Rector s Address to the Annual Meeting Sunday, January 19, 2014 It is my pleasure to address you today at this my fourteenth annual parish meeting. 2013 was a pretty good year, though it was not without its challenges. As usual the challenges we face often contain opportunities. I would like to do my annual feeble attempt to thank everyone who has done so much to make the ministry of Christ Church successful in 2013. I say feeble attempt because it is impossible to name everyone who has done things to move our ministry along. First I d like to thank my wife Sian for putting up with me. I d like to thank the members of the vestry and all the chairs of commissions. I d like to thank our staff, most of whom are here, but there is one person that most of you don t get to see very often. Our secretary Ruth Feltner is the voice that you hear when you call during office hours. She is the one who sends many emails and other correspondences. However, not being a member of Christ Church, we don t see her on Sundays. You may have had the experience of walking into the parish office during the week and seeing her smiling face. When you told her your name, she likely recognized it, but not your face. Ruth does a great job. I depend on her greatly. She and all the staff are vital parts of what makes the church work. In the past I have also singled out elves, people who do so much that is unseen. Many of you remember Vicki Duperock. She was one of our elves. Many of you remember Chuck Cooprider. He was also an elf around here. Now I would like to point out, and thank, Roy Smith. Since his retirement from the University of Mary Washington, Roy has been spending every waking moment here at the church. Well, maybe it just seems like that. He does pickups and deliveries for the Thrift Shop. He is a shopper for the Food Pantry, picking up and delivering food from the Fredericksburg Area Food Bank. He does all kinds of work in the pantry: organizing, moving things around, storing and packing food.
And he is here every time we open the doors to distribute food. Roy has been on the finance commission for more years than he cares to remember. He has been the budget guru for the parish. He has been the treasurer for the Christ Church 20/20 capital campaign since its beginning. He recently became treasurer of the Outreach commission as well. Roy took the lead last year in remodeling our web page. I m sure there is stuff I m forgetting to mention, but you get the point. Roy is an elf at Christ Church. Thanks, Roy for all you do. There are two other people I want to mention. First, I want to mention Jenny LeBlanc. Jenny has been serving as our Family Ministry Coordinator, a position created and funded by the Christ Church 20/20 campaign for three years now. Due to financial realities and our best discernment of how to structure her position, we have had to cut her to part-time this year, and redefine her job as Director of Christian Education. We are not changing her email address. It will still be FMC@ChristChurchSpotsy.com, but she is no longer an FMC. We took a bit of a gamble when we created the FMC position. I m not willing to say that the gamble did not have its pay off, but as I said financial realities were the greatest concern. Jenny, it has been a pleasure working with you as our FMC, and I look forward to continuing to work with you as DCE. Thank you for your fine work The last person I d like to mention is the last person I expected to be mentioning, mainly because until July I didn t know she existed. We had a visitor at worship on a Sunday. I noticed that she was clearly an Episcopalian. She knew her way around the prayer book, in fact, didn t need the prayer book for the whole service. I figured she was just someone who had moved to the area and was looking for an Episcopal Church to attend. Well, she had just moved here from New York state, and she was looking for an Episcopal Church to attend, but what I didn t know until some weeks later was that she was a deacon in the Episcopal Church. The Rev. Margaret
Haight, was deacon at St. Luke s in Cambridge, NY, and working for the National Park Service at the Saratoga Springs Battlefield when she was transferred to run the book store at the visitor center at the Fredericksburg Battlefield. We are delighted to welcome her to Christ Church, and express our gratitude for her ministry here with us. Welcome Margaret. Now, looking ahead to 2014 and beyond. Our financial situation has been made clear by Ray in his remarks. He has also spoken about how we might work to make things better. Christ Church has been shrinking in recent years. That has been the trend for all churches, all denominations. One can always point out notable exceptions. There are individual churches that are growing, but as a whole church membership and attendance is shrinking. What we are dealing with is more than just our own problems. Our society is changing. The Church just doesn t play the major role that it once did in people s lives. When confronted with this fact, we often pose the question like Ray mentioned, some version of, How do we get more people to come to our church? The old model of church is a group of people, members, who participate and contribute money to make the ministry of the church work. That is still how we operate. But that is the model that is becoming increasingly untenable. It s not time to give up on it entirely, but it is time to be thinking about the future. I propose a two part response. It is not a first do step one, then do step two proposal. My two parts need to be done simultaneously. The two parts are: 1) Invite, and 2) Innovate. The first part, Invite, is an answer to the question as it is usually asked, How do we grow? It turns out that the only reliable way to grow a church is for its members to invite people to come to church with them. That is the only way that the church has ever grown. There is no magic program, or perfect staff person or priest. There is no awesome advertising campaign, or cool tee shirt design that will attract people. We need to be doing all we can to
offer good programs, to have good staff, and all that, but none of these things will be the one thing that does it. The temptation is to point to a church that is, or seems to be, growing and say that we need to be more like them, in whatever way that might make sense. Well, point to a church that is growing, and I guarantee you that that church s members are inviting people to church on a regular basis. Inviting is not something historically that Episcopalians have done with ease. So, I intend to do some more talking about how we can go about doing that, and how we can confront our fears and our discomfort related to becoming an inviting church. The Church, and the Kingdom of God, has always been a person-to-person phenomenon from its beginning. So let s commit together to be a church that invites. The second part, Innovate, I believe we are already doing, but we need to do more. Ray talked about the Thrift Shop s success and how it can be a model for the future for us. In the old model, the church s members are the only source of income and of human power to do ministry. In the future, we can build on the success of the Thrift Shop which created an income stream that funds ministry, and is a part of our organization where people who are not members can volunteer, people who may not be interested at all in being a member of our church, people who may never show up for worship on a Sunday morning. And these people are helping us to accomplish our mission. They are part of our little community. So, if the Thrift Shop can do that, what else can we do that will increase our visibility in the community, and our involvement with it? What other creative endeavors can we get involved with that invite people to buy into our vision and support our ministry? Are there other businesses that the church can run that provide needed goods or services, are consistent with our mission, and amount to being ministries themselves bringing people together, building
community, and meeting needs? We are not the only little parish that is struggling with these issues. Lots of folks are trying to figure out how to be the Church in the 21 st century. I don t have the answers, but I have some ideas. I don t think we will find one thing that will solve all of our challenges, but building on our successes is a good start. I don t believe it is time to abandon the old model of being the church altogether, but I am ready to consider some pretty radical ideas. One thing will not change this century: the Mission of the Church. We are still called to proclaim the Good News, and to help reconcile the world to God through our Lord, Jesus Christ. We may need to radically rethink how we are structured and funded, and even what it means to be a member of our church, but the message of love and hope that we bear remains the same, and the Kingdom of God will continue to be built one person at a time, one person at a time.