 My dear friends in Christ,
Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Happy Easter, y’all! The Great Fifty Days continues, and I hope that this Eastertide has brought you all many blessings and at least a little peace in the midst of these continually “interesting” times in which we live. I hope that you all were able to connect in some way or another with at least some of our Easter liturgies, and that you experienced our shared worship to be as comforting, as rejuvenating, as inspiring as I did. If so, then ALLELUIA, indeed! It’s “been a minute,” as we say down South, since I had a chance to connect with y’all via this Newsletter column. My apologies! The first part of the calendar year, from a church & ministry perspective, always seems to be pretty intense. We come off the high of the twelve days of Christmas, and we immediately encounter the Feast of the Epiphany. For us, just after Epiphany comes our annual parish meeting. From there, it’s never very long until Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season which brings its own particular kind of spiritual intensity to all the other intensities we already have been experiencing. Then, before you know it, it’s Holy Week, and then Easter, and it hain’t gwine be (oh, excuse me ~ that’s Southern for “it is not going to be”) long at all before we’re at Pentecost and are celebrating the birthday of God’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church! Whew! So in the midst of all that ~ not to mention the complex lives we’re all leading and the intricate web of relationships that tie us all together as a parish family ~ it’s good to pause for a moment and reconnect. And before too long, we will have more tangible ways to do just that. There’s already a team of folks planning and organizing a renewed coffee hour for Sunday mornings, to be held outdoors to take advantage of the long-awaited change in the weather and allow us to fellowship more safely, even as the Covid pandemic still refuses to set us completely free. Our Youth Minister, Erin Wolf, is already planning a number of parish events to bring us together over the summer. And I will continue to expand our mid-week worship offerings, continuing (and growing) our Wednesday evening healing Eucharist and also (very soon) adding a Tuesday morning Eucharist, as well. It’s an exciting time for All Saints. If you feel the Spirit moving you perhaps to get more directly involved in this renewing and reinvigorating of our parish life, please reach out to me, directly, or contact the church office ~ several existing Ministry Teams would love to have your ideas, energy, enthusiasm, and service … and there are a number of Ministry Teams that don’t exist yet but very much need to! There are more ways than ever to get involved now, so let’s do it, y’all! Here’s to a blessed and beautiful summer ahead. Peace & blessings to you all, C+  My Dear Friends in Christ,
Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Happy Eastertide to you all! Well, I suppose that technically that’s a tad premature. We’re at the moment in the midst of Holy Week. Even so, as the bearers of Christ and as the embodiment of two thousand years’ worth of witness to the resurrection of Jesus, we know that the victory is already won! That it has been won for all time by the One who lived and died and rose again for us. The past few days have offered us a welcome respite from what has been, thus far, a rather windy, chilly, rainy, and ~ just to make sure I don’t forget that it’s Wisconsin ~ snowy springtime. Bright sun, blue skies, temperate weather … even when the next snow hits, which it is sure to do at least once more before finally receding for spring & summer, I will remember feeling, in a day like this, the promise of new life to come. And it will. It is absolutely inevitable. That fact is as true for the changing of the earthly seasons as it is for the eternal promise of God Almighty that, having died with Christ in our baptism, we are raised to new life with him in his resurrection. This time last year, I was reflecting on where we were, as a parish, after “13 months of Coronatide.” Guess we need to update that to read “the first 13 months of Coronatide,” huh? I went on to write: “Indeed, in many ways, it still feels like Lent began in March of 2020 and still hasn’t quite ended. The pandemic is still with us, and it will take time, perhaps years, to recover fully. Even then, things will never be quite the same as they were before.” Unfortunately, that observation continues to hit very close to home, even another year further along. But so does the next thing I wrote last year: “And yet … “And yet there is light. There is hope.” We’ve come a long way from our first Easter Sunday together, when I packed up my ancient MacBook Pro laptop (vintage 2013 technology!), drove over to the empty church building, set up my computer on a stack of prayer books on the altar, and livestreamed a service of Spiritual Communion in celebration of the holiest day in the Christian year … mainly because I couldn’t stand the thought of trying to livestream anything for Easter from my dining room table at home. It just didn’t feel right. Truth be told, our celebrations this year may still not feel entirely right. Covid, after all, is still with us, requiring us to continue to modify our shared worship in order to mitigate as much risk as we can. But we are together, both online and in person. We are singing together again, as a congregation. And, as of Easter, I’m delighted to announce that we will once again have the option of sharing the common cup as part of our celebration of Holy Eucharist. Yes, the wine is coming back! Of course, it will be optional ~ no one who is uncomfortable with the small but not non-existent bit of extra risk will need to drink from the cup. Remember that for nearly two millennia, the Church has understood that the blood is inherent in the flesh, so that to receive only the bread in Communion is to receive Communion fully. But for those who wish to drink, the cup will be available, at last, this Easter. And so life returns, in ways small and great. Life in Christ is renewed, rekindled, reborn, as Creation itself is made anew through the Mystery of the Cross, by the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. What that means for All Saints Church, as indeed what it will mean for each one of us in our individual lives and spiritual journeys, will unfold before us over the coming weeks, months, and years. This time last year, it was difficult for me to imagine that we would be where we are now, this Easter. I don’t know what awaits us over the next horizon, but I feel renewed and re-energized … and I hope y’all are as eager as I am to see where our Risen Lord will lead us next! Have a happy and most blessed Easter this year, y’all! God has blessed us richly, for the Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia! Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
As y’all know, with the beginning of Lent this year, we have added a service of Holy Eucharist with healing on Wednesday evenings at 6:30, with an opportunity for anyone who wants to make an individual confession to do so in the hour beforehand. These services have, thus far, been small, quiet, contemplative, and ~ as far as I can tell ~ especially meaningful to the folks who’ve been able to come out and take part. Thanks to all of you who’ve helped us get this new worship time going … and for those who haven’t come by yet to check it out, here is your renewed invitation to do so, if you’re able. There has, however, been some confusion about the new service, and so I wanted to offer a few words of clarification in this week’s newsletter, in hopes of clearing things up a bit. So, the question I’ve heard the most over the past few weeks is: “Why did you replace the Wednesday morning service we used to have with an evening service that the folks who used to come on Wednesday mornings cannot attend?” Well, the short answer is: “We didn’t.” Please forgive me … I do not in any way intend that answer to sound flippant or dismissive. But it is important, I think, to be clear that the evening service that we’ve added this Lent was never, ever intended to be a “replacement” for the morning service that we used to hold in the chapel prior to the Covid pandemic and shutdown. Replacing that service was never, ever the purpose of adding the service we’ve recently added. The new Lenten service was added because I was going to be here at that time, anyway, in case anyone wanted me to hear a Confession (a wonderful Lenten practice, by the way!), because it wasn’t going to require any extra work from anybody else but me, and because between the ongoing Covid situation, the ongoing strife in our society and in our lives, and the now-ongoing violence and open warfare in our world, a little extra healing during Lent is especially appropriate. The added benefit of the service time’s coinciding with the in-person weekly meeting of our Youth Group was exactly that ~ an added benefit, ensuring that there are enough adults in the building whilst children are present to satisfy our Safe Church requirements. Plus, an invitation to Eucharist is an incredible gift to be able to offer to someone who has just been through the Rite of the Reconciliation of a Penitent. Again, there was never the least thought of “replacing” the pre-Covid morning service with an evening one “instead.” In hindsight, however, it is very easy to understand why a number of folks thought otherwise. After all, the new services began at the same time that the morning livestream of Spiritual Communion on Wednesdays went away. But that wasn’t because the one replaced the other. It was simply because, with the extra time commitment required on Wednesday evenings, I had to let the Wednesday morning livestream service go. A tough call to make, but when we’ve only got one priest, we sometimes have to make choices like that. (The best I had been able to tell, not that many people had been tuning in to those Wednesday livestreams ~ although since I stopped doing them, I have had to wonder if perhaps a lot more people were tuning in than were showing up either in the comments or the Facebook metrics that I could see.) So since I stopped the Spiritual Communion service in the morning at the same time as I started the evening Lenten service, it’s easy to see why it seemed as though the latter was designed to “replace” the former. It wasn’t ~ I just wasn’t able to do both in the same day. That was the initial thinking behind the recent schedule changes. I do sincerely apologize for not doing a better job of sharing all of that information with all of you more clearly and more thoroughly beforehand. I could have done much better about that ~ and I should have. It likely would have cut down on some of the confusion. Another objection I’ve heard lately to the Wednesday evening service is that it’s a problem to have the service in the evening because many of the folks who used to attend the previous Wednesday morning service either can’t or don’t go out in the evenings at all. This objection is also based on the idea that the new evening service was meant to be a replacement for the old morning service, which it wasn’t. But it also raises a separate point that I think we all ought to think about: There are some folks who are part of our parish family who cannot attend evening services. We cannot ever forget that fact. We have to make sure that we make worship available to everybody in the parish, one way or the other. Let’s not ever forget that fact. But let’s also consider the fact that there are folks who are part of our parish family who cannot attend mid-week services in the morning or at noon. So we’ve also got to make such worship available to these folks, as well. We must not forget that fact, either. Now, here’s the really tricky question: which group is more important to All Saints? Well, “tricky” isn’t really the right word. I should rather say: “here’s the trick question…” Because it is a trick question: Which group is more important to our parish? The answer is a resounding “yes!” The goal is, and always has been, to get to a point where we’ve got two mid-week Eucharist services going every week ~ one in the morning and, on a different day, one in the evening. (And eventually, we will need to arrange to have both of those services livestreamed, as well.) Unfortunately, again with just the one priest here, the process of reopening and moving towards a post-Covid “new normal” (including adding extra services like these) has to be a matter of increments, baby steps, rather than our being able to do everything all at once. For the reasons I mentioned above, it made sense to add the evening service when we did. That does not mean that the morning service isn’t important, or that the people who would attend a morning service don’t matter. Everybody here matters! As soon as I’m able to add a morning service, we’ll get one up and running. My hope is to get one going later in the spring or over the summer, so that both services are well established by the time our fall program year gears up to start in September. So stay tuned for more news and announcements about that in the hopefully-not-too-distant future! And thank you for everything y’all do to support our shared worship at All Saints. In the meantime, please do continue to contact me directly with any questions, concerns, fears, hopes, delights, or any other sorts of thoughts and feelings you have ~ let me know what’s on your minds and on your hearts. Peace & blessings, Christopher+  What is Church? … to me? … for me? … without me?
Recently, the Vestry and I met together on a Saturday for a retreat, the purpose of which was to begin a process of discernment and visioning that will continue throughout this year and beyond. With a little bit of luck, and a lot of grace from God, All Saints will continue to move towards a post-Covid “new normal,” and now is the time to be asking what that will mean for us as a parish community. To be asking: what will All Saints be in the next three years, five years, ten years, twenty years? And to be listening faithfully and prayerfully for God’s answers to those questions. It’s an exciting time, to be sure! Especially on the heels of two-plus years of pandemic shutdown, when we’ve had to focus almost exclusively on what we couldn’t do. And when we’ve had to work so hard just to hold onto the present and preserve as much as we could of our past. Now, at last, we get to begin looking ahead, towards what’s to come, towards what we might become. Towards what God has in mind for our future. Exciting, indeed! Folks, I’m happy to report that your Vestry is dedicated to this discernment process, is motivated by a deep love for God and for All Saints Church and you, its people, and is filled with fantastic ideas and great energy for moving All Saints enthusiastically into the next chapter of our lives together in our shared walk with God. The whole retreat was incredibly inspiring to me, and I am eager to continue this work of discernment, not only with our Vestry folk, but also with all of you. I have to say, it feels wonderful to be looking ahead. As a way of bringing us all to a common foundation and starting point, one of the questions I posed at the retreat was: “What is church?” We filled and erased and refilled several chalkboards’ worth of ideas from our brainstorming in response to such a seemingly simple question. I’m attaching a photo as a small taste of just one tiny piece of those conversations, to give you a sense of what it was like. But my main reason for mentioning this part of our retreat to you is to invite you all to explore this same question, both for yourselves individually and also in conversation with your fellow parishioners. What do you say church is? As the Vestry and I explored that question, we discovered something that I’d like to share with you all. In asking the question over and over again, we realized that, at different times, we actually heard different questions, even though the words didn’t change. Sometimes, we heard “What is church … to me?” Sometimes, it was “What is church … for me?” And at times, it was even “What is church … without me?” I draw your attention particularly to that last question, because it’s one we absolutely need to face together. Intellectually, we all realize that growth means change. Emotionally, however, we usually experience some sense of fear at the prospect of change. That can be true even if, at the very same time, we also feel excited about the opportunities! This fear can be even more powerful when it comes up in a parish setting. Why is that? I suspect it’s because we all, at one time or another, have likely worried about whether or not there is, or there will be, truly a place and a home for us in a shifting and changing parish community. “I’m all for growth and trying new things,” we might say, “but what about the things that I need from my church, to feed my soul?” It’s a very important question. One that we need, I believe, to explore together as a church family. Because we probably will not all answer that question exactly the same way. That’s perfectly natural ~ we don’t all need exactly the same things. But we need to be able to name the things we need … and we need to be able to talk about such things with each other (and to feel safe enough in our community to do so). Because on the one hand, if we can’t figure out what we need and what our fellow parishioners need, it’s going to be hard to build a thriving future for our parish where we all feel truly nourished by our shared church. That would make evangelism tough, because “you can’t share what you don’t have,” and if we’re going to invite people to our church, it would be good to have an uplifting answer when they reply, “But why should I come to your church?” And on the other hand, if we can and do experience our needs being met here in the abundance of God’s grace, then we will feel freed and empowered to go out and see to the needs of the people in the communities around us ~ which is the work of the Gospel. So, what is church, to you? What is church, for you? What do you fear might become church, without you? And perhaps most importantly, how does church transform you, empower you, equip you, and send you out into the world to seek and serve Christ in others?  UPDATE TO ALL SAINTS COVID POLICIES as of 15 MARCH 2022
My dear friends in Christ, Little did we know, at this point two years ago, that we had just experienced our last normal week. It was the middle of March, 2020, when the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic came to Appleton. In those early days, there were no vaccines and no hope of developing usable vaccines for more than a year, at the soonest. Between that fact, and the fact that large portions of our society (both within and beyond the Church) openly opposed some or all of the protocols recommended by experts in the science of infectious disease control in order to contain (or at least slow down) the spread of the virus, and given the risks especially to the most vulnerable members of our community (children, the elderly, the chronically ill, the immuno-compromised), the institution of the church had no choice but to take the burden upon itself to craft policies to protect everybody. We were forced to shut down all in-person worship and gatherings at All Saints, closing our treasured church building for, at the time, the foreseeable future. To say that doing so was hard would, of course, be the understatement of the decade. But nothing stays the same forever. On Palm Sunday of 2021, we were able to return to in-person worship, albeit under a number of restrictions and regulations, some set by the Diocese of Fond du Lac, and others that we set for ourselves. Both the diocese and our local parish have, since the outbreak of the pandemic, sought to be guided in our responses and policies by the best available data and the consensus of the scientific community. Recently, both the CDC and the Diocesan Task Force on Covid-19 have updated their recommendations. In response, your Vestry and I have spent the past two weeks in close conversation, exploring whether it might be time for us to revise our policies for All Saints, as well … and, if so, in what ways. Since the beginning of “Corona-tide,” we have taken a cautious and conservative approach to Covid safety policies, and we shall continue to do so, going forward. The Covid pandemic, after all, is most certainly not over. At this point, however, I believe we can make the following small adjustments to our Covid protocols. As of now ~ and for the time being, presuming that current trends in the data continue:
We are also fully committed to expanding our online/hybrid offerings until we reach the goal of simultaneously live-streaming any and all services that we hold in-person. In other words, we will work to provide as many options and alternatives as possible for folks to engage not only with our worship but also with our community of faith in ways that feel comfortable, welcoming, inclusive, and safe. Finally, we must continue for now to distribute Communion only in one kind (bread). At present, the diocese does not allow the sharing of the common cup, so we don’t have any choice on this one for the time being, y’all. Please understand that these policies are, as they always have been, provisional. As the situation around us continues to change and evolve, we will continue to review our policies and protocols and to make adjustments as new information comes to light. All Covid protocols are thus temporary and for the present moment; they remain subject to change as needed. Hopefully, we will continue to be able to expand the ways that we can be together at church, but should the numbers spike again as they did in 2021, we may well have to return to a stricter set of policies again. If you have any questions or concerns about these adjustments to our policies, please contact me via phone or email, or through the church office ~ I will be more than happy to converse with you, and I most certainly want to hear your thoughts as we work together to chart a way forward for All Saints Episcopal Church. Peace & blessings, Christopher+  Continuing my series of messages about ministry teams, in this column I hope to begin providing some slightly more concrete details about what I have in mind. In the first two installments, my goal was to express the overall concept and to define some important terms, as well as to give a broad, general description of what I think this system of ministry teams can do for our parish. Today, I invite you to dig in a little deeper with me—below, I have drafted Vision and Mission Statements for teams to oversee each of what I’m calling the “Principal Ministries” of the Church. The idea here is that a vision statement describes what a particular ministry will (with God’s help) “look like” when it’s fully up and running and functioning in a healthy, sustainable manner; a mission statement, on the other hand, denotes the specific work the team will do in order to bring about that vision. That said, one more note about Principal Ministries:
Principal Ministries ~ To Preach, Teach, Heal, and Make Disciples I am labeling the ministries of worship, Christian formation, pastoral care, and missions as “principal” because these ministries must be first and foremost in priority for us ~ not so much for us as All Saints Episcopal Church, specifically, but for us as baptized Christians. These ministries comprise the “Gospel imperatives” of preaching, teaching, healing, and making disciples. They encapsulate and embody the very essence of our baptismal covenant, the disciplined work (i.e., discipleship) to which each and every baptized Christian is called when sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own, forever. To be clear, these ministries are not things we are commanded to do in order that we be saved. That is not how grace works! No, these ministries are the specific ways we are both inwardly compelled and outwardly called to express our overwhelming gratitude for the grace that God has freely given us in baptism. These four ministry areas, thus, represent the core ~ the very heart and soul ~ of what it means to be Christian. To the extent that any committed community is actively doing these four things, that community is a church, an assembly of the Body of Christ. If ever a church ceases to do these things, it ceases to be a church at that point, no matter what other good works it might support. In other words, these are the ministries that are, for the Christian, not negotiable. These are the “must haves” and “gotta do’s.” That’s why I’m writing about these four first. It’s not that other ministries are not extremely important; it’s that these four are foundational, making all the others possible. To help kickstart this process of (re)organizing ourselves along the lines of the ministry team model, I’m proposing the following vision and mission statements for each of our ministry teams. As a reminder of the difference between the two, a vision statement is oriented towards the future ~ what we would like to see the ministry in question grow into ~ whereas a mission statement seeks to capture what the team in question actually does in the present moment. Put another way, our vision expresses our hopes and aspirations, while our mission defines our work and activities. WORSHIP Vision: Worship at All Saints will be a lively, welcoming, engaging, and communal experience of prayer, praise, and sacraments, rooted in the tradition of the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church as expressed in the Book of Common Prayer. Mission: The Worship Ministry Team shall work with and assist the clergy of All Saints in their work of planning services and of deciding the details of weekly, monthly, and seasonal observances for the shared worship of the parish. CHRISTIAN FORMATION Vision: Christian formation at All Saints will provide an integrated program of instruction in the Christian faith, across all age groups, as understood in the Anglican tradition and received by The Episcopal Church, including Scripture and catechism as well as Christian discipleship. Mission: The Christian Formation Ministry Team will work with the clergy and staff of All Saints, under the direction of the rector, to plan and implement Christian education curricula and formation opportunities for the parish, recruit and oversee volunteers for Sunday School and Youth Group classes and events, and foster inter-generational educational and formational activities for the parish. PASTORAL CARE Vision: Pastoral care at All Saints will embody the healing, nurturing, and nourishing presence of Jesus Christ in the lives of our parishioners in times of joy and celebration as well as in times of loss and suffering, in response to Jesus’s call to “feed my sheep” and to “love one another as I have loved you.” Mission: The Pastoral Care Ministry Team will coordinate with the rector/clergy of All Saints to discover and assess the pastoral needs of the congregation, to determine appropriate responses to those needs (i.e., to discern opportunities for lay ministry and specific needs for pastoral care from clergy), to implement those responses, and to recruit, train, organize, and oversee volunteer providers of pastoral care within the congregation. MISSIONS Vision: All Saints Episcopal Church will strive to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Jesus Christ, embodying both within our congregation and in the larger community around us the healing and teaching ministries of Jesus, in order to proclaim the Gospel, to bring others to Christ and make disciples, and to promote truth-telling, justice, and reconciliation amongst everyone. Mission: The Missions Ministry Team will seek out and create opportunities for evangelism within the parish and especially within the larger community, coordinating All Saints Church’s efforts to proclaim and demonstrate, in word and action, the Good News of Jesus Christ. Working with the clergy and staff of All Saints, the team will identify and respond to the needs of the community through events, programs, workshops, etc., that call and invite people to new life in Christ. To conclude for today, if you feel any curiosity about or interest in any of these four major ministry areas, please contact the church office or contact me, directly, and let’s talk about it. We need to recruit members especially for Worship, Christian Formation, and Missions as quickly as we can; Pastoral Care is already up and running, and we need to get the other three going soon, as well. Remember, no particular expertise is required ~ just a sincere desire to live out your baptismal covenant and to grow in your walk with Jesus Christ. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Peace & blessings, Christopher+  MORE ABOUT MINISTRY TEAMS
My dear friends in Christ, In the last newsletter, I began to elaborate on the Ministry Team model for parish organization that I originally pitched to you all at our Annual Meeting in January. Over the next few newsletter columns, I will continue to expand on the basic concept. Hopefully, what will come out will offer a clear and at least somewhat coherent proposal for helping our parish to thrive and grow into the future. In this column, I share with you the overall outline I have in mind for a network of ministry teams at All Saints, along with some explanation of how we might want to organize and prioritize the various teams according to the types of ministries involved. In future columns, I will offer more details about each individual team, including Vision and Mission statements for each team. But first, one additional bit of explanation about what I’m envisioning these ministry teams will be and how they ought to function: The members of any given ministry team will not necessarily be the same people who are called to perform the duties of the ministry in question. Rather, the ministry team exists to make sure that a particular ministry of the church gets done. Sometimes, that might mean the members of the team do some of that work; other times, the team’s job will be to bring specific ministerial or pastoral needs to the priest’s attention; and in other cases, the ministry team may be responsible for recruiting volunteers from the parish (or experts from the larger community outside the parish) to handle a particular task or help with a particular project. The ministry team is about oversight, management, and coordination; the team is not meant to bear the entire burden for performing its assigned ministry all by itself. A Proposed Outline of Ministry Teams at All Saints Episcopal Church “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.” (2 Cor. 13:14) I suggest we organize our parish’s ministry teams according to the types of ministries these teams will oversee. First priority are our Gospel imperatives ~ those ministries which, as a parish in God’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, we must make central to our lives, as they are the very reasons for our existence as a faith community. These are our Principal Ministries. In order to be able to maintain those ministries on an ongoing basis, however, we must also provide for a number of supporting ministries ~ I am calling these our Administrative and Organizational Ministries. In addition to creating a support network for our Principal Ministries, we need also to provide ongoing support for one another as individuals and as a parish family. I propose we think of these as our Christian Life Ministries. Here is the arrangement I am proposing: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ … Principal Ministries ~ To Preach, Teach, Heal, and Make Disciples WORSHIP CHRISTIAN FORMATION PASTORAL CARE MISSIONS Please note that each of these Principal Ministries corresponds directly to each of the four imperatives from the Prayer for Spiritual Growth that we prayed at our Annual Meeting: WORSHIP ~ preaching; CHRISTIAN FORMATION ~ teaching; PASTORAL CARE ~ healing; and MISSIONS ~ making disciples. These are the big ones, folks. The “must haves” for any group that would call itself a “church.” These ministries aren’t just good ideas or things to aspire towards; these are the things we have to do because they are rooted in our identity as Christians and baked into our baptismal covenant. … and the love of God … Administrative & Organizational Ministries ~ For the Good of the Order Vision & Planning Finance & Resources Stewardship Communications All Saints Tech Crew While it would be a bit of a stretch to characterize these ministries as “Gospel imperatives,” a quick glance at the names of these teams makes it apparent that if we don’t provide for these ministries, then we will not be capable of doing the big four Principal Ministries. If we don’t plan a coherent vision for the parish, if we don’t practice stewardship and diligent custody of the resources God gives us, if we have no reliable way to communicate with each other or the outside world, and ~ especially in this day and age ~ we don’t master and maintain our technology, then we cannot reliably preach, teach, heal, or make disciples. … and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, … Christian Life Ministries ~ That We Might Have Life and Have it More Abundantly Parish Life & Fellowship Hospitality, Welcome, & Newcomers Community Engagement Discernment & Vocation Jesus tells us in the Gospel that he came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. These ministries have as their purpose the creation and nurturing of a flourishing, abundant life together, both within our parish, and for our parish as part and parcel of the larger community around us. In the same way that the Administrative and Organizational Ministries are absolutely essential to the healthy functioning of the Principal Ministries, these Christian Life Ministries are absolutely essential to the healthy functioning of both individuals and interrelationships within our church family. As such, they are particularly important as we look to growing and expanding our church family ~ the most powerful tool in the evangelism toolkit is a vibrant, life-giving, engaged church community. These ministries are essential to fostering such a community, one that people will want to belong to. That’s it for this installment, folks. As always, please let me know your thoughts, questions, concerns, and ideas about this approach to parish ministry ~ I want to hear from you! More to come in the next column… Peace & blessings, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
At our Annual Meeting this past Sunday, I spoke to you about the importance of putting together small groups called “ministry teams” to organize and oversee the ministries of All Saints Episcopal Church. For the next several weeks, I hope to use my allotted space in our parish newsletter to expound and expand upon the ideas that I tried to articulate at the Annual Meeting … and to respond to questions, concerns, and interests that y’all may have as we seek to put these concepts into practice. So, please stay tuned to this newsletter (and other parish communications), and be sure to contact the church office or me, directly, with any comments, questions, suggestions, and/or ideas that come to you as we go along. To begin, you may have noticed I added an extra prayer in to the beginning of our Annual Meeting this year, a prayer for spiritual growth: Gracious Father, we ask spiritual growth for ourselves, our families and friends, and especially for our family of All Saints. Grant us growth in understanding and willingness to be your Body in this world. Empower us to live the mission of Christ: to preach, teach, heal, and make disciples. In joyful thanksgiving for the blessing of your presence in our lives, compel us to share you with everyone we meet. May our numbers increase, our commitment deepen, our lives be joyfully yours. Make us a God-centered people. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen. Personally, I love this prayer. One of the reasons I love it is that in each and every line, it calls us back to the center of who we are, and whose we are, as Christians. Each sentence in this prayer reiterates a portion of what we become, and what we promise, when we receive the sacrament of baptism. And perhaps most importantly, this prayer makes it very clear that spiritual growth is not only something that happens in the mind or even the heart; it is that, but it is also thoroughly tied up in the activities of being the Body of Christ in the world. Spiritual growth isn’t mere philosophical enlightenment … it is a call to new life that requires the total transformation of the self, making us into more useful servants of God. Now, what does that have to do with this ministry team thing I keep talking about? Well, I’m glad you asked! : ) But before I answer that question, let me once again see if I can’t explain what a ministry team is, and why it’s different from a committee… What Is a “Ministry Team”? Why am I making such a big deal out of using the term “ministry team” instead of “committee”? What difference does it make? After all, no matter what we call it, we are talking about small groups of parishioners who volunteer to help do the work and conduct the business of the church. That pretty much matches the official definition of “committee,” per dictionary.com: “a person or group of persons elected or appointed to perform some service or function, as to investigate, report on, or act upon a particular matter.” But All Saints is ~ primarily ~ neither an institution nor an organization; whatever else All Saints may be, it is, first and foremost, a church. Likewise, a ministry team is more than a mere committee, and serving on a ministry team is both more demanding and more rewarding than simply performing some service or function for the institution or organization of All Saints Episcopal Church. More important than functions or services are the ministries of the people of All Saints. So what is a ministry team, then? A ministry team is a small group of people who offer their time and energy to make sure that one particular ministry of the parish gets done. Each team comprises a chairperson (someone to “take point” and get things organized), a Vestry liaison (a member of the Vestry who is a member of the team and so can actively report back to the Vestry on the team’s needs and activities), and three to five team members. Note that the ministry team is responsible for overseeing that ministry, not necessarily for doing that ministry. The team identifies the needs related to that ministry, and the team members then recruit folks from the parish to help do the work that needs doing. Now, why is that important, and what does it have to do with spiritual growth? Simple. All Christians are called at baptism into the role and identity of being ministers and we are charged with the responsibility of ministering to each other and to the world. As expressed in the Outline of the Faith, or Catechism, found in the Book of Common Prayer: 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. (p. 855) Serving as a member of a ministry team is an outstanding way to live into your baptismal vocation as a lay minister in God’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. It is a wonderful way to offer the specific skills and gifts God has given each of us to the use and service of God’s purposes, to respond to God’s invitation to take up your part in the work of establishing God’s kingdom in our part of God’s world. However mundane a particular task might seem to be, doing that task as a member of a ministry team is a powerful reminder that each of us is not just a volunteer, but a servant … and not just a servant, but a minister, and that our work in the Church ~ no matter the job or service ~ is meant to be sacramental: an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace with which God has blessed us here at All Saints. Again, the members of any given ministry team are not necessarily the same people who are called to perform the duties of the ministry in question. Rather, the ministry team exists to make sure that a particular ministry of the church gets done. Sometimes, that might mean the members of the team do some of that work; other times, the team’s job will be to bring specific ministerial or pastoral needs to the priest’s attention; and in other cases, the ministry team may be responsible for recruiting volunteers from the parish (or experts from the larger community outside the parish) to handle a particular task or help with a particular project. The ministry team is about oversight, management, and coordination, not bearing the entire burden for performing its assigned ministry all by itself. In this way, a parish organized around ministry teams continually creates new opportunities to invite individual members of the congregation into the hands-on ministries of the church, yes, but also into networks of relationship that keep the people in our parish family actively connected with each other. As we live out our baptismal covenant together, in community, not only are we more likely to find our prayers for spiritual growth answered, but we are also more likely to find ourselves seeking and serving Christ in each other and our community, to find ourselves in deeper Communion with each other and with our Lord Jesus, and in that way to be ever more deeply conformed to Christ ~ the very definition of discipleship. Words matter, and names are particularly important. What we call something becomes, often, what that thing is. So I believe it is important that we leave the term “committee” behind and commit ourselves to organizing our parish into ministry teams whose work will be to oversee and supervise the important ministries that, taken together, define the mission of All Saints Episcopal Church.  My dear friends in Christ,
Our Annual Meeting (January 30 @ 2:00 via Zoom) is nearly upon us once again! An appropriate moment to pause for a bit of reflection and, perhaps, a bit of intention as we get set to move forward into this new year together. One thing I hope to see this year is the formation of a number of new Ministry Teams to manage and steward the important ministries of All Saints. The stellar work of the longstanding Finance Ministry Team and of the nascent Online Ministry Team have given us examples and models of how this type of parish organization works well both to sustain ongoing ministries and also to respond to new (and unexpected) needs with new and exciting ministries. The financial challenges of the pandemic have been, as you might imagine, not insignificant, and the fact that we’re entering 2022 is such comparatively good shape is down to remarkable leadership from our Finance Team. And as for the Online Ministry Team, well, we didn’t have an online ministry when the pandemic hit ~ now we do. Can I get an “amen”? Our Pastoral Care and Music Ministry Teams are the latest to come together … or rather, to come back together. Now, Covid has once again, thanks to Omicron, curtailed for the moment our ability to do home visits safely and to sing together as a congregation. I’m delighted to say, nevertheless, that both these ministry teams are doing remarkable things despite the ongoing pandemic. The Pastoral Care Team is off to a fantastic start, reaching out to folks in the parish, making sure that I as rector and other church leaders are made aware of people’s pastoral needs, preparing training sessions for lay Eucharistic visitors, rekindling our Stephen Ministry, and revitalizing (or re-starting, in some cases) the kinds of pastoral care that have been a hallmark of this parish community. And the Music Ministry Team has worked incredibly hard to incorporate both pre-recorded and live, in-person music back into our shared worship in spite of the extreme difficulty imposed by Covid safety protocols. None of that should be surprising, of course. I’m told that All Saints has a long and wonderful history before my time here of vital and effective teams (“committees” is the term that’s been commonly used in the past). But a stretch of time without a rector followed by a global pandemic would take a toll on any parish. Feels like it’s been a few years now of operating in “emergency mode.” Now that it’s become more or less clear that the pandemic isn’t so much an emergency we’re going to get through as it is simply a newly redefined reality that’s here to stay, we’ve got to shift our orientation a bit. We still have the (ongoing) emergency to deal with, but we must at the same time get back to the deeper work of laying the foundations for our future. In short, we’ve got other ministerial needs that must be met. In particular, I’d like to see ministry teams come together to oversee Worship Support, Christian Formation, Missions, Communications, and … something along the lines of Community Engagement or Presence. (What we really need is a team to focus on marketing and branding, but it often feels distasteful in Episcopal circles to use such terminology when talking about our churches. It need not be so, however, if we remember that we are commanded by Christ in the Holy Scriptures to go out into the world to spread the Good News ~ to preach, teach, heal, and make disciples. Hard to do that if nobody out there can see or hear you, y’know?) There’s a lot to do in the coming year. If you have any questions about or interest in any of the areas I just named ~ or, perhaps more importantly, if you have an idea for a ministry team that All Saints needs ~ please send me an email (fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com) or shoot me a text or voicemail (920.266.9262). I would LOVE to hear from you! Peace & blessings, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
By now many of you have seen the recent recommendations put out by the Wisconsin Council of Churches. But whether you’ve seen that document or not, you’ve likely been keeping track of current Covid trends, especially in terms of Omicron, the latest variant of the virus that’s been causing infection rates and hospitalizations to spike yet again. Questions arise (also yet again) about whether we should modify or revise our Covid mitigation protocols and procedures. With such questions in mind, the Covid Task Force appointed by Bishop Matt in 2020 met again this week. Here is a summary of where we are at the moment. Both the bishop and the task force agree that decisions about in-person worship, congregational singing, et al., are best handled at the parish level. Bishop Matt has not at this time issued any further diocese-wide directives. That said, some parishes are considering returning to all-virtual worship, suspending in-person services until the current spikes in the numbers start to come back down. Some parishes are not. Infection rates, death rates, and hospitalization rates are some of the metrics being used to make those decisions; for my part, one metric that weighs very heavily on me is the saturation of our hospitals and healthcare infrastructure. While it is true that Omicron ~ in most cases ~ does not seem to result in as severe an illness as Delta or earlier strains of Covid, it is also true that, in our area, hospitalization rates are high ~ back up in the summer 2020 ranges. That’s a real problem, because it means that even if you don’t get Covid, you’ll likely run into difficulty gaining access to the medical care you might need for other illnesses and issues. People’s chemo treatments, for example, have had to be rescheduled, and hospital beds are not available for other emergencies because they’ve been filled by Covid patients. One of the reasons we shut down in-person worship in the first place was to give our healthcare infrastructure time and space to “catch up” and not be so over-saturated. All that said, I do not believe that we need to shut down in-person worship at All Saints at this time. The Covid Task Force agrees: an hour, more or less, of worship ~ as long as we are absolutely diligent about masking and about maintaining at least six feet of social distance between households/family groups ~ is probably not any more risky than anything else that we’re all having to do to get by these days. Moreover, I believe that the emotional, psychological, and pastoral risks of shutting down and going all-virtual again, after we’d finally gotten back into our beautiful church and after we’ve worked so hard to be able to worship together safely, are equal to or greater than the risks posed by worshipping together for an hour once a week, masked and socially distanced. There is something that we do need to change, however: we cannot continue to be as lax as we have been before and after each service. We’re not holding any coffee hour gatherings for fellowship because of Covid … so we’ve slowly developed a habit over the past several months of congregating in the aisles and hallways after church to fellowship, to reconnect, to see each other and to be seen. My friends, I know how hungry we are for that contact with other human beings, with our brothers and sisters in Christ. But these are exactly the kinds of activities that contribute the most to the spread of Covid, and Omicron is more highly contagious than anything we’ve seen so far. So I am going to have to be much more diligent and consistent than I have been, of late, to remind everyone at the end of the service that, as the famous pop/rock song from the ’90s goes, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” It’s particularly hard now that we’ve gotten into proper Wisconsin winter (that 20 degree stuff weren’t nothin’, am I right?) because we also can’t gather in the parking lots to fellowship there ~ not when it’s 3 degrees or colder outside. Other than simply holding out till the weather breaks towards spring, I’m not sure what we can do. But what we cannot do is continue to clump together after the Sunday services and spend another half hour close together, talking and breathing each other’s air. It breaks my heart, but we can’t keep doing that, y’all. Not right now, with the numbers being what they are. We have to love each other by doing our best to keep each other as safe as possible. Otherwise, unless things take a sudden turn for the even-worse, we don’t need to change anything else about what we’re doing. We will continue to hold two in-person services on Sundays, live-streaming the later service, which will also include limited choir singing (though still no congregational singing just yet) and music. We will continue to share Communion in one kind (bread only). As for other business beyond worship, most of our committees and ministry teams ~ including the Vestry ~ have been meeting virtually all this time, anyway, but I strongly encourage all of our church groups to meet via Zoom for the duration. The more we can keep the foot-traffic in the building down during the week, the better. None of this news, of course, is what we want to hear. We want to hear that the pandemic is just about over, that a combination of masking, distancing, immunization/vaccination, and other protocols have gotten us through the worst of it, and that any day now, we’ll be able to get back to life as “normal.” And, two years in, we are weary, weary to the depths of our bones. More than merely tired, it’s an ongoing, constant fatigue that saps a little more of our strength each month, each week, each day. But we are just not there yet. So we must endure. And we will, with God’s continual help. If you have questions or concerns about All Saints’ Covid policies, or if you just need to vent your weariness and frustration with the whole, entire thing, please send me an email or give me a call. I’m more than glad to listen and talk. So are your wardens and your Vestry members. Let us know how you feel and what you’re thinking. We’ll do the same. After all, we’re all in this together. Always have been. Always will be. Peace & blessings, y’all, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
Our secular calendar has now caught up with our sacred one, so for the second time in as many months, I say to you: HAPPY NEW YEAR! And, as I said in my 2021 rector’s report for our last Annual Parish Meeting, WE’RE STILL HERE! I do not mean to be coy; to the contrary, I begin with these two particular observations because I sincerely believe they are worth celebrating, and I wish for us to enter into this new year from a place, from a foundation, of celebration. Because, let’s be honest, 2021 was a tough one, in so many ways. Especially in its final few weeks. Many of us, myself certainly included, are still reeling from sudden loss upon sudden loss. Many of us, as well, are still facing difficult and painful challenges right now and in the months to come. It’s especially important ~ crucial, even ~ at such times as these that we take time and care to center ourselves in God’s overwhelming love, mercy, grace, and peace. I know. So very much easier said than done. It might even seem somehow inappropriate to spend time reflecting upon such “abstract” pleasantries, when there is so much pain and hurt, so much loss, so much violence and injustice and evil to deal with here in the “real” world. Well, as fate would have it, even as I was in the midst of composing this message, our good bishop just happened to forward to me some passages of C. S. Lewis’s writings, and this one struck me as especially timely for our world, and for that matter our own parish family: “A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. “It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. “The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” – from Mere Christianity As with so many of the deep truths of our faith, the point seems at first glance to be counterintuitive, if not outright contradictory. And yet I believe that Lewis is one hundred percent correct here. What’s more ~ forget about leaving our mark on history in this mortal life; I would argue that we can scarcely bear the hardships and pains of this life if we do not keep at least one eye focused on the life to come that is promised us in God’s gift of Jesus Christ, and him crucified and resurrected. The Christian hope … in point of fact, the Christian experience as lived by countless generations of the faithful for two millennia … has never consisted in the wishful notion that baptism would somehow magically prevent us from ever again experiencing pain or suffering. The stories of the martyrs put the lie to that very idea. No, the Christian hope is never so fanciful or deluded as all that. Our hope rests in the fact, the concrete reality, that this mortal life, even unto death, is not the sum total of our existence. This mortal life, for us Christians, can never be the whole story. And, as Lewis points out, focusing our minds and hearts on the life to come, the reality of God’s heavenly, peaceable kingdom of which we get a taste each time we share the sacrament of Holy Communion together, is not escapism. For escapism relies on fantasy, on denying or ignoring actual reality. But for the Christian, life everlasting in God’s kingdom is reality, the ultimate, absolute reality, the foundation of all being. So. Where does that leave us, here at the brink of a brand new year, still here, living our real lives in the real world, with all the real hurts and real burdens we have to carry? How do we live our real lives from the belief ~ from the knowledge ~ that the kingdom of God is real and had indeed come near to us in Christ? We should recognize, I think, that our answers to those questions may well change from day to day, or even hour to hour, as the circumstances around us change. By now, maybe we’re beginning to get used to the fact that reality changes more frequently than we’d like. What doesn’t change is God’s enduring presence with us, in both our joys and our sorrows, and God’s unfailing, overwhelming love for us, each and every one of us. Meanwhile, we do what Christians have always done: we pray; we worship; we love each other; we forgive each other; we do what we can to help carry the burdens of those around us, making the load each one of us must bear just a little lighter. And we look, and expect to find, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the people in our lives, every single day. I realize that this message tends rather strongly in the direction of abstract language and poetic theology ~ well and good, I think, for the start of a new year. Subsequent columns will get a little more concrete and specific, as the opportunities arise. But for now, at this time of beginning, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to lift our minds, our hearts, and our spirits to things eternal, to set aside just briefly the thousand specific, pressing, practical concerns of this particular day and center our souls in the unchanging vastness of a loving God who has wonderfully created, and more wonderfully redeemed, each one of us … to catch a breath of Spirit before we start off again on the next leg of our journey. Peace & blessings, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
If I remember correctly, I’ve joked with y’all once or twice about the ancient curse that says: “May you live in interesting times.” The joke being, of course, that in your average history class, the “interesting” parts of the textbook are the chapters covering dire, cataclysmic events—wars, plagues, famines, the collapse of empires, et al. Interesting to read about … but not so much from the perspective of anyone who has to live through such times. That latter perspective is better expressed by the protagonist, Frodo, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, when it sinks in that he has been fated to play a critical role in what might actually be the end of the world: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish that none of this had happened.” The wizard Gandalf—the embodiment of wisdom in the tale—responds to Frodo’s lament with words that might just resonate with us today: “So do I. 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.” His answer doesn’t solve the problem, of course. It doesn’t resolve much of anything. Yet, it does manage to reframe Frodo’s (and our) perspective, and perhaps to reorient our priorities. My friends, I love this parish. I love being part of it, and I love that God called me and my family here to be among you. It’s not really possible to express in words the gratitude that I feel that this is the parish I get to serve as your priest. Your faith, as a Christian community, is so deep, and your grace so freely shared, that it is truly a joy to be here. That said, we have been living in “interesting times” for a long while, now. As many of you know, I arrived at All Saints on the first of December (Advent 1), 2019, and it felt like I was here for about twenty minutes before Covid hit and the whole world came crashing down. I exaggerate, of course. A preacher’s prerogative … or at least, a preacher’s typical bad habit. Even so, the year and a half that I should have—would have—spent visiting with you, sharing meals, enjoying with you the sights & sounds of Appleton, and just generally building relationships, we instead had to spend scrambling, together, to figure out how even to do church at all in the depths of a global pandemic. Everything had to be re-visioned, re-imagined. The word “daunting” hardly covers it, yes? But this amazing parish did so much more that merely weather the hardships. This congregation, from what I saw, basically said: “Okay, another crisis. Guess we’d better get on with it.” : ) I cannot tell you how utterly inspiring it has been to watch the way all of you came together in order to make sure that we stayed together as a parish family. To say “thank you” hardly covers it, indeed. That said, I have to admit that, as inspiring and uplifting as it has been to be with you all through these interesting times, as your brand new rector (can I still say that after almost two years?), I have also found it extremely challenging. And lately I’ve begun to notice some signs of burnout. And a burnt-out priest is neither good nor healthy for any congregation. So, despite the fact that it is an absolutely terrible time to do so … and despite the fact that I was only just able, last Sunday, to be back with you after having to quarantine for ten days prior … and at the urging of our Wardens and Vestry (and especially my wife, Anne!) … I have realized that I need to go ahead and take the rest of my allotted vacation time for 2021 now. I will be “gone” for the next two Sundays, as I go on retreat in order to recharge, refresh, and reorient myself in order to be stronger, healthier, and better prepared to serve this wonderful faith community into the new liturgical year. It had been my hope to do that prior to the start of Advent, but those ten days of Covid lockdown threw a spanner into those works, unfortunately. As always, in the event of any serious emergency, I will be reachable, and I will not be too far away to get back if anything major happens. But I’ve hit a point where I just don’t have a whole lot left in the tank, as we say down South. It is my deep desire—and indeed, at my installation I swore a solemn oath before God and all of you—to serve you as diligently and as faithfully and as fully as I can, offering you everything I’ve got as your priest and rector. To be able to do that, I need to take this time of retreat and restoration. My heartfelt thanks to the Wardens and the Vestry leadership of this parish for your support and encouragement in making sure that I do what I need to in order to be healthy and strong for all of you. And my thanks to all of you, who make All Saints the incredible home that it is for us. I very much look forward to completing the journey of Advent with you in a couple weeks, and moving together into the blessed season of Christmas. See you soon! Peace & blessings, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
It has been too long since my last column here. To say that the past couple of months have been “full” would not be to do justice to the reality. Our incremental process of reopening continues apace, with all the busy-ness that such an undertaking brings. And particularly in the past few weeks, we have had some extraordinary events in the life of our parish. Most recently, we held our first real parish-wide celebration together since Covid first shut us down in March of 2020: we had a formal Celebration of New Ministry, and y’all got yourselves a “new” rector officially installed. So I am writing today to express my deep, abiding, and truly heartfelt thanks to all of you who worked so very hard to make that celebration so amazing. So many people in this parish stepped up and came together to plan a perfect evening … and then y’all showed up on the day to make sure it actually happened. It was a phenomenal amount of work with, I think, equally phenomenal results. Thank you all so very much—on behalf of my family, who were made to feel warmly and fully welcomed here all over again, and on my own behalf. I am truly delighted that God called me here to become part of your parish family. In the message I sent out before the Installation, I mentioned that this celebration came at a turning point in our lives together. This parish is no stranger to such turning points, I suspect—at least from the history I’ve learned so far. So perhaps to call this moment, now, a turning point seems a bit pedestrian … like, “Yes, Father, we know. Turning point. We’ve got it.” But a turning point doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly cataclysmic to be important. For so long, during Corona-tide, we have reflexively looked over our shoulders to the past. We’ve had to! When Covid shut us out of our buildings, we had to figure out how to “do church” in new ways, and one of our main goals (certainly one of my personal goals) was to find a way, during the pandemic, to hold onto as much of what we had, as much of what we’ve always loved about our church, as possible. I remain in awe of the way the people of this parish stepped up to find creative ways to do just that. Now, even though we’re not out of the Covid woods yet, we are at a turning point nonetheless—for now we can begin to focus our attention and our energy not only on what we want to hold onto from the past, but also what we want to do and create and become in the future. Please do notice that I say “also” and not “instead of.” Part of the point of being an Episcopal Church is being part of a truly ancient tradition, being the heirs of through Christ of the Truths revealed in Him by God, and having a rich and abundant heritage stretching back thousands of years. We are not at a “turning point” of throwing any of that away—and with God’s grace and help we never will be! We are, however, at an exciting new point in the life of this particular Episcopal parish: a point at which we can begin looking ahead to what All Saints will be like in three years, in five, in 15. We can start to imagine, and then to implement, new programs, new ministries, new connections with the community and city around us … new ways to be more visible in downtown Appleton, and new ways to invite more and more people to share in our life in Christ here at All Saints. So stay tuned for what’s to come! There’s a lot in the works behind the scenes at the moment, and we’ll be sharing with you some exciting new opportunities very soon. In the meantime, thank you all once again for welcoming me and my wife and daughters (once again) to this wonderful city, this wonderful community, this wonderful parish family. We have already been so richly blessed by you all since coming here. And we look forward to many more amazing years to come! Blessings, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the final (for now) installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’ve been sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here has in any way sparked your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I very much look forward to hearing from y’all! Conclusion: Okay, that’s my story … but what have I not told you? Well, honestly, there is so much I haven’t told you, even in a newsletter column comprising eight installments and spanning several months. (I mean, in light of those facts, you can’t say it’s for lack of trying, right? :) ) There is too much left out and left over to condense into this conclusion; unlike the illustrious Inigo Montoya, I can’t even “sum up.” Even in all these entries, it seems there just wasn’t time to tell you about my erstwhile attempts to become a 1970s guitar hero, the years that I served on the board of directors for a professional writers association/conference, my time as a newspaper reporter, a lumber/building supply salesman, a burger-slinger, a telemarketer (yikes!). Indeed, I’ve even left out most of my time teaching freshman English for various colleges—my life for 19 years, if you include the three years that I taught half time whilst pursuing my first master’s degree. And even of the things that I have shared with you about my spiritual journey, there are so many wonderful, and wonderfully weird, details and detours, dead-ends and do-overs that have gone unmentioned in the telling. I assure you, that is not because I’m being coy, much less because I feel like there’s anything to hide. In part, the omissions were down to limits upon time and space—I don’t mean in the cosmic sense of astrophysics, by the way! The space-time continuum did not warp or in any way interfere with my writing process. Rather, there was only so much time I could devote to these column entries, and there was only so much space I could justify taking up in the parish newsletter! The other reason, though, for leaving out so much of the story, so much of myself, is that, Covid pandemic restrictions aside, I am still very much looking forward to spending time, face to face, in person, with as many of you in this parish as we possibly can in the coming year. For the moment, it does appear that the rates of infection are once again forcing us to clamp down on gathering together in person, but this circumstance will not last forever (however much it might feel, right now, as if it might)! So I’d like you all to know that there’s still plenty left for us to discover together, for us to take mutual delight in as we learn each other’s stories and histories and share more of our own. If you have never attempted to write your own spiritual autobiography, I strongly encourage you all to give it a try. The underlying process of trying to write out the story of your journey to, and with, God can be enlightening, transforming, even liberating … whether or not you ever create a completed document on paper. It is a very good way to prepare yourself to make an account of the joy that is in you, something we Christians are admonished and encouraged to be able to do at all times. At any rate, I eagerly look ahead to any and all opportunities that will arise for me to hear and learn your stories. I’ve made a bit of a start, with some of you, so far in this first … is it almost two years already? Wow. On one hand, the time has flown by; on the other, thanks to Covid, it feels like nearly two decades instead of nearly two years. In that time, it has been my great privilege to begin getting to know many of you; I enthusiastically look forward to getting to know the rest of you as we work together to make sure All Saints continues to do its part to serve God’s kingdom here in Appleton. Peace and blessings to you all! Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Discernment Process, Part 5 December of 2012 saw the birth of our second child. It was an extremely joyous and extremely stressful time, as I went in for back surgery in January of 2013 and was looking at a long recovery, and Anne was suddenly forced to become a single parent with double the number of children under her care (triple, if you include me in the count!). The situation was only marginally better after my surgery, as I was now facing a fairly lengthy recovery, with regular doses of heavy medication and a number of restrictions that rendered me unable to be much help with the children. I was forbidden, for example, to lift more than about five pounds’ weight. Just as bad, I found myself unable to concentrate clearly enough to work on the long-overdue paperwork for the diocese, as the medications kept me in a constant state of light-headedness. Time seemed determined to continue speeding onward, yet I seemed to be losing any and all momentum in terms of moving my process of discernment forward. My discernment process felt like a shambles. How was I to get back on track? I started back to work teaching at the end of the spring semester, in March of 2013. Adjusting to the workload post-surgery was not easy, and it was April of that year before I finally got all of the necessary forms, tests, applications, explications, and documentation completed and submitted to the diocesan office in Columbia. With my profuse apologies for the delays included. Over the summer, I had a follow-up meeting with the Commission on Ministry that, in hindsight, did not go nearly as well as I’d hoped—or as I had thought it did at the time. The impressions of the committee members seemed, from the feedback I later received, quite different from the impressions I had thought I was giving off during the meeting. In the moment, I thought things had gone well enough, but the committee later expressed several concerns regarding my possible call to ministry. However, the committee decided to address these concerns by having me meet with two mentors from the committee over a period of a few months, which is where my process stood in September of 2013. Though the meetings with the two mentors were apparently quite successful both in their opinions and in mine—the experience was, in fact, quite spiritually affirming and uplifting to me—the overall Committee recommended against granting me Postulancy in early 2014. But at the suggestion of the co-chair of the Commission on Ministry, I scheduled a meeting with Bishop Waldo anyway to discuss what possibilities existed for my continued discernment. He shared the commission’s concerns that I needed to find a way to view organization and administration not as “necessary evils” but rather as part and parcel of a pastoral call, and he assigned me an essay to write that would require me to explore ways in which I could trigger that shift in my understanding. I eagerly complied, and after he reviewed what I had submitted, Bishop Waldo granted me Postulancy at the end of March of that year. After a mad scramble at that late date to get accepted to their program, I enrolled in The School of Theology at the University of the South in the fall of 2014. I graduated in May of 2017 and was ordained to the diaconate on 17 June of that year, not quite three weeks after beginning my first call as Assistant to the Rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal Parish in Clemson, SC. On 1 February 2018, I was made a priest in God’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church—some twenty years since I first found the courage during graduate school to mention to the priest at the small Episcopal church in Carbondale that I wondered if I might be called to be a priest. In some ways, my ordination to the priesthood marked the end of my discernment process … but in a larger (more accurate) sense, what happened at that point was that the nature of discernment changed. I had been initiated into the life to which God had called me. For all that it had taken for me to get to that point, it was in truth only the beginning…  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Discernment Process, Part 4 During the course of my work with the Augusta Committee, Anne received word that funding had indeed come through for the job in Asheville she’d applied for many months before. At that point, there was no way we’d be moving to Georgia, and I realized that I’d have to cut my time with the Augusta Committee short. I was anxious about how that conversation was going to go; this group had, after all, invested quite a bit of effort into my discernment. Yet, when I informed the committee of the change in my circumstances (at our third meeting) they offered to complete my full six-meeting rotation “as our free gift to you,” in the words of a priest on the committee. I was not only grateful for that, but also quite humbled. Not only was I moving towards clarity in my work with this committee, but I was also being rejuvenated and restored, as well. I hadn’t realized how deeply I’d been wounded by some of my previous experiences with discernment until I was confronted with such positive, nurturing experiences as I was then having. And by the time I finished the six-month period, I once again felt the kind of clarity I’d first felt back in 2001. However, there were some important differences this time around. I realized, in hindsight, that seven years previously, without being aware of it, I had made it my primary goal to get into seminary. I had looked at my time in Spartanburg as a sort of a temporary stopover on the way to seminary. And when things didn’t fall into place as quickly as I thought they should have, I hadn’t been quite sure what to do. But coming out of my work with the Augusta Committee, I had developed a different goal—by this point, I simply wanted to serve. Were I to re-enter the formal discernment process, I knew it would be without the preconceived notions I’d brought with me the first time. And perhaps, given that difference, the process this time might not only be much less painful, but possibly even downright joyful. Coming out of that experience in Augusta, I felt convicted that I needed to begin the formal discernment process within a parish once again, and as soon as that thought struck me, I also realized that I needed to enter that process at my home parish of St. Matthew’s. Stepping outside of that environment for a few months of discernment had made it abundantly clear what a true spiritual home St. Matthew’s had been to me, and for me. The thought of walking away from the support, the friendship ~ the family ~ that I had there in order to discern my vocation in some other parish had now become unimaginable. That is why I came back to Fr. Rob in 2010 and asked him if we could meet and begin talking about discernment, vocation, and priesthood again—and that was no easy thing to do, after so many years. But it was something I knew that I had to do, that I was compelled to do. As I only vaguely understood when I was thirteen, it was something that’s bigger than any one person; it is certainly bigger than I. That is what led me to the St. Matthew’s discernment committee in 2010. It was a very affirming and uplifting time, returning to the work of discernment “at home,” so to speak, and I was grateful for the opportunity to share that part of my spiritual journey with my family at St. Matthew’s. I was doubly grateful for that support when, in October of that year, our first child was born. From my time with the St. Matthew’s committee, my discernment was much more focused than it had been previously, and for the first time, one step on the journey finally seemed to lead to a next step, and a next step. After being approved by the committee to continue discerning at the diocesan level, I was invited to take a biblical literacy exam and to participate in a newly developed internship program for those discerning a call to ordination, and that placed me in another parish for the summer (of 2012), where I was required not only to design, but also to implement, an entirely new ministry for St. James Episcopal Church in Greenville, SC. Following the internship, which my supervising priest considered to be successful despite several challenges, I would have moved to the next step of meeting for three to four months with a pair of mentors selected from the Commission on Ministry, except that I had not completed the 600 pages of diocesan paperwork, including a required psychological screening, by the end of the summer internship. Somehow, I had mistakenly thought I wasn’t supposed to begin the paperwork until after the internship had concluded. Suddenly, and very unexpectedly, I found myself horribly “behind” in my process. I was told that I needed to get the paperwork done as quickly as possible to continue the process, but that if I did so, the delay shouldn’t hurt me to badly. Unfortunately, time and circumstance made doing so not only difficult, but temporarily impossible. By October, 2012, when I received the news about my paperwork, I was nearing the end of that fall semester’s teaching load—classes were wrapping up and I had final grading to do. It looked like I’d be able to get the paperwork completed and sent off by November without too much difficulty. But that is exactly when a herniated disk in my lower back began to press into my sciatic nerve, effectively crippling me for the next three months. After many medications, many chiropractic adjustments, and many doctor visits, I had to accept that I needed surgery to correct the problem. I scheduled the procedure for January 30, 2013, which was the soonest I could have it done. Meanwhile, our second child was born three days ahead of schedule on the evening of Christmas Day. It was an extremely joyous and extremely stressful time, as I was still crippled and Anne was suddenly forced to become a single parent with double the number of children under her care (triple, if you include me in the count!). The situation was only marginally better after the surgery, as I was now facing a fairly lengthy recovery, with regular doses of heavy medication and a number of restrictions that rendered me unable to be much help with the children. I was forbidden, for example, to lift more than about five pounds’ weight. Just as bad, I found myself unable to concentrate clearly enough to work on the long-overdue paperwork for the diocese, as the medications kept me in a constant state of light-headedness. Time seemed determined to continue speeding onward, yet I seemed to be losing any and all momentum in terms of moving my process of discernment forward. My discernment process felt like a shambles. How was I to get back on track? To be continued... Peace, C+  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Discernment Process, Part 3 So I had come to the realization that I had to go back to Fr. Rob, the priest with whom I had initially began exploring a possible call to holy orders years ago, and tell him that I believed I needed to re-enter into the discernment process in The Episcopal Church. But by now, it had been a couple of years since I’d been active in church at all, much less actively pursuing a call to ministry. What was he likely to think? How genuine could my call be, if it apparently fluctuated like that? What did it say of me, that I had stepped away from the process once before? There were further, more pragmatic complications, as well. Anne and I were planning at that time to be in South Carolina for perhaps another year, and not much beyond that. What would Rob, or the church, for that matter, think about the prospect of beginning the process anew when I might not be around for the long haul? Yes, I had rediscovered my sense of call. I was afraid, however, that I might already have missed my window of opportunity. I was hesitant, therefore, even to attempt to begin the process again there, in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina. Anne and I were seriously considering the possibility of moving back to Georgia in order that I might attend graduate school; as I spoke with my father about that possibility, and about my concerns about restarting the discernment process, he recommended that I contact Bishop Louttit of the Diocese of Georgia. My parents had moved back to south Georgia, and they had been sharing with me stories of the innovative ways Bishop Louttit had been addressing the shortage of priests in his diocese. They thought he might have some insight as to how I might best proceed. Indeed, Bishop Louttit spoke with me (a complete stranger to him) for an hour when I called, and he was kind enough to refer me to one of his diocesan Discernment Committees, one based in Augusta, which wasn’t too far from where we were in South Carolina. Under Bishop Louttit’s direction, the Diocese of Georgia had created regional standing committees to be the first step for aspirants (those who wonder if they might be called to holy orders) in their discernment processes. The aspirant would meet with a regional committee (made up of clergy and laity from several parishes within the diocese) once a month for six months. At the end of that time, the committee members make a recommendation to the aspirant’s home parish based on their perception of the person’s path and vocation. Although I was not coming from a parish within the diocese, Bishop Louttit offered to put me in touch with the Augusta Committee so that I might come to a clearer understanding of the path to which God was calling me before Anne and I picked up and moved to Georgia. This opportunity seemed like a Godsend. I was extremely grateful for the chance to explore God’s calling in a structured environment and for the chance to have help gaining clarity after my earlier experiences. I must stress, however, that what led me to that exploration with a group in Augusta, as opposed to seeking it in my home parish, was the near certainty that Anne and I would be moving out of that parish, and out of the diocese, in comparatively short order. Anne had applied the previous year for a job in Asheville, but it seemed unlikely that funding for the position would be available, and we were each becoming less and less satisfied with our current job situations in South Carolina. We needed a change, and it looked like that would mean a move to a new locale. It would, perhaps, have made more sense to wait until we had moved and joined a new parish to take on such work again, but despite the uncertainty regarding where we were going to end up, I felt a sense of urgency to proceed with discernment. When my sense of being called (to something) flared back to life, it did so intensely. I had reached a point where I couldn’t really make long term plans with my wife for our future together without a better understanding of what role(s) I would be called to play. In that light, I entered into working with the Augusta Discernment Committee with the specific goal of discerning whether my primary path of service ought to be academic or ministerial. I realized that the two were not only not mutually exclusive, but often interdependent; I felt driven to discover, however, whether I could be of better service as an academic who also does ministry, or as a minister with an academic background. When I began meeting with the Augusta committee, I suspected that I would end up leaning towards a primarily academic vocation, one which I thought would likely include some aspects of lay ministry. But as I moved more deeply into exploring the questions put to me by the committee, it became clearer and clearer to me that where I wanted to be, that where I needed to be, was in Christ’s Church, helping to administer His Sacraments—in other words, I began to realize that the academic gifts I’d been given and experiences I’d had would only be put to their best and highest use in service to God’s people through His Church. I felt called to be directly involved with people’s lives, on a more holistic basis than I had experienced as a college teacher. And parish life is full of very real opportunities for teaching and learning, after all, and that’s also where opportunities for healing, grace, reconciliation, and transformation are likely to be experienced, much more directly so than in any academic classroom that I had yet be part of. I was coming to another point of clarity on the road to ordination. But, as is often the case in the fullness of God’s time, there was yet another twist coming … To be continued… Peace, C+ THE GOOD NEW DAYS:
A Few (okay, a lot!) More Words about Service Times, Sunday Schedules, the Good Ol’ Days, and what’s on the near-horizon My dear friends in Christ, It wasn’t very long at all after I first announced that we were about to experiment with moving our Sunday service time to 10:30 for the remainder of July that I began receiving inquiries about the change. While some folks reached out to say “thank you,” the majority of the messages that came in asked whether we would ever have an early service again, or if this new, later start time were an indication that anybody who preferred the early service would simply be out of luck, moving forward. Other folks have raised questions about when we might be able to stop roping off every other pew, when we might be able to sing hymns together, and what our “new normal” might actually look like, when and if we manage to get to the point of having a “normal” again, after Covid. So I wanted to take the opportunity to share with all of you the answers to some of these questions that have come in, as well as a more in-depth glimpse into the thought process behind this experiment and the longer-term goals involved as we try to navigate this strange in-between time of being almost post-Covid, but not quite. By far, the most common question so far has been “Will we ever go back to having an early morning service again?” The short answer to that question is: YES, I absolutely hope and plan to return to our pre-Covid practice of having both an early and a later service each and every Sunday. Please understand that there is no question of whether we will be adding an early service back into our schedule; the only question is when. In answer to that question, the current plan is to resume a two-service schedule for Sunday mornings no later than this fall, when we’ll be launching our regular program year. Everything else being equal, that would be the logical time to make such a change. That said, however, there is a consideration that might lead us to return to a two-service schedule sooner than that: if our in-person attendance continues to increase ~ and especially if the diocese continues to require us to rope off spaces for social distancing between usable pews ~ then we will need to have two services in order to accommodate everyone whilst maintaining social distancing. Even if the diocese decides to relax the social distancing requirements, if in-person attendance gets much higher than it was last Sunday (the 11th), I’ll want us to go to two services anyway, in order to help things run more smoothly in terms of logistics. Since we resumed in-person worship on Palm Sunday, but prior to last Sunday, the highest attendance we had ever had in church on a Sunday was 36 people; we had been averaging about 21 per Sunday. (By way of comparison, in pre-Covid times, we were seeing 13-20 people each Sunday at the early service and 55-75 people each Sunday at the later one.) This past Sunday, we broke 40 for the first time (41, to be precise). That was good news, not only because it marked a significant increase in in-person attendance, but also because one of the main reasons we wanted to try out starting at 10:30 for a few weeks was that many of our parishioners, including a half dozen of our more senior parishioners, had been asking me ever since we re-opened if we could start later, because they're having such a hard time getting to church by 9:30. They wanted very much to come worship in person, but a number of folks have found the early start time either difficult or preventative. We needed at least to try to accommodate these folks who are so faithful and so committed to being in church but who've been having such a hard time just physically getting here. Of course, what's easier for one group of parishioners is often a hardship for another group of parishioners. Since making the announcement of the temporary time change, I’ve also heard from a number of people who can only attend an earlier service. We need to accommodate these folks, too, obviously. And we will. But while it might have been possible to add an 8 o’clock or 8:30 service and continue to hold the live-streamed service at 9:30, I really didn’t want to do that, and I’ll tell you why: long-term goals. Ultimately, when we get to the point of being truly post-Covid and the pandemic restrictions have been fully lifted, what I'd really love to see on a Sunday morning would be something like this:
There are, of course, any number of problems with trying to organize Sunday mornings that way. Probably the biggest, most difficult problem would be that fellowship and adult formation would conflict with our choir’s pre-Covid schedule, which had the choir rehearsing between services (and sometimes while the first service was still going on). I don’t want our choir members to have to choose between their love of music ministry, on one hand, and both fellowship and Christian formation, on the other. We could, alternatively, do adult Formation after the second service, but I imagine that most folks ~ especially those who would have kids who’d finished up Sunday School before the second service ~ would be ready to leave by then … and of course I’ve been cautioned about making people late for kickoff during football season (for the record, I have several good sermons prepared on that topic, should the opportunity arise! J). It is, admittedly, an ambitious goal. And, obviously, much more brainstorming and planning ~ and likely some experimenting ~ will have to happen before we can come close to a Sunday schedule like that. But I think that should be the goal towards which we aim. (Of course, one of the main reasons I’m sharing these raw ideas with you, even though they are not even close to being worked out and ready to implement, is to get your feedback. I very much want to hear from all of you about what you would like our Sunday mornings to look like. Please do take some time to think about worship, formation, and fellowship, and let me know what you think ~ I’m including my email address & phone number below for just that purpose.) In any case, we will return to a two-service schedule on Sundays. It is my sincere hope that our new “regular” schedule will also include time for both coffee/fellowship and for Christian education and formation for all ages. In terms of overall timing, it would make the most sense, I think, to try to kick off a schedule like that in the fall, when we will be launching our "program year" anyway, so that moving to the new schedule is simply part of what we do, as we gear up for that 21/22 program year. One important thing has to happen, however, before we can get all the way there: we need to wait to have full in-person Sunday School for kids until there's a vaccine available for children under 12. Parents might not feel comfortable sending their kids to Sunday School without the option to have them vaccinated; as a parent myself, I don’t know that I would. The latest rumors suggest that there might be a vaccine for children 5-12 in September, and perhaps in November there will be one for children even younger. But we just don’t know yet, and that prevents us from making a concrete plan with a concrete timeline. So that’s what’s going on “behind the scenes”; I hope that this context helps make a bit more sense out of the decision to experiment with starting at 10:30 in July. As I mentioned earlier, I invite and encourage all your questions, comments, concerns, and creative ideas: please share them with me at 920.266.9262 or at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com . I very much look forward to hearing from you and we envision a new normal for All Saints Episcopal Church. Yours always in Christ, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Discernment Process, Part 2 I had achieved a real clarity about my calling in winter of 2001, but by the time it got to be 2004, nothing had come of it. It seemed to me that I was going in circles. I would spend six or eight months participating in a specific series of meetings or workshops or “discernment activities” … and as soon as I was done, another six- or eight-month exercise would pop up, which I’d be told I had to complete before I could meet with the bishop. Everyone, from the diocesan level to the parish, from clergy to laity, said the discernment process was “broken,” but nobody seemed able to fix it. In fact, I could never get a clear answer as to whether I was even officially in the discernment process. Something had to give. I decided to take some time off from church activities. To be clear, I never considered leaving the Church—especially not after having recognized a call to serve Christ with my life. But I needed to take a step back in order to reflect on where ~ and who ~ I was. I’d been teaching freshman English full time at Spartanburg Community College (then Spartanburg Technical College) since the spring of 2002. After moving to Spartanburg in the fall of 1999, I taught part time at Furman University from 2000-2001, and I’d also been teaching as an adjunct at STC since the spring of 2001. Perhaps, I thought, my calling is to serve in an academic, as opposed to an overtly ministerial, capacity. Certainly, teaching freshman classes at a community college involves a great deal of counseling, if not outright ministering… At that time, I was also dealing with several more mundane concerns: buying a new car for the first time, buying my first house, learning to handle the pressures of a career as opposed to a mere job) … Moreover, I found that, after my recent church experiences and the resulting frustration and confusion, quite frankly, I need to heal, emotionally and psychologically, before I could return fully to the question of vocation. I felt severely let down by the parish in which I’d placed my trust, and by the process itself, and I needed to sort those feelings out and let go of whatever negativity was there before I could proceed to anything else in that regard. In the meantime, Fr. Rob, with whom I’d initially discussed discernment, had accepted the position of rector at another Episcopal church in Spartanburg: St. Matthew’s. In the summer of 2005, having been away from active church participation for roughly a year, I decided I needed to visit Fr. Rob in his new church. I did not, at the time, intend to switch my parish membership, much less to become actively involved again, but I quickly ended up doing both those things. The atmosphere at St. Matthew’s was markedly different than what I’d known at my previous parish. This congregation, though just as divided politically, instead of focusing on their anger and fighting things out to see who “won” and therefore was “right,” primarily focused on worship of Jesus Christ, and I found that … rejuvenating. I jumped into music ministry again, joining the guitar choir that played and sang for the healing Eucharist on Wednesdays. I even considered beginning active discernment again in this new parish, despite the fact that I’d have to start over from scratch. Once again, though, life offered me an unexpected turn. There was a young lady in the Wednesday night guitar group who was herself a new member of the parish, a music therapist working in the behavioral health unit of Spartanburg Regional Hospital. Anne and I became close quickly and started dating. And despite a brief moment of “cold feet” on my part at the very beginning (I had never connected so quickly and so thoroughly with another person as I did with her, and honestly it scared me at first!), our relationship deepened into an abiding love. In November of 2006, I asked her to marry me, and we were married on the 19th of May, 2007. In the ensuing year, I began learning not only how to be a full-grown adult with a career, a car, and a house, but also how to be a husband, as well. All of which is to say that it seems clear to me now that God understood, back in 2004, that I had a lot of education to catch up on before I should consider going forward with any vocational discernment, even if at the time I hadn’t seen it that way. As we began our second year of marriage, Anne and I began exploring the deeper, existential questions of life together, questions about vocation and purpose. We realized that where we were was not where we felt ourselves to be of greatest service. I discovered that I loved teaching, yet I had not felt fulfilled or fully devoted to what it was I’d been teaching for a while. I felt, and still feel, drawn to the academic study of religion, and I wondered if perhaps my call were to pursue a Ph.D. and move on to teach at a university. At the same time, that powerful sense of clarity I’d discovered back in 2001, being called to serve God and God’s people through the ministering of the Sacraments, still haunted me. I was at a crossroads, uncertain how proceed. I needed help finding a way forward. That, and the powerful sense of call to sacramental ministry, drove me once again to engage in active discernment within a structured Church environment. I had to tell Fr. Rob … but how would he respond, given that I’d stepped away from discernment several years before? To be continued... Peace, C+  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Discernment Process, Part 1 And that is where the matter stood when I arrived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the fall of 1999. Some important things happened at that point: I became active in a parish, participating in its Canterbury young adult ministry from my first weeks here. In the summer of 2000, I traveled (as one of several adult chaperones) with the church’s youth to the village of White Horse, South Dakota, on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, for my first mission trip. I attended meetings of the Committee on Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, including a planning session for the annual Cross-Roads gathering. For two years, I taught Rite Thirteen Sunday School. All of these activities gave me insight into the meaning of living a life of service, and all of them strengthened my sense of purpose and calling to ministry. In early 2001, after participating in a workshop facilitated by Fr. Rob Brown (then the associate rector of the church I’d been attending since coming to Spartanburg) entitled “The Voice of the Lord’s Invitation,” all of these experiences came together for me. The workshop focused not on directions or end-goals for our lives, but rather on discovering what gifts we have been given by the grace of God and by virtue of being who we are. Doing that showed me what choices I’d already been making, subconsciously at least, about which priorities were most important to me in my life. And I began clearly to see a distinct pattern, a definite direction that my life had been taking up to that point—sometimes in spite of myself. That direction was one of ever deeper, ever more profound encounter with the mystery of the Christ. A close friend of mine once told me he respected the fact that I was willing to ask spiritual questions that made him too uncomfortable, that he himself would never ask. The comment surprised me, because I hadn’t realized until then that it wasn’t something I was willing to do at all; it was something that, being who I am, I have to do. As I had grown closer to Christ, through my searching and questioning, and through my life experiences, I felt a growing need to share what I felt, what I’d seen, what I’d experienced firsthand, with others. Helping others, if possible, to approach and move into that mystical encounter with Christ Jesus, or merely proclaiming the very potential of such an encounter (that it is something that can actually, really happen!), was something that I not only felt called to do; it was something that—having now examined closely the details of my life up to that moment—I had apparently already been doing, for as far back as I could recall. That is what led me, in the spring of 2001, to feel called to seek Holy Orders. I was at the point of making a conscious choice: to make the seemingly random patterns that led me to that moment in my life an active part of my awareness and daily activity. To do intentionally and consciously what I had been doing automatically and unconsciously. It became clear to me that whatever gifts I’d been given in life had been entrusted to me by God for the work of bringing about God’s Kingdom in the world. I felt that, in order to develop these blessings to their fullest extent and to use them for the greatest good and the highest purpose, I would need the training, community, structure, and—eventually—the authority that comes with seminary and ordination. To that end, I became even more actively involved at my church than I had been up to that point. I became a lay reader and chalice bearer, so that I could participate more fully in the liturgy and especially the Eucharist; I offered my abilities as a musician, playing guitar for contemporary evening worship services. I directed a “reader’s theatre” production of the play Christ in the Concrete City as both a Lenten reflection (for the actors) and as an Easter celebration (the performance) for the parish. Over a period of roughly two months, I co-presented, with the Rev. Marilyn Sanders, an adult education class/Bible study/workshop the purpose of which was to bring together parishioners of varying viewpoints and opinions (in the wake of the confirmation of Bishop Robinson) to discuss issues of sexuality within the Church from cultural, anthropological, theological, and Scriptural perspectives (this parish, at the time, was deeply divided, as were so many parishes, and indeed the national Church itself, over such issues). Despite all of that activity, however, my own discernment process never seemed to move forward. I met with the church’s Vestry; I participated in a six-month workshop, meeting with a committee of Vestry members and lay folk to explore the various canons of ministry. I met regularly with the rector, Fr. Clay Turner, but in spite of his strong support, the process seemed to stall out. At the time, I didn’t quite understand what was going on. To this day, I’m sure I do not have the whole picture. I did discover, however, in later years that this particular church has in its history only rarely sent anyone to seminary, even though it is one of the largest churches in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, and one of the most blessed in terms of people, education, and resources. Eventually, I became not so much disillusioned, but frustrated and more than a little confused about God’s plan for me. After having felt like I’d finally achieved such clarity about my calling in 2001, by the time it got to be 2004 and no further progress had occurred (at least from my point of view), I believed I needed to reconsider some things. To be continued... Peace, C+  My dear friends in Christ,
Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Call Story, Pt. 3 By the time I was in graduate school (at Southern Illinois University) in my late twenties, I believed I had managed to get a pretty fair idea of what I, personally, believed, and that I had nurtured a healthy and productive relationship with Christ Jesus on my own, independent of any formal worship or of any formal institution. Not really having experienced such a thing for myself at that point, I had little concept of a “faith community,” much less a “church family.” The irony, therefore, of nurturing a healthy and productive relationship with Christ Jesus in the absence of the covenant community was quite lost on my younger self. Having spent so many years “on my own,” I took it as given that my particular beliefs, understandings, and perspectives would never fit in within the mainstream Church. Of course, I hadn’t stopped to examine that assumption, or even to realize it was in fact an assumption—not until I had been in grad school for almost two years (of a three year program). Coming back into town after visiting a friend for the weekend, it struck me (“out of the blue,” as it were) that in all the time I’d been in school in Carbondale, I’d never set foot inside the local Episcopal church. The particular thought that hit me, riding back on the train, was that I had no clue what the inside of the local church looked like. On a whim (or so it felt at the time), I resolved to get up the next morning and go to the Sunday service there. That proved to be another pivotal choice. Once I got involved at St. Andrew’s, I quickly experienced a series of revelations. No more visions or anything like that; these were much more mundane realizations, yet their impact upon me was nearly as profound. To put these realizations into perspective, let me jump back in time for just a moment. I had been taught from an early age, being brought up in the Church, that God is everywhere, in all things, and so I’ve always felt that connection on a personal level, as I’ve described. But I also grew up with the notion that priests, as the official servants of God’s Church, were somehow different from regular, normal folk—that they were in some strange way not “real” people. So for all the years I spent pursuing the spiritual quest that I’d begun at age 13, it was possible for me to admire the priesthood as an institution, and the individual priests who served the churches I’d attended, all the while thinking, “It would be wonderful to serve God in that way … but those people aren’t like me. And I’m certainly not like that. Not like them.” Several things happened toward the end of my studies in Illinois to alter that belief. First, I began to meet—as an adult—actual members of the clergy, as well as people preparing for or already in seminary. I kept thinking, “But wait, these people seem to be exactly like me.” It was unnerving at first, to say the least. At the same time, I was realizing that, though I was about to complete my master’s degree (and thus be qualified to begin a career in college teaching), I had yet to find a direction or purpose in life that truly commanded my conviction. Teaching was something that I could do, but I was not at all sure that it was something I should do. I felt compelled to seek a vocation that would make the best use of my life, for the greatest good. Additionally, through working with the priest in Carbondale and through attending various Province V and national conventions, I had come to see that the personal beliefs and perspectives which I thought I had hammered out for myself in isolation were, in many cases, perfectly in-sync with where the contemporary Church stood. I also started noticing a lot of little things, which collectively seemed to point in a particular direction. Sometimes, it was a subtle as a line in a book that leapt off the page—“Who, in this modern day and age, will once again take up the Mysteries of Christianity?” one author asked, seemingly of me, personally. At least once, though, it was really on the nose. I’d worn a black, circle-necked shirt to church one Sunday (because I didn’t like wearing neckties), and at the peace, Father Isaac came over, shook my hand, and told me “We need to get you a collar to go with that!” I hadn’t even known the man for a month, and I’d not yet spoken to him of any feelings of vocation. And for his part, he was I’m sure just joking around with a parishioner. But still. In the context of my life at that point, the moment stood out like a shout in a silent room. How did he know? Thus, having lost my best excuses for not seriously considering the priesthood, I realized that if I didn’t explore that possibility in earnest, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. To be continued… Peace, C+  Spiritual Autobiography
My dear friends in Christ, Here is the next installment of my Spiritual Autobiography. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I’m sharing these details of my spiritual journey from childhood to priesthood and to All Saints Episcopal Church not (with all due respect to Walt Whitman) to celebrate myself, but in an attempt to begin (at least) to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic, time we would otherwise have been able to spend getting to know each other and building the close relationships that are so important to the life and health of a thriving parish. This chapter that I’m sharing this week may strike you as … a little strange. It is not an episode of my journey that I’ve shared with many people ~ it is certainly not one with which I would ordinarily begin a conversation with someone I’d just met. To be honest, I had considered being a bit more selective with my storytelling and only sharing certain excerpts (read: probably not this one), rather than the entire narrative, for this newsletter column. But upon reflection, I realized that I would rather y’all have a chance to get the whole story, as it were. If nothing else, perhaps my sharing an experience like this one might serve as an invitation to some very interesting follow-up conversations! On that note, if anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262. I look forward to hearing from y’all! Call Story, Pt. 2 From the age of 13 until my late twenties, I pursued that goal of discovering and understanding whatever it was that I actually believed, both informally, on a personal level, and to an extent formally, getting my bachelor’s degree in anthropology. (I had, early on in high school and only very briefly, entertained the notion of becoming a theoretical physicist and studying “reality” in that way, but a couple of higher math classes quickly disabused me of that error! But I had always had a love so social sciences, anyway, and when I took Anthro 101 at Georgia Southern in the spring of 1990, I was hooked.) I spent time reading about all sorts of religions and belief systems, from my native Christianity and its cousins Judaism and Islam, to eastern faiths such as Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, eventually exploring belief systems of various non-Western, non-industrial, indigenous cultures and “alternative” nature religions, so-called “New Religious Movements,” like Wicca and Druidry. And I spent even more time in conversation with as many different people, from as many different backgrounds, as I could find. In hindsight, it seems a bit odd, but throughout this period of intense and wide-ranging exploration, I never considered myself to be anything other than Christian, though admittedly I rarely attended formal services during those years. Only once did I seriously entertain the idea of actually leaving the Church. That moment of consideration was another formative milestone on my spiritual journey, and it deserves a bit of description and explanation. It happened one evening during my junior year of college at Georgia Southern. I had been doing field research for a term paper in my cultural anthropology class, studying a group of Wiccans (they were more common that you might expect in south Georgia in the early ’90s!) as a religious sub-culture. It had struck me more than once, over the course of that research, that, although it would have taken me a lot of adjusting, I could in fact have found a spiritual home amongst the people I was meeting and interviewing. It was shocking, in fact, to realize how fully and completely I would have fit in with and been welcomed into their community. I found especially compelling the degree to which the people who practiced this religion integrated their spiritual beliefs and religious rituals and practices into the ordinary business of their everyday lives. For me, that way of living their religion was a bit of contrast to what I’d experienced in the tradition into which I was born, which all too often relegated religious concerns and practices to one or two designated days out of the week and, also all too often, left one wondering what connection the religion even had to the actual business of living day-to-day. At any rate, on the night in question, I was thinking pretty hard about that idea of really living the faith, about one’s entire life being a continuous act of religious devotion and expression, and about the realization that I could potentially find a spiritual home in this new tradition … when I had what I’ve only been able to describe afterwards as a vision. I happened to be looking into my bathroom mirror and, instead of my own reflection, I suddenly saw the figure of Jesus, smiling at me kindly. He didn’t speak out loud, but I was given to understand that I was perfectly welcome, if I liked, to choose the change in direction that I was considering, and that if I did choose that change, there would be no wrath or punishment from Him because of it. I was also shown, however, an image of myself as a Wiccan, and then an image of His slowly turning around and walking away from me until He vanished in the distance, and I was left staring at my own image in the mirror once again. The experience was devastating. The utter finality I perceived in that that image that struck me like a physical blow. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of what my Baptist friends from childhood had described as a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Watching the that possible future unfold in which Christ allowed me my free choice and stepped away, never to return, I felt a sense of loss that goes beyond expression in words. And I knew—suddenly and completely—that, though I was free to choose my own path and that I would continue to build friendships with people of all sorts of faith backgrounds and to learn as much as I could about as many different belief systems as possible, I would never, could never, choose a path that led me away from my relationship with Christ Jesus. It was in that moment that I discovered that that relationship, that His presence, had always been with me, though I had only just embraced it fully consciously for the first time. To be continued… Peace, C+  Spiritual Autobiography
Introduction One of the worst aspects of these past fourteen months of pandemic shutdown has been that you and I, the parish and your new rector, have been essentially robbed of a year’s worth of time we would otherwise have been able to spend actually getting to know each other. My dear friends in Christ, I have agonized over that fact. And while it’s true that we are finally beginning to be able to open back up, at least a little bit, we are still a ways off from being free to come together for face-to-face fellowship, the telling of tales, the swapping of memories—not to mention the sharing of meals—that are so deeply part of what makes a parish feel like a family. So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about it, in the meanwhile of waiting for Covid numbers to decrease and Covid restrictions to relax a bit further. I don’t know if it will be helpful at all, but it occurred to me that, although I might not be able to get out there and get to know all of you as I would like to yet, perhaps I can give y’all a chance to get to know me a little better. I thought, what would happen if I shared with you my Spiritual Autobiography? When folks are discerning a possible call to ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church, they are required to compose and share their “spiritual autobiographies”—accounts of their lives with particular emphasis on the events and experiences that were spiritually significant, that were formative, that led to the conviction that God was calling them to the diaconate or to the priesthood. So my Spiritual Autobiography is, in many ways, the story of how I came to be here with you, serving you as your priest. Under normal circumstances, I would no doubt have ended up sharing much of this information with you informally, chatting during coffee hour or in conversation at various church functions, or perhaps even over coffee or a shared meal in small groups. And I still very much hope that we can do all those things together! But as an experiment, while we wait for the pandemic to be enough under control that we can resume gathering freely like that, here is the first excerpt from my formal Spiritual Autobiography, for anyone who might be curious. If anything here sparks your interest, if you have questions, or if you’d just like to connect and talk about something else entirely, please let me know at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com, or at 920.266.9262, and let’s talk! Call Story, pt. 1 My “official” spiritual journey—at least in terms of my conscious awareness of being on such a journey, and of the fact that I was taking deliberate steps on that journey—began when I was 13 years old. I remember clearly a particular Sunday School class, taught by a nice lady who was actually younger then than I am now, which served as a catalyst in my spiritual life. That morning’s lesson was a pre-printed tract which attempted to “prove” by means of the mathematics of probability that life simply couldn’t have evolved on the Earth, as the scientists claim. At that point in my life, I was very much what my friends at school would call a “nerd.” I had watched hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nature documentaries on Public Television and had spent countless hours poring over whatever scientific information I could find on dinosaurs and related subjects. I also had very little patience with anything that I, in my 13-year-old “wisdom,” deemed silly. So I really couldn’t help myself when confronted with that lesson. I felt compelled to raise my hand and point out that the infinitesimal percentage that the lesson plan indicated was the chance that life actually evolved on our planet was nothing of the kind; rather, I informed the class, that was the percentage chance of the exact same pattern of evolutionary development happening again on some other planet, exactly the same way it had on Earth. I remember being aware on some level, even at the time, that the lesson plan was not written by our Sunday School teacher, that she was just presenting the curriculum she’d been given to present. But I also remember how important it seemed to me that the truth be spoken and understood. It was something that was bigger than anyone’s personal opinion, including mine. As soon as my family made it back home after church that morning, I informed my parents that I would not be attending Sunday School any longer. My father was particularly displeased; I can still hear his voice as he told me, very calmly, that he had a problem with the notion that my formal religious education was to end at age 13. I did too, I replied. It was just that I felt pretty certain that I wasn’t going to receive any real education in that class. In hindsight, all these years later, it seems odd to me that I never once had any intention of walking away from the Church. Nor, as I tried to explain to my father, was I shying away from religious education. If anything, I felt compelled to seek out such education. What had been presented in that Sunday School class made no sense, and something deep within me told me that not only should things make sense, but that, somehow, some way, they actually do. It was about that same time period in my life when I noticed that many of my friends at school were not just rejecting the religious practices of their parents, but also often rejecting religion itself outright. “I don’t let my parents force me to go to church anymore,” I remember hearing, and “I’m not going to be a hypocrite like that.” In light of my own experience, I realized that what I’d been doing for 13 years was essentially just going through the motions, imitating what I’d been exposed to. I knew all of the liturgy by heart … but it occurred to me then that I had no real understanding of what any of it meant. I concluded that I needed either to quit being a hypocrite myself and stop attending services I didn’t really understand, or I needed to figure out exactly what it was I did believe, and (perhaps more importantly) why. As I mentioned above, leaving the Church never seemed like a serious option to me; I felt strongly (even if I had no idea why) that I belonged there, somehow. So at 13 I set out to find some way to understand the tenets of the faith in which I’d been raised. To be continued… Peace, C+  My dear family in Christ,
A recent exchange I had via social media has brought my attention to a topic that I don’t think we, as a Christian community, talk about as much as we should. A certain individual took issue with a particular phrasing I used in one of my comments (on a thread I had myself started) ~ I had quoted a character from Star Wars/Disney’s The Mandalorian: “I have spoken.” It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek pop-culture reference in the midst of a more serious discussion. The individual I mentioned above demanded to know if I “talk to my children that way.” I responded to this person by asking “How dare you attempt to use my children in an attempt to shame me just because you disagree with my point?” Personally, I found and still find that tactic to be extraordinarily offensive. This individual replied: “I thought you were supposed to be a pastor. Some pastor you are.” That response—and let me tell y’all, it is one that’s heard all too frequently by those of us who are in the business of ministry, whether lay or ordained—is evidence on the surface of what I think is a fairly deep issue, both within the Church and beyond, in the larger secular culture. There is a widespread misconception that being a Christian, in general, and that begin a pastor/priest/minister/etc., in particular, means first and foremost being “nice.” Now, nice, of course, is a good and wonderful thing; what makes this expectation problematic is that “nice” gets defined as “never, ever pushing back against any words or actions, no matter how offensive or vile those words or actions may be; never challenging anyone or anything, but instead just being happy and making sure nobody ever feels bad for any reason.” Christians, and especially Christian ministers, are just supposed to smile, nod, and “take it,” no matter what sort of vitriol is directed our way. Now, to be sure, we are absolutely called to conform our lives to the life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who commands us unequivocally to turn the other cheek, to return kindness for malice, compassion for hate, love for fear, and to make of our lives a living sacrifice in service to God and God’s people (i.e., everybody). Beyond that, Jesus calls us to be, ourselves, agents of transformation: when hatred or anger are directed at us, we are called to transform that hate and return only love, to transform that anger and return only peace. We must follow not only the commandments but also the living example of Jesus, every single day. So I am not even remotely suggesting that any of us ought to “fight back.” To do so is irretrievably un-Christian. That said, however, Christians in general and Christian ministers, especially, do have an additional obligation, and that is to teach, through word and example, the faith of Jesus Christ. Teaching sometimes requires a bit of compassionate confrontation, a willingness to call people’s attention to the nature of their own actions and those of others … and the courage to offer loving correction when needed. What happens, all too often, is that the expectation that Christians and (again especially) Christian ministers are to be meek and mild at all times gets weaponized: “I can say and do whatever I want, and the pastor has no choice but to allow me to do so, because if he or she pushes back at all, I can accuse him or her of being a bad pastor and not following Jesus … and yet I don’t even have to try to live up to that same expectation myself.” Folks, in the Christian community, we all have to live up to that standard, together. That’s the piece of the puzzle that’s so often missing in our modern Church and especially in the larger, secular culture that surrounds us: it’s not about individuals’ behavior at all. It’s about the way the entire community is called and commanded to behave towards each other within the community, and towards the larger world outside the community. We’re all in this together. That’s the only way any of this Christian life can work. That means that I sometimes need to receive—with as much gratitude as I, in my own sinfulness, can muster—a loving rebuke from a fellow follower of Christ. Even, and really especially, when I don’t want to, I have to make myself close my mouth and open my ears and my heart to hear where it is that I’ve misspoken or acted inappropriately, how my behavior has hurt or is hurting someone, and what I need to do to make it right. It’s hard to be on the receiving end of such a rebuke at all, much less to take it in gracefully, but that’s what I’m obligated to do. It also means that, when I witness someone’s mistreating another person (whether that other person be me or some other individual), I am obligated by my faith to speak up. I can’t let it slide; I have to step in and let the offending party know, as gently but as firmly as possible, that he or she is speaking and/or acting in a way that is contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and that such behavior will not be tolerated in my presence. Looking out for each other, taking a stand for each other (or even for ourselves, sometimes), whilst maintaining a humble awareness of our own capacity for harming others (whether advertently or inadvertently)—that’s all part and parcel of the Christian witness that is our obligation and our collective vocation. Again, we’re all in this together. To borrow once more from The Mandalorian: “This is the Way.”  My dear family in Christ,
The short version first:
The longer version: As you know, it has been a year and a week since the last time we were all together in our beautiful church, praising God, singing hymns, and sharing the sacrament of Holy Communion as the gathered Body of Christ in Appleton. A year is a long time to be apart, even under the best of circumstances, and—regardless of one’s perspectives, preferences, proclivities, or priorities—I think we’d all be a bit hard pressed to describe 2020 as having comprised “the best of circumstances.” It has been particularly difficult to have to fast for so long not only from each other’s presence but also from Holy Communion shared together. Now, as the season of Lent draws to a close and we look eagerly toward Easter, I have some good news to share. Of course, the greatest good news is that Jesus is Lord! and that we will once again celebrate the Resurrection this Easter! But I have some more immediate, down-to-earth good news to share, as well: We will reopen our church (in limited fashion) beginning on Palm Sunday! It’s time. Not because Covid is over—it isn’t! (More on that in a moment.) Not because the risks are gone—they are not! Even so, the overcrowding in our hospitals and healthcare facilities has started to go down, more and more people are getting vaccinated every day, and as long as we continue to mask, distance, and observe the recommended safety protocols, we can finally worship together again in limited numbers. So it is time for us to begin the long process of moving back into our shared, communal worship. That’s the good news. As you can tell, however, from my careful wording above, there is unfortunately also some bad news. The bad news is that the return to our remembered experience of full-scale in-person worship, including so many of the things we love about the All Saints experience, is still a good ways off. In other words, we will NOT be “going back to the way things were” anytime soon. Instead, our return to in-person worship will have to happen in stages, in increments. And this first stage will NOT be ideal. In many ways, it will be awkward and strange. It will almost certainly feel frustrating. But it WILL be a necessary and important first step towards a complete post-pandemic reopening, and that’s not nothing, y’all. So how is it going to work? What exactly will it look and feel and sound like? What will be different? Here’s a breakdown of some key features of this next phase we’re about to enter into together: Face masks & social distancing are absolutely required. Until the Covid numbers get significantly better, these requirements MUST be observed. We don’t ever want to turn anyone away from our doors … but as pastor, my responsibility—and my sincere desire—is to safeguard the well-being of the entire flock. So these restrictions are non-negotiable. (We will try to keep a small supply of disposable masks on hand, in case someone just happens to forget to mask up before leaving the house to come to church, but if possible, please bring your own.) As for spacing, we will limit seating to one family unit* per pew, and we’ll have to skip a pew in between each family unit as well. The pews will be marked off accordingly when you come in to the church. Reservations are required in advance. You’ll have to contact the church office before the close of business on Friday in order to reserve a physical place for yourself and your immediate family* for the following Sunday service. In order to make sure as many folks who want to attend in-person get the chance to do so, we are going to ask that if you reserve a spot and attend in-person in a given week, you then join us virtually/online the following week, to give someone else a chance to worship in-person. If we can voluntarily alternate weeks like that, it will make it easier for us to adhere to the other restrictions we have to follow, and also hopefully calling the office to sign up will maybe feel a little less like trying to get a vaccine appointment. : ) * NOTE: I am using the terms “immediate family” and “family unit” to indicate a small group of people who live in the same space together. If you have family in the parish, but you and they live in separate houses, then you and they would count as different “family units” for purposes of maintaining social distance. One single service will be offered (to start) at 9:30. As we begin to add in-person worshippers back into our Sunday morning service, we will continue to have a single 9:30 a.m. service that will combine in-person worship and live-streamed online worship. At least, we’re going to try it that way to begin with; if it does not work to combine in-person with live-streaming, we might have to separate the two types of service, but I am truly hoping that we don’t have to do that. I would prefer that what we do be what we live-stream out, in terms of worship, so that we have one communal act of worship, with some folks taking part in person and some folks taking part online, but all of us sharing the same worship together. In-person capacity is limited. Current diocesan restrictions for in-person worship services limit us to 25% of building capacity OR 50 persons total (including priest & servers), whichever is fewer. With a space as large as ours, that means we are limited to 50 people per service. For comparison, prior to the shutdown a tad more than a year ago, we were averaging between 70 and 90 people between two services. Given that a significant number of our parishioners will not yet feel safe and/or comfortable attending in-person services, it may not be too unreasonable to expect that a single service that allows for 50 people would suffice for us, at least for this first phase of reopening. Of course, if demand is too great, we will add a second service on Sunday morning. NOTE: Folks who attend in-person on Palm Sunday will still be eligible to attend one or the other (but not both) of our Easter services, either Saturday evening or Sunday morning. But, again, we would prefer that you choose in advance which one of the Easter services you want to attend. In-person worshippers will receive the Bread only. Diocesan restrictions require that both Bread and Wine be consecrated, that the Celebrant receive in both kinds, and that all other participants receive in one kind (Bread only). Essentially, at this point it is still far better to be safe than sorry, and that is why we will not be sharing a common cup just yet. In-person singing is NOT allowed. This restriction, I predict, will hit our specific community particularly hard. Music and (especially) singing are so deeply ingrained in the culture and identity of this parish that it’s almost unthinkable to consider returning to worship together … without also returning to our practice of singing together. Overwhelming amounts of research show, however, that, because of the ways that the virus spreads most effectively, singing in groups is one of the most dangerous things we could do. At this time, we simply cannot risk it. Of course, the folks participating in our live-streamed service from their own homes can belt those hymns out as much as they like. : ) Grace will be needed. We will need to remember that a number of our fellow congregants won’t want to, or even shouldn’t, attend in-person gatherings until the rates of Covid infections go down significantly. So we must be absolutely clear that participating in our worship online via live-stream is every bit as valid and meaningful as attending in-person. We can’t have higher or lower “tiers” of worship in our community, and we certainly cannot have “second-class citizens” in our parish. You will need to dress for the weather. For purposes of maintaining as much non-re-circulated airflow as possible, we will need to open some of our windows and exterior doors. Using recycled air in enclosed spaces pretty much destroys any advantage we gain through social distancing, because it mixes everybody’s air all together and blows it all over everyone in the group. Depending upon the weather on any given day, you’ll want to keep your heavy coats with you in the pew. None of this process will be easy, at first. It’s going to be awkward and strange and likely rather frustrating to be back in church, but in such restricted and unfamiliar ways. But I have great faith in the faith and the grace that, in my experience, define this parish family. With a bit of patience, continued devotion, grace from above, and a healthy sense of humor (or at least irony), I believe we will continue to be a blessed people of God together during this new phase of our shared life, just as we have during the long separation and isolation of Coronatide. You all continue to inspire me, and you remain in my daily prayers. Please call or email if you have any questions, and God bless you all! |