As you know, our bishop is on sabbatical, and so I’m writing today – the end of Christmastide and the eve of Epiphany – to give us some thoughts to ponder as we continue in this new secular year, and in our new Christian year as well.
I recently came across a modern tradition that had sprung up sometime in the 1980s of churches handing out, on the Sunday closest to the Epiphany, cut-out paper stars with words on them. Each person would get a word assigned at random to contemplate and pray about throughout the year, things like “hope,” “faith,” “patience,” “courage.” Sometimes it would seem like the word fit, and sometimes it would seem like the word didn’t fit. However, many people across the country and around the world have found this to be a potent prayer experience and practice each year.
As I thought about this, it occurred to me that we’ve been doing something kind of similar collectively in our diocese. There are words and concepts that, because of our strategic vision, process and plan, and because of what we’ve been talking about in all kinds of groups and with our bishop, we really have been focusing on prayerfully, and I thought it might be helpful to remind us of a few of those as this New Year continues.
One is “communication.” This was clearly one of the points of emphasis for our strategic vision, and I know our Director of Communications, working with lay people and professionals throughout the diocese, has done a great deal to advance that part of our strategic plan. It’s also something that it’s worthwhile for all of us to think about all the time. Not only, how are things being communicated? Are they being communicated? But other dimensions of communication, such as: Are the people who need this communication likely to receive it? Is it being expressed in a way that will be clear to people? Is it offered in various forms and in various languages? It can also be how we refer to things, whether we are careful in the language that we use, because it matters and it conveys things about what is important to us. This is something that we can all be a part of.
Another word that we’ve been focusing on through our strategic vision, very dear to my heart, is “collaboration,” particularly congregational collaboration. We have defined this as being when two or more people or groups are working together towards some kind of common goal or mission. It’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. It’s not something that’s about merging congregations automatically or sharing clergy as the only way of doing it. It is as broad and deep a category as people can imagine and pray about. And it’s essential to the messages of Christmas and Epiphany and to how we need to be the church always and in the time that we’re living in, to think about collaboration. We do not do this work alone. We are Christians in community, and we carry out ministry in community, and ministry is something that we all are called to by our baptisms. As we heard in the readings this Sunday where God has claimed us as God’s own, through baptism, we are made God’s children and therefore are called to ministry. So, I invite us all to continue to focus on the idea of collaboration, which grows out of relationship and mutual trust, mutual ministry between vestry and clergy and the rest of the congregation, trust and relationship between congregations in Regional Ministry Networks, and in all sorts of ways. One of the things that we’re working on is having a group of coaches who are trained, many of whom are already very experienced professionals, who are going to be available to work with congregations and be alongside them in this kind of conversation, relationship building and discernment. If you would like to be a part of that, please let me know as soon as possible, as spaces are limited for this year.
The last word I want to talk about is “storytelling” – the importance of being able to talk about and share our faith, and the importance of knowing our own stories and the stories of the communities in which we live and serve. If you think about it, the whole Christian life is defined by story: the story we find in scripture of God and God’s people, of Christ coming into the world, his birth, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension. It is the story of our salvation, as we sometimes say, and it is so important to be able to talk about and to think and pray about how we fit into that story and how we tell it. So, an exciting way that we’re going to be doing that is through the Bishop’s Study Group beginning this month. There are still some spaces available, and you can find the registration online, on the diocesan website. We are going to continue to look deeply at telling and understanding our own stories and understanding the stories of others, and I invite you to consider taking that class and that journey with us. It will be two sessions on Zoom and two sessions on site at the new Diocesan Center in Livingston.
God bless you as this new year begins and you ponder, for yourself and for your parish, what it means to think about communication, collaboration, and story.
