From the Rector

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

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