 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! Rearranging Some Spaces As many of you already know, we are gearing up for a return to in-person worship, albeit in a limited capacity and with a number of safety restrictions in place. And it is so very tempting, in our excited anticipation, to allow ourselves to think of this new phase we’ll be entering into as if we’ll be “finally getting back to normal.” That, unfortunately, will still not be the case for some time. Covid is yet with us, and while more and more people are getting vaccinated against the virus every day, the risks are still far too great for us to jump back into life as it was prior to March of last year. Even so, grace—and good news—abounds! If we continue to mask, to observe social distancing, to get vaccinated as soon as we are able, and to follow established safety procedures, there is every reason to believe that we will continue to see improvements in the numbers. And one day, we will reach a point at which we can finally come back together in our beautiful church to pray and to worship without restriction. It will happen. But there is even more good news than that. Namely, that we now have before us an incredible opportunity. We have the opportunity at this time to do more than merely try to “get back to normal”; we have the opportunity to determine with faithful intention exactly what we want our “new normal” to be. As we finally begin to move through and beyond this time of pandemic, we can explore, imagine, brainstorm, and otherwise faithfully discern what we’d like to get back to … and perhaps also what we’d like to do differently. We have an incredible chance, now, to lay the foundations for an exciting new chapter of vitality and growth in the life of All Saints Episcopal Church. Now, that might sound like a tall order, but I’ll tell you truthfully that I’ve seen this parish accomplish amazing things over the past twelve months, and I’ve seen y’all do that under the worst conditions of this pandemic. Grace does indeed abound in this place! So on the teeniest, tiniest scale, I have begun my own little experiment in exploring how things might be different as we come back into our church building. In preparing to resume in-person worship, I’ve transitioned from working completely from home, as I have for most of Coronatide, to working two days a week (Tuesdays and Wednesdays) from the church. And when I started coming back into the office on a regular basis a few weeks ago, I suddenly had an idea about rearranging the space in which I was working. Basically, I decided to try switching out the “office” and the “library/conference room.” At the moment, then, my office is now in the room that used to be the library/conference room. It’s my intention to try out using the old office space as a library/conference room/project room. The transition isn’t complete; there’s more arranging to be done to make it all work. But thus far, I think it’s going to be a good change. The new setup already seems to me to be much more conducive to pastoral care and counseling, for one thing, and with doors that open directly into the hallways, I believe it will also be more inviting to anyone who stops by and wants to talk to the priest. Take a look and see what you think. Now is a fantastic time for reimagining, for re-envisioning, how we see the treasures and assets that have been entrusted to us, for considering exciting new ways to appreciate and utilize the resources that we have, as well as for remembering and preserving everything we love and cherish about our parish. I invite you all to enter into this period of discernment with faith, joy, and eagerness. God is here, in the midst of our parish; who knows what the Holy Spirit is already working to stir up in us as we come back together and rekindle our shared faith in our shared space?     An Invitation to the Observance of a Holy Lent
My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, The Lenten season is upon us! As of Ash Wednesday, we bade adieu, for a while, to the green of ordinary time which we’ve enjoyed in the season after the Epiphany, and we have now embraced the purple that ever reminds us of the inner reflection and penitence that are the hallmarks of the journey to Easter. As you may know, the observation of Lent as a liturgical season has its origins in the disciplines and practices of the early Church. Easter, the great feast celebrating the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus, was understood from the earliest days of the Christian era to be a proper and fitting time for new converts to the faith to be baptized. Preparation to receive the sacrament of baptism involved a great deal of prayer, instruction, study, prayer, contemplation, penitence, and prayer, in a process that took up to two full years. And the final forty days leading up to the converts’ baptism at Easter marked a period of particularly intensive prayer, fasting, prayer, devotion, prayer, penitence, and prayer (notice a theme developing here?). As Christianity became culturally dominant, eventually more people became Christian by being born into families that were already Christian than by converting as adults. With that shift, the forty days leading up to Easter became a time of fasting, penitence, and (you guessed it) prayer for all Christians in preparation for the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord. In the modern age in the West, we begin our observance of Lent with the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, which allows for a period of forty days—not counting Sundays—leading up to the Great Vigil of Easter. (Sundays are not considered part of Lent because every Sunday is a feast day of Jesus Christ and celebrates His resurrection; that’s why we describe each of them as, for example, the “third Sunday in Lent,” rather than the “third Sunday of Lent.”) In preparing our hearts, our minds, and our souls, as well as our congregation and our community, for the highest of high holy days, the single most important feast in the entire Christian religion, we intentionally observe these forty days as a time for introspection, reflection, discipline (a time for us to be “disciple’d”), self-control, self-denial, and intensive prayer. In particular, we deliberately focus our attention upon our own mortality (right from the beginning with Ash Wednesday), our own heavy burden of sins (our specific individual sins and the collective stain of sin upon our communities, the burden of which we share simply because we are part of those communities), our need for Jesus as savior, and the importance of discipline as we seek be become ever more deeply conformed to Christ in our own lives. This particular year, however, as many of my friends and colleagues have observed, it hardly feels like Lent is the start of a “new” season; emotionally (and even spiritually) for many of us, it feels as if Lent, 2020, never actually ended, and that this year we are simply moving into some sort of Lent ~ Phase II. That feeling, I think, is quite understandable. The pandemic that has isolated us physically from each other and cut us off from worshipping in community together has imposed upon us an array of sacrifices and disciplines that have significantly changed the way we live our daily lives. How, then, do we even consider moving into a meaningful observance of a holy Lent this year? What more can God ask of us? … we might cry to the heavens. We might just as well turn that question around, though: What more can we offer God? Is there anything that we could do that would ever be enough? Coming at the question from that angle might change our calculus somewhat, yes? And we must remember, moreover, that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ Jesus ~ there is nothing we need to (for there is nothing we can do) on our own to achieve or earn our salvation. It is a free gift from God. Discipleship, however, is another matter entirely. That is work, and it is work that is never finished, not in this earthly life. Even something as seemingly simple as prayer is often hard work. One of my favorite stories from the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the Fourth Century puts it like this: The brethren also asked Abba Agathon, “Amongst all good works, which is the virtue which requires the greatest effort?” He answered, “Forgive me, but I think there is no labor greater than that of prayer to God. For every time a man wants to pray, his enemies, the demons, want to prevent him, for they know that it is only by turning him from prayer that they can hinder his journey. Whatever good work a man undertakes, if he perseveres in it, he will attain rest. But prayer is struggle to the last breath.” To what works, what struggles, are we called this Lent, coming as it does on the heels of such hardships already? My friends, as we begin our Lenten journey together, as we make our way this year to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, I invite you prayerfully to consider that our work for this year’s Lent may be a true repentance, a true turning. This Lent, let us begin by transforming our hearts and our minds to see the hardships imposed upon us by Covid-19 not as unjust impositions and unfair burdens that we are forced to bear because we’re scared of getting sick, but rather as sacrifices we make and disciplines we willingly take on because we love each other and all of our fellow human beings, we respect the dignity of each and every human being, and we truly desire to serve God by safeguarding the people around us. In other words, I’m not asking you to take on any additional burdens, to make any additional sacrifices. I’m asking us all to “turn around” how we see all of the hardships we’re currently enduring, to make them into the disciplines and sacrifices of a holy Lent, offered up in devotion and service to the One who sacrificed everything of himself for us on the cross of crucifixion. Let that be the Way for us who would follow Jesus through Lent to the glory of Easter. Peace and blessings to you all, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
If you have not yet heard, I’m sure you soon will (especially if you’re reading this message!) ~ Bishop Matt will be granting parishes in the diocese the option of resuming limited & restricted in-person worship services, as early as the first Sunday in Lent. Essentially, the diocesan guidelines will be what they were back over the summer, before the Covid numbers and hospital overcrowding spiked drastically in the fall, prompting the diocese-wide suspension of in-person worship which has remained in effect till now. Even though the overall statistics have not yet come back down to the levels we saw back over the summer, the more severe hospital overcrowding has, and the bishop and the Covid Task Force have come to the conclusion that limited in-person worship can resume with fairly low levels of risk, as long as all the safety procedures are strictly followed. As I’m sure you recall, even when the diocese gave us permission to gather last summer, I nevertheless required All Saints to remain closed and our worship to remain virtual. Given the demographics of our particular parish, I felt the risks to our congregation were too high to do otherwise. Now, however, while it is true that the Covid rates in our area are still higher than they were over the summer, even so, I believe that we are in a much better position to begin resuming some forms of in-person worship here at All Saints. We do not yet have a specific date for our first Sunday on in-person worship. I will be working very closely with the Executive Committee of our Vestry, as well as with our Online Ministry Team, to make sure that when we bring people back into our worship space, we will do so as safely as possible, and as reverently as possible, whilst still providing online access to our worship services for everyone who cannot attend in person and/or who are not comfortable attending in person as long as the pandemic rages on. So stay tuned! Much more information will be forthcoming shortly as we work out the logistics of this momentous change. It has been nearly a year since we were able to worship together in person last. That’s a long time … and, as Indiana Jones famously observed, “It’s not [just] the years … it’s the mileage” that makes a big difference, too. We’ve been through a lot of miles since last March. It’s time to come back together ~ even if we can only do so in very limited ways, and even if the experience will not yet be what it once was. Please pray for us as we work out the details to make this happen, and let’s all continue to pray for this incredible faith community that we share. Yours in Christ, CW+  CHRISTMAS EVE, CHRISTMAS DAY, & THE 1ST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
My dear friends in Christ, We will have two online services on Christmas Eve: one at 4 p.m. and the other at 7:30 p.m. The earlier service will be a celebration of Spiritual Communion with special hymns by and a special message for the younger members of our parish, but of course everyone is both invited and encouraged to tune in and take part. The evening service will be a traditional service of Holy Eucharist offered on behalf of our parish, our nation, and our world, in celebration of the coming into the world of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Ordinarily (and by “ordinarily” I mean “in a year not shaped by the worst pandemic in global living memory”), we would have a third service, as well, on Christmas morning. This year’s being what it is, however, and given the fact that we still cannot gather together in person to worship, we will not be streaming an additional service on the 25th itself. Our bishop, +Matt Gunter, has very graciously but very firmly encouraged the clergy of the diocese to take a bit of unscheduled time off during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I extend that very same invitation to all of you: if you can, take this opportunity to rest and recharge immediately after Christmas. The All Saints virtual-office will therefore be closed during that week. We’ll take a break from regularly scheduled Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline, as well as from our regular Monday and Thursday Bible study and Faith Talk, respectively, in order to have a bit of a Sabbath before we carry on into the new year together. Now, I won’t be on vacation. I’m not going anywhere (and wouldn’t, anyway, until we’re all nice and vaccinated!); I’ll still be reachable by phone (920.266.9262) and by email (fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com) ~ especially in the case of pastoral emergency. But I think the bishop’s notion that we ought to lay low and breathe easy for just a bit after Christmas is a good notion, and I think most of us could use the break. Please use the links below to access worship services from Christmas Day through New Year’s Day: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day diocesan services may be found here, starting December 24th at 5 p.m.: https://www.diofdl.org/events/christmas-eve-christmas-day-at-the-cathedral For the First Sunday after Christmas (December 27th), please tune in to the livestream service from St. Thomas in Menasha here: https://www.stthomaswi.com/livestream/ Pandemics and shut-downs and virtual reality have made for an … interesting … first year among you as your priest and with you as a new member of All Saints parish. Despite the unprecedented challenges we’ve weathered since last Advent, I want all of you to know that my family and I are still absolutely delighted to have been called here to serve God amongst you in this congregation and with you out in this community. This church has been a tremendous blessing to me and mine. I hope that it will continue to be so for you and yours as we move into the coming year. God bless you all! Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
I know that we are still very much in the process of getting to know each other ~ this pandemic has unfortunately slowed that process down to a fraction of what I believe would have been the case had 2020 been a normal year. And that makes it difficult for me to come to you and say, “trust me” … but that’s what I’m about to do. I’m going to ask you to trust me, because I’m about to take a bit of a risk. Last week, I received an anonymous note, typed in a plain font and without date, signature, or any other identifying mark, from someone who is apparently very dissatisfied … no, more than that ~ quite upset, actually … at All Saints and (though the note doesn’t mention me by name) at me, personally. I know nothing about the author; I don’t even know for sure that he or she is a member of the parish. All I can say for sure is that it’s someone on our mailing list. Now, conventional church wisdom, as well as all my seminary training and the advice of many priests who have served for far longer than I, says “ignore it.” And under normal circumstances, I admit I would probably do just that. But that’s just it: 2020 is hardly a “normal” year by any metric, and maybe the fact that this year has been so full of crises … is the best reason not to treat this note like I might in any other year. I believe that whoever wrote this letter is hurting and maybe afraid. I believe the author feels abandoned, if not outright betrayed, by his or her church. Y’all, it breaks my heart to know that anyone who’s been connected with our All Saints family is feeling that way. And to be prevented from reaching out to this person (because I not only have no idea who wrote the note, but I have no way to find out, either!) breaks my heart a second time. So … I’m taking a risk. I’m not ignoring this anonymous note. I’m bringing it to all of you, and I’m inviting us to talk about it. Honestly, I don’t hold out much hope (some hope, but not much) that the mystery author will see this response and be willing to talk with me personally. I suspect that if he or she were interested in any sort of follow-up communication, he or she would have left a phone number, or an email address, or at least a name … But it seems likely to me that if one person on our mailing list is having such thoughts & feelings, then someone else out there is probably having similar thoughts and feelings, too, and I do hold out a real hope that it’s not too late for us to connect, or at least converse, and see what kind of relationship we can build. So, here’s the thing: you all need to know that each and every one of y’all can talk to me about anything. If you’re worried about something, tell me about it. If you’re concerned about something, tell me about it. If something in the world has got you scared, talk to me ~ don’t try to carry that burden all alone! And for God’s sake, if you’re angry, even if you’re furious, holler at me! Especially if what you’re furious about is something that I, as your priest, am doing. Or not doing. You’re not going to hurt my feelings (and even if you were, that’s no excuse for me not to listen to you!), and if you don’t talk to me about it, it’s almost guaranteed to get worse, whatever it is. So that’s the general message ~ talk to me! That’s it. Just know that you can talk to me, and that I will listen. Of course, I cannot guarantee that I won’t talk back. I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also with a hint of seriousness, as well. Let me explain… My vocation ~ my job and my calling ~ here with you is defined by my ordination vows. As the bishop says in the ordination liturgy, I am “called to work as a pastor, priest, and teacher” (BCP 531), and I take those roles very, very seriously. So you might say that fully one third of my job here at All Saints is to teach. Now, pastoring and teaching are two different things, but my job and calling include both. Part of my vocation (as pastor) is to provide comfort, support, encouragement, counsel, and healing; and part of my vocation (as teacher) is to provide information, inspiration, challenge, and even gentle correction. Sometimes, I have to be pastor and teacher at the same time. That should tell you two things about me: First, if you’re concerned, or hurting, or afraid, or angry, about anything, you can come to me and unload everything you’re feeling. When you’re talking to me, you are safe! So get it all out, and say what you need to say. Second, I will always speak truth with you. The Church is God’s house, and our God is the God of truth ~ our God is Truth. So as Christians, we have to seek the truth, always. So if you come to me and you’re upset about something that isn’t true, I will hear you and listen to you and comfort you … but I will also, always, be truthful with you. I have to. Anything less would be a disservice to you. I mention the importance of truth because, of the four sentences in the anonymous note I received, all four contained statements or assertions that are factually untrue. Two of them expressed virulent ~ and easily debunked ~ conspiracy theories based upon Q-Anon propaganda. Folks, that won’t do. Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.” As his followers, we must constantly guard against letting ourselves be taken in by falsehoods, deceptions, lies, or any kind of distortion of truth. But here’s the thing: even though the author of this anonymous note got his or her facts completely wrong, nevertheless, the underlying pain, fear, and anger are very real, and they cry out for help, for ministering, for pastoral care ~ they cry out just to be heard. And that is what I am here for. Literally, it’s my job. Beyond that, it’s my calling. It’s why God formed me to be who I am, and it’s why God brought me here to this place. So if you’re upset, bring it to me, and let’s at the very least share that burden together. Or if you’re upset at me, then pick up the phone, shoot me an email, or ask for a Zoom meeting so you can be upset at me, to my face. Again, when you’re with me, you are safe. So bring me whatever you’ve got, and let’s work through it together. I love you. I am blessed to have the opportunity to minister among you and to share with you in the work that God has given us to do. And I so look forward to walking with you in faith towards wherever God is leading us next. Yours always in Christ, Christopher+ My dear All Saints family,
Grace to you, and peace, in God the Father and our Lord, Jesus Christ! We are rapidly approaching the start of a new year together. The last Sunday of November will be the first Sunday of Advent, which this year not only marks the beginning of the Church year, but also the 1-year anniversary of my arrival in Appleton and my stepping into the role of rector for All Saints Episcopal Church. Safe to say, I suspect, that the nearly twelve months that have passed since December 1, 2019, have not exactly gone the way that many of us would have predicted last winter. Nevertheless, I want you all to know that my family and I remain overwhelmingly grateful to have been welcomed by you into this parish family, and we continue to thank God for calling us to this place, to this ministry, and to this relationship with all of you. We are blessed! All Saints is blessed, as well! Thanks to the grace of God and the faithful efforts and hard work of the Vestry, staff, and lay leadership of this parish, we have weathered the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, managing not only to maintain our worship, fellowship, and formation, but also to expand the scope and range of our ministry in totally new ways. Necessity really is the mother of invention: when the pandemic forced us to shut the physical doors of our building and kept us from gathering in person, we created an online ministry and online worship services, and we did it nearly overnight. It is due to your continued and generous giving throughout this pandemic crisis that All Saints has been able to pay our bills, sustain our payroll, address critical maintenance issues in our building, and at the same time expand our ministries into the online environment. Your ongoing support has meant that All Saints has not had to face a financial crisis on top of the Covid crisis. THANK YOU! It is a sign of your love for this parish and your enduring faith in God that even in a time of global plague you have made your faith community a priority. As one parishioner observed: “Are you pleasantly surprised that our connection to one another has endured, even though we haven’t seen each other in months? Are you pleasantly surprised that our connection to All Saints Church, our spiritual home, has endured, despite our not having entered her doors in eight months? Apparently, the mystical body of Christ is stronger than we knew.” I would bet that some of you knew, though. This parish has deep roots in faith. That has been apparent to me since I got here a year ago. We’ve been through a lot together since December of last year. But one thing we haven’t been through together yet is the annual stewardship campaign. I’m told that, normally, the stewardship drive would have already ended by now, with pledges being gathered in by All Saints’ Day. Since almost nothing has been “normal” about 2020, however, perhaps it isn’t too surprising that stewardship is working a little differently this year. So I’m writing to you all today to invite you to join me in a new way of looking at stewardship and, by extension, an exciting vision for the future of All Saints Episcopal Church. Each of us is at this moment dealing to varying degrees with feelings of separation, constraint, uncertainty, and/or fear. What if we, as a parish, were to transform our sense of uncertainty into a spirit of inquiry? As new circumstances compel us to enter a new church relationship for a new decade, we need to consider opportunities for flourishing in new ways. What if, as we look forward to a return to in-person gathering, we also work together to plant the seeds for a post-pandemic All Saints Church that preserves all that we love about our church yet allows us to expand the reach and impact of our church in our lives and in our community? Working with the Vestry and the Finance Ministry Team, and supported by a Stewardship Team called together to help flesh out and implement this vision, here is what I am proposing: Three phases & three stewardship drives—a unified three-year plan THIS YEAR: PLANTING THE SEEDS What we need to do: Sustain the parish. In a year full of crises and unforeseen changes & challenges, we seek only to maintain what we currently have. We need to pay the bills and keep the church functioning, yes. But beyond that, we need to offer our thanks to God and our gratitude to this church for all the blessings we share together. In that way, we will plant the seeds of future growth. At this stage, we are primarily concerned with keeping the seeds of our faith and of our All Saints community alive. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, here is a rough calculation of the daily costs of our three main areas of expense: Ministry staff $391 per day Buildings & grounds $209 per day Current operations $202 per day These figures are based on a very conservative budget proposal that is aimed at simply maintaining our current ministries and levels of expense. We have benefited somewhat from being shut down during the pandemic, since closing the building has meant lower costs in terms of cooling and heating. Eventually, however, we will return to in-person worship, and that will cost us more than our current, online worship does. We need your generous support and your faithful giving that has kept us going during this pandemic to continue. We need you to help keep the seeds of ministry alive until we can emerge from this crisis and begin to grow our future together. NEXT YEAR: TENDING THE GARDEN What we need to do: Move from maintenance toward mission. Building upon the solid foundation we have established, we must seek to discover our identity as a community of believers and followers of Jesus Christ, and also to discern God’s specific call to us to act as Christ’s body in this place. We need to ask challenging questions to push us beyond mere maintenance to get us excited about the future and to prepare us for real growth to come. At this stage, our focus begins to pivot from being primarily internally-focused to becoming more externally-focused as we move beyond securing our own needs and sustaining our own community toward a vision of what we might do for God with the community and stability God has given us. What does that mean? It means prayer and discernment. It means studying the Holy Scriptures. It means discovering and naming the specific gifts and resources that God has entrusted to us—both as individual members of the parish and especially as a community of Jesus-followers. What do we have to offer anybody who is not already a member of our parish? What gives us joy? More importantly, what are the most critical needs of the folks who live just outside our parish doors? To paraphrase Frederick Buechner, the intersection of our deep joy and the world’s deep need is where we discover our vocation. God is calling us to do more than merely continue existing. God has work for us to do. In Year Two, we begin the work of discovering the details of the mission God has in mind for us—the reason God wants us to grow. These will be challenging conversations that invite us to re-vision how we see ourselves as a parish and how we see our purpose as the people of God in Appleton, Wisconsin. How exciting! THE YEAR AFTER: WORKING THE HARVEST What we need to do: Define and enact God’s call to us in concrete actions Having discovered our identity rooted deeply in Jesus Christ, and having listened faithfully to His call to grow His Church (“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” – Matt. 28:19), we begin to harvest the seeds planted and tended in previous years. We need to discern the specific ways in which Jesus is calling us to be His body here in Appleton—the particular people in our area (and beyond) to whom Jesus is sending us as apostles and ministers. At this stage, we look to both present and future with excitement, confidence, and zeal, and we offer up to God a stable, sustainable, highly-functioning community of committed believers ready and eager to do the work that God has given us to do in our community, our city, our region, and beyond. What will that look like? Who can say? But I imagine it looks like a dynamic, engaged parish, full pews on Sundays and Wednesdays (at least), a congregation actively living out our discipleship in many different ways, a presence in the Appleton community that sees us tending the needs of “the least of these” whilst at the same time offering a safe haven and a source of healing and true inspiration for all of God’s children. Does that sound outlandish? Unobtainable? Not to me. I’ve seen hard proof in my first year of what your faith can do. And I have no doubt whatsoever in the absolute power of God to do great things within, through, and by means of All Saints Episcopal Church. But we do not have to figure out how to get there (or how to fund such a vision) all at once! All we have to do is commit to God, and commit to God’s Church. We do not, will not, cannot ask anyone to give beyond your means or to commit to more than you can manage. We simply ask you, please, to continue to support All Saints with your generous giving as you’ve done throughout this year. Help us maintain the great gifts we have in this church, and help us plant the seeds this year that will grow into a beautiful, bountiful harvest in years to come. Thank you, and God bless you all! Christopher+  On Holy Communion
My dear friends in Christ, As you know, we have been working hard behind the scenes to figure out the best way to return to celebrating Holy Eucharist as our principal act of weekly worship. Rapidly changing—and rapidly increasing—Covid numbers in our area and our state have made the task … difficult, at best. As I’ve observed in a number of my previous Newsletter columns lately, it has become apparent that, for various reasons, this virus isn’t going away anytime soon. Because the virus is still with us, and because it is not likely to abate in the foreseeable future, we are left in a tricky spot: we cannot simply “wait it out” before we get back to Communion; we also cannot simply resume gathering together in the church building to celebrate Eucharist, either. What, then, can we do? Well, the best we can do is experiment a bit within the parameters of our current situation. Current diocesan restrictions limit us to having no more than four persons together in the church building for the celebration of Eucharist (including the priest). That doesn’t leave much room for physical participation on the part of the parish. Our current Zoom format actually allows greater interaction and participation in the service than we could have if we just switched over to Communion in the church that’s limited to four people. Given those factors, here is what I’d like to try going forward: let’s do exactly what we’ve been doing for live-streaming, but let’s add actual Communion to the end of the service. In other words, we’ll still use Zoom to connect to social media for live-streaming the service. We’ll still have lectors and intercessors and psalmists join in the service from their homes, thus avoiding having to have groups of people physically gathered in the church space. But instead of concluding the service with Spiritual Communion, we’ll conclude with literal Communion. Here’s the catch, though: in the Anglican tradition, and therefore in The Episcopal Church, priests are not to celebrate “solo” Mass. In other words, in order for me to celebrate the Eucharist, there must be at least one other person present with me to share in the Communion of Jesus. Now, the experts are telling us pretty clearly that the next six to twelve months are going to be with worst since the pandemic first broke upon us early this year. I am extraordinarily hesitant, therefore, to take the chance of putting anyone at risk in this climate. So what I’d like to do, again as an experiment, is to offer this possibility to the church: my wife, Anne, and our children, Emily & Elena, already live together with me in the same space (often on top of each other!) and share the same air. Because of that, if I were simply to bring them to the church building with me on Sunday mornings, we would be able to celebrate the Eucharist because there would be people here to share in the celebration with me. We could then live-stream actual Holy Eucharist for our Sunday worship service. I realize that doing things that way does not offer the larger parish the opportunity to receive Communion, and that’s what we’re sorely missing after all these months. But I’m seeing this proposal as a very temporary “solution” until the Covid numbers allow us to bump up to larger numbers in the church building. If we can get the pandemic numbers down enough, we’ll be able to move to a lesser level of restriction (perhaps 20 people in the building, instead of four). At that point, we would absolutely adapt our practice to make sure as many parishioners as possible could come participate. So. A temporary solution. Not an ideal situation. But it has been weighing more and more heavily on my heart that, during a time of great strife and great plague, we ought to be saying more Masses, not fewer. As a priest, the centerpiece of my vocation is a call to celebrate God’s holy sacraments. And our entire Christian tradition is very clear that the celebration of the Eucharist brings immeasurable benefits not only to those who participate physically, but to all those on whose behalf we offer the sacrifice, and indeed to the whole world, the entirety of God’s creation. So if we can get back to celebrating Eucharist, even in a less-than-ideal way, sooner rather than later, I think it’s worth it. And we would be doing it especially with an eye towards expanding the scope of the service as soon as it’s at all safe to do so. So that’s the plan at the moment, and a bit of the reasoning and thought process behind the current plan. Please let me know what you think, what questions you have, what you’d like to see in the future, etc. – I’d love to hear from you and have the chance to talk about our worship in these trying times in greater depth. Please drop me a line at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com and let’s connect! Yours in Christ, Christopher+  “But when are we going to get back to the way things were?”
My dear friends in Christ, Not quite two weeks ago, I wrote these words to you all: “The truth is that we will never get back to the way things were. We won’t. Because we can’t. Our world is changed, and it cannot be un-changed.” I was talking about the prospect of our resuming some form of in-person worship at All Saints—in particular, of resuming the celebration of Holy Eucharist. As if to drive home the point, as soon as my last message was published announcing that we would be resuming in-person worship in the month of October, the rates of Covid infection in Appleton, in the Fox Cities, in Wisconsin overall, skyrocketed. This latest spike in the numbers, significant by any measure, was the sole subject of the latest meeting of the diocesan Covid-19 Task Force. I’m not sure if the decisions made in that meeting will have been published by the time you’re reading this message, but if not then they very shortly will be. The good news is that the Task Force did not recommend totally suspending all in-person worship until further notice. The not-bad-but-perhaps-not-wonderful news is that the Task Force did recommend, and the bishop has now directed, that in-person worship services be restricted to no more than four people in the building at one time (including priest & servers), masked and spaced at least six feet apart. These stricter regulations are temporary measures, but they will remain in place until further notice from the bishop. What that means for us … is a bit up in the air at the moment. We do not, at present, have the capability to live stream from our worship space a Communion service that involves more than one person. One priest, one lector/intercessor, and one server leaves room for only one participant in a Communion service that’s restricted to four people, total. Given that we cannot at the moment broadcast such a service, I imagine some folks might feel there wouldn’t be much point in even holding that service at all. If so few people could actually participate, and nobody else could see it, what’s the point? On the other hand, it has been weighing heavily on my heart and my soul since the shutdown in March that, for spiritual and theological and pastoral reasons, we should be saying more Masses during a time of great plague, not fewer. That even if nobody’s there to see such Masses, they still ought to be prayed and celebrated on behalf of—and for the spiritual benefit of—the whole parish, our whole community, our state, our nation, and our world. After all, if we really believe what we claim to believe, theologically, about what happens in the Eucharist, then isn’t it our bounden duty as faithful followers and disciples of Jesus Christ to celebrate and enact his life, death, and resurrection, until his coming again? All of which is to say, the announcement I made in the last newsletter must now be modified somewhat in light of the recent surge in Covid cases—and we know from watching this same thing happen in other states that a surge in Covid deaths will inevitably follow—and that our exact plans for how we will move forward with in-person worship are today a bit more up-in-the-air than they were two weeks ago. I will continue to be conversing with our wardens and vestry, and together we will shape our plans both to conform to diocesan policy and to meet the needs of this parish. In the meantime, I really would love to hear directly from you all. Let me know your thoughts, hopes, fears, and concerns regarding worshipping together in-person and about celebrating Communion whilst managing the very present risks of Covid-19. Drop me a line at fatherchristopherallsaints@gmail.com. And thank you all for your continued grace, devotion, faithfulness, and commitment to this blessed parish of All Saints. Even in the midst of crisis, it is an absolute blessing to get to be part of your church and share this journey (however difficult this present stretch of road may be) with you all. Blessings, Christopher+  My dear friends in Christ,
There is an old joke about a supposedly ancient curse, which says, “May you live in interesting times.” The joke is that it doesn’t really sound all that bad, the prospect of living in interesting times. It sounds, in fact, rather interesting. At least, until one remembers that the most interesting, the most gripping, the most riveting times to read about in history books are times that were full of great strife, upheaval, chaos, conflict, even violence—all the things that also make for interesting and exciting movies and television shows. That’s just it, though. The exciting events and situations that make all those stories from history or Hollywood really interesting … those are generally not the sorts of experiences that any sane person would ever want actually to live through in real life. My friends, it would appear that we are, right now, living in interesting times. I won’t rehearse and rehash the details of the violence and chaos that has been recently and still is being experienced by our neighbors in Kenosha. By now, I’m sure we’ve all seen too many details, too many times. Our own Bishop Matt last Friday issued a powerful and uplifting pastoral letter to the diocese. I commend it to your reading and consideration. I cannot improve upon any of the things that +Matt has said so eloquently, speaking into this deeply troubling moment in our lives together. I can say, though, with some confidence that the shock and horror of these particular incidents on our doorstep will begin to fade, sooner or later. The 24-hour news cycle will rush to latch onto the next shocking and horrifying headline, in the next town or city, and those of us who have the privilege of being able to do so will start to return to life as normal (“normal” itself, these days, being something of a different concept than it used to be). But issues of race and racism, of police and policing, of deep, seemingly intractable divisions in our society—divisions that often render us incapable of agreeing upon even a shared set of facts, much less what to do about them—are not going to go away any time soon. So what do we do? How do we find God in this? How do we find each other? How do we do any of that when we’ve been physically separated from each other, from our church building, from the worship that comforts and sustains us in deeply familiar ways, for half a year? There are, of course, no simple or easy answers to any of those questions. I do invite us all, however, to borrow an idea from our Pentecostal cousins in the Christian faith: the idea of holy chaos. Now, that’s a term that takes some unpacking. Let me begin by clarifying what I don’t mean by it. I don’t mean that the shooting of Jacob Blake was in any way, shape, or form a “holy” thing. I do not mean that a teenager’s choice to carry a rifle across state lines and to murder two protestors and wound a third was in any way, shape, or form “holy.” When I call chaos “holy,” I do not intend to imply that God wills the chaos or inflicts it upon us. As the saying goes, God is good—all the time! No, what I mean by “holy chaos” is that God finds ways to sanctify even the darkest, most evil events and acts and circumstances, turning them always to the greatest possible good and the highest possible purpose in the unfolding of God’s will in God’s creation. This holy work that God constantly does throughout creation is most perfectly demonstrated and exemplified in the broken body of Jesus Christ on the cross, and by the empty tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. It was not God’s desire that Jesus suffer and die, but suffer and die for us Jesus did, and through his suffering and sacrifice God worked the miracle and the mystery of Salvation. We should note that it took centuries for Christians to work out the meaning of everything that happened on that cross. That is not to say we should expect it to take centuries to find God in the midst of our present chaos. The earliest Christians recognized God’s presence in their midst, even in their experiences of persecution, violence, and death. What I’m saying, rather, is that we must be gentle with ourselves, and we must accept whatever grace we can offer each other, as we all struggle to make sense out of this moment in our shared history and to discern God’s will for us in the midst of chaos. For grace abounds, and it will continue to abound. God is yet with us. That is the promise God made to us in Jesus Christ—that he will be with us, even to the end of the age. The age is not yet ended, though some days it may appear that we are at the end of all things. Let us lean on each other, carry each other, lift each other up. For whatever divisions may stand between us, we are united by something greater. We are all bound together by God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. Let us remember that, always, and be faithful to God and to each other. Amen. Christopher+
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