood of the innocent cried out to heaven. The church did not find the right word in the right way at the right time. It did not resist to the death the falling away from the faith and is guilty of the godlessness of the masses.
 
“The church confesses that it has misused the name of Christ by being ashamed of it before the world and by not resisting strongly enough the misuse of that name for evil ends. . .
 
“The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people . . .
 
“The church confesses that it has looked on silently as the poor were exploited and robbed, while the strong were enriched and corrupted.
 
“The church confesses that it has coveted security, tranquility, peace, property, and honor to which it has no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.
 
“The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. . .”
 
These, my friends, are … harsh words, to say the least.  Perhaps their aggressive tone is mitigated somewhat by the fact that Bonhoeffer was writing in the context of the rise of Nazi Germany, and in particular of the complicity of many German churches in openly supporting the rise of the Nazis to power.  But as you can see, he was not only calling out the complicity of the churches which openly supported the Nazi cause, but also the silence, the passive “neutrality,” the refusal to oppose actively the clear evils of Nazism in that present moment.
 
Perhaps Bonhoeffer’s more famous quote on the subject is that “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil:  God will not hold us guiltless.  Not to speak is to speak.  Not to act is to act.”
 
Such talk can make many of us feel uncomfortable.  I’ll be honest ~ it makes me feel uncomfortable!
 
But there is something, I think, in the purity of this ethic, of this moral standard, that is not only compelling … but is also biblical.  It is also Gospel.
 
Consider Luke 10:25-37:
 
25 An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27 He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
 
29 But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and took off, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved with compassion. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, treating them with oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him, and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
 
The story of the Good Samaritan is, as you know, a parable about mercy, empathy, compassion, and justice.  About what it means ~ in God’s eyes ~ truly to be a “neighbor” to our fellow human beings.  It makes concrete what love ~ again, in God’s eyes ~ actually looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, etc.
 
But we fail to grasp the full import of the parable if we do not also see that it is a scathing indictment of those persons ~ and institutions ~ whose supposed function and purpose it is to embody and enact the love and mercy of God in this world, yet which fail to achieve that purpose … or, worse, choose not to try.
 
Here at All Saints Episcopal Church, we have made a conscious choice and taken on a shared, intentional commitment to build and to be a community of Jesus followers that is welcoming to, affirming of, and safe for all persons.  That commitment guides the way we receive visitors, and also the way we treat and care for each other as members of this parish family, certainly.  But it also lays upon us an obligation to speak up and speak out, in our larger community and society, on behalf of and in solidarity with any and all persons who are marginalized; oppressed; suffering from injustice, bigotry, prejudice, and hatred; at risk of being denied basic human rights; or are targeted by people in power.  We are called to be a voice for people who have no voice, to use our place and our privilege in this society to work towards inclusion, affirmation, and justice for groups of people who are being excluded, dehumanized, and denied justice.
 
In other words, we must not only believe in and cherish the Gospel inwardly; if we really want to follow Jesus, we must also seek to embody the Gospel outwardly, actively, tangibly, in the world around us.
 
And this is not a new thing.  It was not a new thing in Bonhoeffer’s day, either.  It has been central to the witness and ministry of the Christian faith since Jesus himself became incarnate in real, human flesh and gave his life, a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, showing us “the way, the truth, and the life.”
 
It’s a tall order.  It’s not comfortable.  It ain’t remotely easy.  Of course, Christianity was never meant to be easy.  It is meant to bring us ever more deeply into the joyful and abundant life God has always intended for us to have.  It’s as simple, and as difficult, as loving God, and loving people.
 
As 2024 begins to draw to a close and we start looking towards 2025, let us commit to seeking out, eagerly, new and bold ways to be, for Appleton and the Fox Valley, the active and engaged Body of Christ at work for God in this world.

 My dear family in Christ,
 
It’s a hard day, I must confess, to be trying to compose my bi-weekly message to the parish.  This election cycle just concluded has been particularly brutal for many of us ~ mentally, emotionally, spiritually ~ myself definitely included.  I’m old enough to have lived through many presidential elections now, but it’s difficult to recall one which truly seemed to play out along the lines of a cosmic contest of powerful primal forces, the way this one has felt. 
 
Regardless of where you locate yourself on the American political spectrum (or whether you do), the deep dividedness of our society, the differences that have less to do with particular policy positions and more to do with existential (and irreconcilable) worldviews and values has left so many of us feeling beaten, broken, hopeless.
 
Some folks are no doubt happy about the results of the election.  Others are surely relieved that it’s “over.”  Of course, for folks in vulnerable populations ~ women, people of color, LGBTQAI+ folx, non-Christians of all varieties, immigrants, it’s hardly over.  In many ways, it’s just beginning … or beginning again. 
 
Established rights and protections under the law are no longer necessarily secure, with the change in national leadership and the different set of values and priorities coming with that change.  The domestic and international order of the past four years is now much more uncertain than it was a few hours ago. 
 
As a result, it may well feel as if we awoke this morning in a very different world than the one in which we fell asleep last night.  It may feel like reality has fundamentally shifted underneath our feet.
 
The good news, and the bad news, is that this is not so.
 
The world that stands revealed today is in fact the same world that was real yesterday, and the day before, and the day before.  All that has changed is that it now stands revealed.  What I mean by that is that the majority of citizens ~ the ones who carried the day in the election ~ did not just magically appear in our midst overnight.  They’ve been here all along.  The reality we woke up to today is the same reality that existed yesterday. 
 
The difference is that, today, we are less able to pretend otherwise.  We are less able to hold the notion that most Americans, when presented with a clear choice, would embrace the fundamental values of empathy, compassion, respect for human dignity and the value of human life, and reject the path of rage, hate, dehumanization, demonization, violence, apathy, and a deeply callous inhumanity.  The people have spoken, and that illusion is gone.  But it was in fact an illusion.  The reality underlying it has not changed.
 
Make no mistake:  the effect may be no less devastating, no less a gut-punch, for the realization that the only real difference is that we see more clearly now than we did before.  It is no less appropriate, no less justified, to grieve and grieve deeply.  For even the loss of an illusion is still a loss.
 
Be as kind and gentle with yourselves as you can, through this harsh awakening.  It’s okay not to be okay.  It’s okay to need time to reel, to lament, even to rage against what shouldn’t be.
 
But let us covenant with ourselves, our God, and each other not to stay in that state for too long.  Because the truth is we have not so much lost the things we feel like we’ve lost, but rather have been shown that those things we treasure have not really yet been achieved.
 
We don’t live in the world that we thought we lived in.  Grieve at this discovery, this revelation, yes.  But we must hold fast to that vision of the peaceable kingdom, because that vision is still true.  Compassion is still true.  Justice is still true.  Truth is still true.  Love is still true.
 
We stand this morning in the midst of a stark, nigh crushing revelation about the state of things.
 
But we do not stand alone, and this story is not yet over.
 
You are all in my prayers.  If you need to talk, please reach out to me:  920-266-9262.  Many, many people are struggling deeply today, and many of us feel like we have lost any lingering thread that remained of something we might call “faith.”  If that’s where you are, please know that you are not alone!  Many, many people are right there, right now.  Even pastors and priests.  It is Golgotha, the place of the skull, where light and love and even hope itself hang bloodied and murdered upon the cross at the hands of brutal empire.  Many people are feeling exactly what you're feeling, and it is a deeply Christian feeling, for what that's worth.  The darkest of Black Fridays.
 
The folks who were there on Black Friday two millennia ago could hardly have believed that Sunday was going to be the first Easter.
 
All we can do in the darkness is hold fast to each other and try to remember Whose we are, yesterday, today, and always.
 
God bless you all.  You are in my prayers.
 
C+

My Dear Family in Christ,
 
It has recently been suggested to me, ostensibly in jest, that “no one knows what the rector is doing.”  Good-natured humor (at least, so I hope! <gulp>) aside, it’s a topic perhaps worth addressing.  Pastors, much like teachers, sometimes fall prey to the notion that we either do not exist outside of the relatively few hours in which we are visible to the public, or on the other hand that we simply sit in our respective boxes (offices or classrooms) in between services or classes like automata plugged into our recharging devices.  (Oh, if only!)
 
Today, I want to share with you a little bit of what’s been going on in rector-land these past several weeks.  It’s been a busy time, but then it generally is.  Seems like things started to get busy here around Advent of 2019, then ramped up significantly when Covid hit, and since then … have only continued to get busier!
 
But before going on, let’s take a look at the parts of my weekly schedule that are more or less regular.
 
My work week begins of course on Sunday.  As we’ve recently returned to a two-service schedule, I celebrate the Mass at 8:30 and again at 10:30, and at present we’ve got coffee and fellowship time after each service.  Sunday afternoons ~ as long as there is no pressing pastoral or priestly need ~ tend to go towards family time and the time-honored tradition of the “clergy nap.” 
 
It may sound a bit strange to say, but something they didn’t tell us about in seminary:  standing at God’s holy altar, at the fulcrum between heaven and earth, and holding that space where, by the power of the Holy Spirit, both the sacrifice and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are re-membered in the present moment … is not a thing to undertake lightly, and it does rather drain you!  By the time I make it home after doing so twice back-to-back, I generally need some time to recover.  (That’s also why Sunday is generally not the best time to talk “business” with the rector ~ my mind and soul are focused primarily on the altar on the Lord’s Day.)
 
On Mondays, I host a weekly Bible study from 11:30 to 1:00, via Zoom.  This is a ministry we began during Covid and it has been going strong ever since.  Each week, we explore the readings appointed for the upcoming Sunday, and these sessions never fail to astound me with the insights and perspectives that come out.  The format is informal discussion, and though ~ when it’s helpful ~ I try to provide some historical, linguistic, textual, or theological context, what we mostly end up doing is sharing our personal perspectives and life experiences as fellow Christian just trying to understand our faith a bit better.  It’s less academic and much more personal & spiritual.  If you haven’t tried it and you’re free to Zoom at that time of day, please consider joining us.  Monday afternoon is for catching up on “business,” and on Monday nights at 6:30, the ongoing Living Christianity program has been running since June.  We finish up around 8-ish, sometimes 8:30, so Mondays are one of my late-night days during the week.  I sometimes take appointments before the Bible study Zoom, so Mondays can also be rather long days, as well.
 
On Tuesdays, I celebrate Mass at 9:30 in St. Mary’s Chapel for a small but very devoted group of parishioners.  Afterwards, I have office hours from 11:00 until 12:30 or so.  I try to keep the rest of my Tuesdays open for meetings, pastoral visits, appointments, or any of the other dozen things that tend to come up all the time. 
 
When possible on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, I try to hold some “office hours” downtown at the Copper Rock coffee shop.  They have excellent (free) wifi, so I set up my laptop and work remotely for a couple hours.  The back of my laptop has a full-size sticker with an Episcopal cross logo and the text:  “I’m a priest.  Ask me anything.  Seriously, interrupt me!”  It works a treat ~ I’ve had dozens of conversations with all sorts of folks over the past couple years since I’ve been doing this.  Some folks just stop to thank me for being out in public “in uniform”; some folks have had pretty serious life-crisis situations they needed to talk about; and some folks just have questions.  In any event, I find it a great opportunity to tell new people about All Saints just down the street.
 
Wednesdays are my other late-night days, so I begin Wednesdays with a weekly staff meeting at 11:00 unless something has come up that requires an earlier start to the day.  There is also a standing weekly meeting between our two Wardens and myself at 4:30, followed by office hours at 5:30 and Mass at 6:30.  A note about the weekday Masses:  they tend to be a bit less formal and more intimate than the principal services on Sunday, and the homilies are designed to be conversational and interactive (for those who are comfortable chiming in, of course).  If you’d like to experience Holy Eucharist in a closer, more personal setting than we can often manage on Sunday mornings, I highly encourage you to attend either the Tuesday morning or the Wednesday evening services.  On Wednesdays, we usually finish up between 7:45 and 8.  Fifteen or twenty minutes to close down & lock up the building, and I get to go home.
 
On Thursdays, the fixed point in my schedule is our second weekly Zoom ministry:   the Christian formation series Faith Talk, which runs from 12:30-2:00.  This one also got started when Covid first shut us down and kept us from gathering in person, and it, too, has continued ever since.  Topics vary widely from week to week, but our focus is always the points where our individual lives and experiences intersect with each other and with our shared faith tradition.  The places “where the rubber meets the road,” so to speak.  It’s a safe and welcoming place to ask any and every question that you perhaps have never dared to ask out loud before, and also to challenge and explore every aspect of Christianity in a supportive and encouraging community.  Again, highly recommended!  The rest of my Thursdays, morning & later afternoons, I try to keep open for meetings, pastoral visits, etc.
 
Fridays are my “Sabbath,” my weekly day off.  Note:  I will always respond to pastoral emergencies as fast as possible and to the best of my abilities, even on Fridays.  But on Fridays, I will generally not respond to “rector business.”  So if you suddenly find yourself in the hospital or having an acute existential crisis on a Friday, CALL ME!  But if you need to talk to me about a budget issue or want to pitch me an idea for a new ministry program, I probably will not be getting back to you about that on a Friday.  (Of course, between church business and family business, my last four Fridays have been filled up and have not been Sabbath days for me, which does happen to priests fairly frequently, but in general, I do try pretty hard to keep my Fridays sacrosanct in order to make sure that I can be refreshed and ready to serve you all fully.)
 
Saturdays are “on call” days, reserved for church functions and activities that cannot be held on weekdays ~ vestry retreats, some Mosaic task force meetings, conventions, parish events, funerals, weddings, etc.  If we don’t specifically have church business happening on a given Saturday, then it becomes a day for family time, since my family has to give me up at least two nights a week and for a large chunk of my Fridays and Sundays.
 
Then, I start all over again!
 
So, that’s a rough outline of the ideal for how a week is “sposed” to go for the rector.  It’s the nature of the business that things rarely go exactly to plan, but that’s at least the plan.
 
That’s hardly the whole job, though.  That’s just the skeleton.  Regular weekly business also includes responding to requests from folks in the downtown community for assistance; pastoral visits (to home or hospital) either for pastoral care or to share Communion (or both) with folks who aren’t able to come to church on Sundays at the moment; handling funerals, weddings, or other requests for Episcopal services; Executive Team and Vestry meetings; meetings with various ministry teams within the parish; meetings with various diocese-level groups (at present, primarily the soon-t0-be-renamed Mosaic Task Force for Racial Reconciliation and the newly created Mission Council for Region B of the Diocese of Wisconsin); connecting with clergy colleagues in the diocese (some of whom owe me a lunch, and to some of whom I in fact owe a lunch!); sermon preparation; my own practices of prayer and study (which honestly should receive a larger portion of my weekly time, but that’s a work in progress…)
 
These things fluctuate week-to-week and month-to-month.  In the past month or two, for instance, I’ve had to field a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of people from the downtown community who’ve come to our church looking for some sort of help with gas, groceries, and/or other necessities.  Up until recently, I had been seeing an average of three or four people every two to three months, and I’ve been able to respond to these requests out of the “rector’s discretionary fund.”  (The RDF is a canonically mandated bit of money to be set aside by the parish to allow the rector to help folks in exactly these kinds of emergency situations ~ the offering from the collection plates on one Sunday out of each month goes to the RDF.) 
 
But in the past couple of months, I’ve had somewhere between fifteen and twenty different folks approach me for assistance.  This aspect of our parish’s outreach is thus taking a bit more management now than it has previously.  Just FYI, to make sure that I continue to be able to help, with the resources that we’ve got, I am limiting each individual to one instance of assistance every three to four months.  The idea is to prevent the whole RDF going only to one or two people when there is so much more need out there.  And for long-term assistance, we direct folks to Pillars, the Salvation Army, LEAVEN, and other municipal and community resources who are better equipped to offer more than just minor, emergency help.
 
Recent weeks have also seen Arden Kuehmsted’s funeral, the first diocesan convention for the recently unified Diocese of Wisconsin, and the very first installment of All Saints’ newest ministry, our Open Mic night for parish and community artists. 
 
Each of these events, of course, is much more than just what happens on the day of.  Funerals can take a week or two of planning ~ at least, if there’s to be any process of pastoral care for the family.  The diocesan convention was a two-day affair (Friday & Saturday), but Mosaic was expected to have a display table to set up for the duration of the convention, so that took some prep beforehand.  And I’ve been proposing an open mic night for the past several years; it was truly a blessing to discover that Oliver and Seth were so willing and eager to work with me to make it happen.  Even so, we first met to get the ball rolling more than a month prior to the inaugural event itself and had been working on it together ever since.
 
A half dozen pastoral visits and pastoral conversations with various parishioners and folks from the community rounded out my weekly schedules in the past couple of months.  And that’s pretty typical ~ and a good and joyful thing!
 
Hopefully, this article demonstrates that the iceberg principle definitely applies here:  there is always so much more going on behind the scenes than is typically visible on the surface.  Of course, that is true for absolutely every single person who does anything for our All Saints community!  It’s one of the many ways we are so deeply and truly blessed in this parish, and a great opportunity for us all to cultivate gratitude for each other.
 
I hope this has been helpful to anyone who’s found yourself saying “I wonder what the rector’s actually doing?” 
 
Maybe next time, I’ll try to tackle “What ISN’T the rector doing?” ;)
 
Yours in Christ,
C+

All Saints.  All Welcome.  All Needed.
 
My dear family in Christ,
 
The “long green” of the Season after Pentecost draws to a close.  Soon, we will embark upon a new Church year as we enter the expectant, hopeful season of Advent.  This time of year is always a period of liminal space -- we are no longer exactly where we were, but we are not yet where we are going to be.  Likewise with our parish -- we are no longer what we once were; we have not yet become what we are going to be.  The very definition of liminal space.
 
Liminal spaces and in-between times are sacred.  Our central act of worship, the Eucharist, takes place in a timeless space in between the here-and-now of our mortal lives and the eternity of the heavenly banquet that awaits us in the next life.  Time spent in between is time spent becoming.  Liminal spaces are the places where we are most open and receptive to the life-giving, world-changing presence and power of the Holy Spirit.  Such times and spaces can be exciting and magical. But change brings uncertainty, and sometimes it’s hard to remember to trust God through it all.
 
Of course, All Saints has a long-established practice of trusting God through challenging times.  The fact that All Saints is still here testifies to that!  This year, particularly, I have perceived a genuine sense, a real and inspiring faith, that God is not yet done with us.  My dear friends, as we launch this year’s stewardship drive, will you commit to join me in pledging that we, also, are not yet done with God?
 
Remember our theme:  All Saints -- All Welcome -- All Needed.  These phrases have never been more true.  We are All Saints Episcopal Church.  We are committed to welcoming all people.  And now, more than ever, every single one of us is needed to help realize God’s vision for this parish.  The attached pledge card will help you discern just how God is calling you to give of your time, talent, and treasure.  My friends, consider altogether your time, your talents, and your money, and you’ll see how great a treasure God has entrusted to our care, for the building up of God’s kingdom in our corner of the world and beyond. 
 
Consider as well that God doesn’t need our treasure.  It is we who need to give!  In order to become a butterfly, the caterpillar must give up its whole self in the liminal space of the cocoon.  We can scarcely imagine the wings that God has in store for us on the other side!
 
Peace & blessings,
Chistopher+

For information about & options for making your financial contributions, please visit the All Saints Episcopal Church website at:
http://www.allsaintsappleton.org/giving-at-all-saints.html
 
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Luke 12:34)
 
And as you prayerfully explore the many ways in which you can contribute your time and talents to the life and mission of our All Saints community, please consider these areas of opportunity & aspects of our parish life with which we always need your help:
 

• Pastoral Care & Lay Eucharistic Visits
• Christian Formation & Education (share your knowledge with us!!)
• Parish Event Planning & Engagement
• Liturgy Planning (Special Services)
• Online Tech Support & Digital Outreach
• Communication, Branding, & Advertising
• Music – All Voices, Instruments, & Varieties!
• Worship Service
            Livestreamers
            Altar Guild members
            Ushers
            Acolytes
            Lay Readers & Intercessors
            Eucharistic Ministers (Chalice Bearers)
• Parish Governance & Administration
            Vestry members (& Vestry Clerk & Vestry Treasurer)
            Finance Ministry Team
            Stewardship Ministry Team
            Building & Grounds Care Team
            Office Assistance
• Outreach & Volunteer Opportunities
            Pillars, Salvation Army, et al.
• Almost anything else you can imagine -- let’s hear your new ideas, y’all!

 
But most of all, what All Saints needs is you!  Each of you is a treasure-trove of talents, abilities, knowledge, experience, and interests, blessed with many gifts that God has given you to share for the building up of God’s Kingdom in this particular corner of the world.  If you’ve got a notion, concept, or idea that isn’t listed above, please call the office, or message me at [email protected], and let’s make it happen!

Allhallowtide
Allhallowtide, Hallowtide, Allsaintstide, or the Hallowmas season is the Western Christian season encompassing the triduum of All Saints' Eve (Halloween), All Saints' Day (All Hallows') and All Souls' Day, as well as the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (observed on the first Sunday of November) and Remembrance Sunday (observed on the second Sunday in November) in some traditions.  The period begins on 31 October annually.  Allhallowtide is a "time to remember the dead, including martyrs, saints, and all faithful departed Christians." 
            ~ from Wikipedia
 
My dear family in Christ,
 
We draw near to the next holy time in our Church year.  Though it is not a formally established liturgical season like Lent, Eastertide, Advent, or Christmastide, it is nonetheless a time of special observance that has been acknowledged as sacred and marked by practices of devotion, penitence, worship, and baptism since ancient times.  In our Anglican tradition, especially ~ perhaps as the Church in England (which predates the Church of England by centuries) had been influenced by the Celtic cultures of the British Isles ~ Allhallowtide is often understood to be a time when the so-called “veil” between this mortal life and the life to come becomes somewhat “thinner” than it is throughout the rest of the year.  Certainly, in the West, it seems natural and intuitive as we move into the season of harvest and the transition between the growing season of summer and the darker, colder, less vibrant season of winter to contemplate our mortality and the ultimate impermanence of the material world and our material lives.
 
All Hallows’ Eve
The vigil held in preparation for the observance of All Hallows’ (that is, All Saints’) Day developed alongside the development of All Saints’ Day itself.  Holding a vigil prior to a holy day of feasting or celebration is itself an ancient practice in the Church, the best known contemporary example being the Great Vigil between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday.  Early Christians having continued to follow the Jewish custom of marking the beginning of a new day at dusk rather than at midnight may have been an influence on the custom of holding a vigil (the term itself coming from Latin in the sense of “keeping watch”) the evening before the main observance.
 
The vigil held on the eve of All Hallows’ eventually gave us the English term Halloween, from All Hallow’s E’en.  The English language has a long and glorious tradition of squeezing words together to form a new word, and that’s what we did with Halloween.  It’s possible (according to Wikipedia) that the modern custom of trick-or-treating might have arisen from the practice of baking and sharing “soul cakes”:

The custom dates back at least as far as the 15th century and was found in parts of England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria and Austria.  Groups of poor people, often children, would go door-to-door during Allhallowtide, collecting soul cakes, in exchange for praying for the dead, especially the souls of the givers' friends and relatives. This was called "souling."  Soul cakes were also offered for the souls themselves to eat, or the 'soulers' would act as their representatives.  As with the Lenten tradition of hot cross buns, soul cakes were often marked with a cross, indicating they were baked as alms.  Shakespeare mentions souling in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593).  While souling, Christians would carry "lanterns made of hollowed-out turnips," which could have originally represented souls of the dead; jack-o'-lanterns were used to ward off evil spirits.
             ~ From Wikipedia
 
While both the origins and the current liturgical practice of All Hallows’ Eve are rooted in the somber contemplation of our mortality and the remembrance of those Christian souls who have passed into the nearer presence of our Lord, it is nonetheless wholly appropriate and quite okay for Episcopalians to enjoy Halloween.  It shouldn’t need to be said, but just to be clear, trick-or-treating, costume parties, scary movie marathons, and the like are good and joyful things to do, even as we prepare ourselves for the more solemn observances to come.
 
And for the record, just to be abundantly clear, there is nothing evil or satanic or otherwise diabolical about Halloween!
 
All Saints’ Day
All Saints’ Day, traditionally celebrated on November 1st in the West, is one of the seven principal feasts of the Church.  It developed in the early Church initially to commemorate the deaths of the holy martyrs.  By the Fourth Century, there were frankly too many martyrs to commemorate each one’s death separately, so the idea emerged to have a single major feast to commemorate them all. 
 
We need to take a moment to let that sink in.  Three hundred years into this new faith, so many people had given their lives for Christ—not merely in abstract devotion only, but also in actual fact:  willingly, literally dying for Christ—that it was not feasible to hold annual memorials for each of them individually.  The calendar simply wasn’t big enough.
 
From our corner of the world, in our time within history, here in this place, it is hard for most of us, myself included, to imagine, much less really to know, what it’s like to be a Christian in a time and place where you can be killed—executed by the state—for being Christian. 
 
I’d wager that many of us in this country and in this culture, when we think about what it might cost us to offer up our lives to Jesus Christ, think mainly of reorganizing our priorities, giving up certain things (maybe), taking on “difficult” goals like being kinder and less selfish in our dealings with other people.  And to be honest, I truly hope that you and I won’t have to think about much else other than that.
 
Because there are places in the world even today where simply gathering to worship Jesus Christ really does mean risking one’s actual life, just as it did in the early days of the Jesus Movement, under the shadow of the Roman Empire.
 
That is the testimony of the blessed martyrs, the saints whom we remember on this feast day.  The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word for “witness,” and in the early Church, it was believed that those who remained faithful to Christ in the face of suffering and death had offered to the world the highest and purest possible witness to the truth of the Gospel.
 
And that is what we commemorate and celebrate at the Feast of All Saints.  If it sounds like a big deal, it is!  It hearkens back to the origins of our faith tradition and invokes the very heart of the Gospel.  For us here in this parish, moreover, it serves as our “patronal feast.”  Since we are not dedicated to a single, particular saint, we wouldn’t normally think of ourselves as having a specific feast day for our “patron,” but since we are in fact dedicated to the entire body of the saints in light, I’d say this is also our feast day!
 
All Souls’ Day
All Souls’ Day is something a little bit different from All Saints’ Day.  The celebration of All Souls, observed on November 2nd in the West, emerged in response to a slightly different but equally important need in the church:  the need to remember and celebrate the lives of countless “unknown” baptized Christians in every generation who lived and died in the faith of Jesus Christ. 
 
“Unknown” in the sense of not having become famous as hermits, mystics, or martyrs on a grand scale, but known to each of us as parents, children, extended family, friends, neighbors—all of the children of God whose lives intertwine with ours in the great Communion of Saints.  Generations past and generations yet to come, all part of the “great cloud of witnesses” to the Gospel in their ordinary, individual lives.
 
In many places throughout the various Anglican communions around the world, and especially here in this country, All Souls’ Day is often folded into and blurred together with the observance of All Saints’ Day.  The All Saints liturgy will in such cases include a reading out of the names of those in the parish (and those connected to folks in the parish) who have died in the preceding year.  It is a good and holy practice, and it is something that has also been a tradition here and will continue to be for as long as we gather here to worship. 
 
Blessings,
Christopher+

“What’s so funny about peace, love, and scientific understanding?”
 
My dear family in Christ,
 
Like many of us these days, I live with an addiction or two.  Most are harmless (or mostly harmless):  food, television, rock and/or roll.  Some of you know that I also nurse a social media habit.  Not proud of it, necessarily, but there’s no sense not being honest about it, either.
 
Now, in my (admittedly questionable) defense, I do try to use my social media platforms to do more than just share pictures of cats.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I simply don’t have any cats.  But I also try to engage in some aspects of what we once called “the public discourse” in our society, particularly when topics happen to float across my feed that touch on matters relating to our Christian faith tradition.
 
I’ve recently shared a couple of reflections online related to the science of biology—one on the particular topic of the complex relationships between genetics, sex, and gender expression; the other touching on evolutionary biology, specifically the origin and evolution of the human species as we know it today.  What, you may ask, do either of those conversations have to do with our Christian faith tradition?  Well, on the surface, perhaps nothing.  Yet, there are huge swaths of the ostensibly Christian landscape out there in our culture where it is widely, though wrongly, believed that in order to be a good, faithful Christian, one has to reject the clear evidence of biological science on both points.
 
In other words, there are a lot of folks who are actively teaching people that if you “believe” what science proves to be true about gender, or about human evolution, then you cannot possibly believe the Bible to be “true” and therefore you cannot be a “real” Christian.
 
(Of course, when we talk about facts that can be proven or disproven, “belief” is not the correct term to use at all.  Likewise, we often make the mistake of erasing the difference between “facts” and “truth” when we talk about Scripture, thinking—falsely—that the details in a passage of Scripture must be literally factual in a scientific sense in order for the Bible to be “true.”  That is obviously not the case, and Jesus proves time and again by teaching truth by means of parables that he just makes up on the spot.  I’m not going to comment on the bit about “real” Christians…)
 
My dear friends, such assertions are not only patently, demonstrably false but also actively dangerous.  Any approach to religion that requires would-be members to reject reality in order to “embrace the faith” is already several steps down the road towards being a cult to begin with.  Moreover, Christianity, specifically, has a long and glorious tradition of scholarship and scientific endeavor.  Indeed, as our modern university system evolved from the High Middle Ages into the Renaissance, students were once required to study all the natural sciences before being allowed to attempt the study of theology, itself once considered the queen of the sciences.  It was believed that one could not properly understand Christian theology if one did not first have a deep grasp of the natural world.
 
Worse still, in order to arrive at the conclusion that a person is required to choose between being a faithful Christian, on one hand, or accepting the things that scientific exploration has proven to be true, on the other hand, more often than not requires Christian Scripture to be mangled beyond recognition.  It requires that portions of the Bible which were from the beginning written as allegory, symbolism, poetry, and myth (in the grandest, truest sense of the term) to be crushed into simplistic and nonsensical texts devoid of any truth or meaning beyond the crudest and most literal reading.  (At the same time, many of the groups who insist on such literal readings of Genesis and other portions of the Bible also insist that we not take texts like Matthew, chapter 25, literally at all!)
 
Now, let’s be as charitable as we can be.  Let’s assume—and I truly believe this is a good assumption to make—that these ideas, as wrong as they are, come from a place of good intentions.  Folks want to be faithful.  Folks want to lift up Holy Scripture and say (and know) that the Scriptures are true.  Y’all, I aspire to both those things, myself!  I want to be faithful to Christ.  And I know that the Scriptures are, in fact, true.  This all fits together, because as John tells us in his Gospel (chapter 14, verse 6), it is Jesus himself who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”  If we are to be Christians, we must be people devoted to truth.
 
But that’s where many folks go off the rails.  They think that it’s either one thing, or the other, and if the choice is between God & salvation, on one hand, or scientific facts on the other, they enthusiastically choose God & salvation.  Well, as far as it goes, that’s the right choice … but it’s a false dichotomy to begin with.  The very notion that such a choice exists, much less has to be made, is just flat wrong.
 
I believe that Pope John Paul II spoke wisely and rightly in 1996 when, speaking on the subject of evolution, he told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that, “truth cannot contradict truth.”  If we, as Christians, believe in the truth of Scripture because we believe that Jesus is truth, then we must also accept what scientific examination has revealed to be true of the created world in which we live, the very world which was made by, in, and through God in Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit:  “All things came into being through him [Christ], and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3).
 
Our understanding of the material world must be informed by our faith … and our understanding of the Faith must take into account what we know of the created order.  The science of biology has revealed that all living human beings are of one biological species.  So when our Scriptures tell us that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, that means that not only our oneness but also our sacredness, our shared spark of the Divine given us by God, transcends all seeming differences and apparent barriers of race, nationality or culture.  And we must act accordingly, seeking and serving Christ in all persons.  Likewise, genetics has proven that even something as seemingly basic and fundamental as “biological sex” (much less gender identity) is extraordinarily complex and truly difficult to define, far from being simple and binary.  And that fact has to have an impact on how we understand such key aspects of our faith tradition as the sacramental rite of marriage, among other things, and it must spur us to examine more deeply any lines of Scripture that we previously thought said otherwise.
 
My friends, these are difficult ideas to consider.  But be encouraged by the fact that our Christian faith tradition has a long and, honestly, glorious tradition of faithfully wrestling with the highest, deepest, most difficult, most challenging concepts in human history.  Episcopalians have in the past been known to brag that our branch of the Faith does not require you to “check your brain at the door.”  Let’s do better than that.  Let’s actually steer into the difficult questions; let’s wrestle with the facts that make us uncomfortable, and the Scriptures that give us pause or make us shake our heads.  Jesus went to the cross for us.  We can, at the least, love him back with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+