Vesry Retreat

The Place
On Saturday the vestry gathered at a new retreat center, Tabor Cottage in Butler. For several decades the Community of Transfiguration has used this space to do summer camp with groups of inner-city children. A few months ago Sister Nadine and Sister Rachel moved in to begin to create a year-round space. We were their first official group and they did a good job making us feel welcome and cared for.
Both sisters are potters. Here is the Eucharistic set sister Nadine made for their chapel. We were given the honor of blessing these vessels before being used for communion.

The Task
Most of the work we did at this retreat came from the book Values-Driven Leadership by Aubrey Malphurs. In the morning we completed and discussed a "readiness for change" survey and decided our parish was able and ready to deal with the change of no longer having a full-time chaplain.

In the afternoon we began trying to discern our parish's core values: those things which are unchanging, make the church the church, and we would continue to hold even if holding them became a disadvantage. We began with another survey, and from this survey we agreed on a group of words that contain some of the core values of Harcourt Parish.

Survey Results
Community
Worship
Relationships
Encouragement
Cooperation
Team Ministry
Prayer
Fairness/openness
Mobilized Laity.

Those of you who know Harcourt Parish, does that sound accurate?

I could agree with those things, but they still didn't hit on the essence of our parish. So we continued to work and struggle and began with these:

Possible Harcourt Parish Core Values

Empowering Outreach
-we are a caring community that strives to improve the quality of life around us
-we are blessed to be a blessing
-we mentor and encourage newcomers and students in outreach
-"I am the Episcopal Church at work"
-virtually everyone in the pews is involved in some outreach work
-we are very involved locally while not ignoring international concerns

Thought-Full
-we're a congregation of people who like to think
-it's OK to have questions and to ask difficult questions here
-we don't all think the same

Honest Worship
-we are a church because we worship together
-we are linked to other churches because we all use the Book of Common Prayer
-we worship whole-heartedly, sometimes imperfectly, and faithfully

Does that describe us? What is still missing? Any suggestions?

Another Possibility
Near the end of our time together we prayed the Litany of Thanksgiving on page 837 of the prayerbook. This line stood out as a possible mission statement:

Minds to think, hearts to love, and hands to serve.

As the vestry continues to ponder these things, we seek your input. Comment here, catch one of us at coffee hour, or send us an e-mail. Thanks.

DMin Reading

I will be starting a Doctorate of Ministry program from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in January. Like many DMin programs, I will continue working full time while I take classes. Our cohort will spend 2 weeks in January and 2 weeks in June on campus for 3 1/2 years, and the rest of our work will be done while in our congregations.

I knew we had a reading assignment for our first class, but it was much more than I was expecting. Before class we are to read five books: Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice, Studying Congregations, Narrative Research in Ministry, How Your Church Family Works, and The Hidden Lives of Congregations. After reading these five books, each of us will write five 2-page papers examining our own congregations through different lenses. In January, we will share all these papers with one another as we get to know each other and our ministry contexts.

I spent several years researching different Doctorate of Ministry programs, and this program made a point of how academically rigorous they are. I think I'm beginning to understand what they meant. It's also one of the least expensive programs and it's in beautiful Austin, TX. I'm looking forward to January!

Clergy Days: Denominational Health Plan

Being in a parish near the edge of the diocese, I often drive a long way to meetings. Yesterday I spent five hours in the car traveling to and from our annual fall Clergy Day in Elyria. On days like this, I'm so thankful for my iPhone. Watching the sunrise, I listened to a variety of music including the fun-AND-theologically-profound Why Not Sea Monsters?, Love and Anger from the Iona Community, and some Taize chant. I also had plenty of time to listen to podcasts including Science Friday, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, A Way With Words, and my current favorite, Pop Culture Happy Hour.

The topic of this fall's Clergy Day was information about the Denominational Health Plan which, as of 2013, will require mandatory participation for both clergy and lay employees (working 30+ hours per week). It's a smart move overall because the current pool of people in the Episcopal health plan are older and not-all-that healthy (which makes premiums quite high). Healthy, younger folks like me have gone elsewhere for better rates.
Harcourt Parish halved the cost of my healthcare when we moved from a traditional plan to a High Deductible plan with a Health Savings Account. I was happy to hear that the Denominational Health Plan will be offering a High Deductible/HSA option. It's been great for us. It's important to include funding the HSA into your calculations, but even by fully funding the HSA, you can still save money over a traditional plan and get great health care for little or no money out of pocket.

It's always nice to have a chance to reconnect with clergy colleagues. I made a special point to say hello and "keep up the good work" to the clergy parents-of-babies who were there. In fact, after the meeting I had a cup of hot tea on a front porch swing with a clergy momma and her charming babe in arms. We both would like to have clergy family gatherings where our children can get to know one another and share experiences of life as PKs (preachers' kids). It would be a benefit to our families and to the diocese if we had a good clergy families group.

I got home after dark but in time to have a late family dinner (crock pot stew), help with homework and corralling the kids to bed. Good night hugs are long and often the best part of my day. They're a great time of true prayer, too.

Technology Tuesday

Yesterday was one of those days that didn't exist for clergy 20 years ago--or even 10 years ago. I spent my day on the computer. Here are a few things I did:

E-newsletter and Survey Work
When our newsletter editor went to Rome on sabbatical a year ago, our parish transitioned to weekly e-mailed newsletters. This gives us the ability to get more information to more people, but it also means that I spend part of every week updating the blurbs. We use Constant Contact and it works very well for us. It even archives our e-mails.

Last week we handed out a survey in worship, but only got three responses back so I decided we should send the survey out by e-mail. I've know other people to use Survey Monkey which is free, so I started creating the survey there. It was a bit cumbersome, so went back to our Constant Contact account because they, too, have survey ability. I signed up for the 60-day free trial and got started. It took a surprisingly long time to create the survey, but once it was done I saved it and could copy it and make changes. Although it took over 2 hours to create the survey for parishioners, it only took 10 minutes to make a similar survey for students.

Website work
Our parish website also needs updated or possibly overhauled. A parishioner has taken on the role of webmaster, but I still need to work on writing and sharing pictures and help out in other ways. We use Joomla to create our website. It's not intuitive, but it's free so we put up with it. I edit our photos before uploading with the great free website Picnik. It's extremely easy to use and has lots of options.
I also spent some time looking at other church websites to get fresh ideas about what do to with ours. A few are here and here and here.

Sermon Sharing
Before my sabbatical, I was pretty faithful about posting audio sermons online. Currently, I use my iPhone to record the sermon on Sunday morning. Then wireless technology gets that file onto the computer where I use GarageBand to turn it into a podcast. The podcast is saved in iTunes and then gets uploaded to Podomatic. Podomatic doesn't seem very "churchy" so I was asking other clergy what they use and someone suggested SermonStudio which is also free. It seems like a better option, so I migrated a few samples from my archives over there and will begin using it soon.

At the end of the day, I rode my bike over to visit a parishioner and then took the long way home.

Sustain and Missio conferences

Last weekend I attended the Sustain conference on Thursday and the Mission conference on Friday and Saturday. These conferences were sponsored jointly by the Episcopal Dioceses of Ohio, Southern Ohio, and Indianapolis.

I was the only person from the Diocese of Ohio to attend Thursday's Sustain conference which was too bad--it was a fabulous day and I was inspired by the people I met, the things I heard, and the food I ate. Oh, and the coffee from 1801 Mills--Oh, the coffee!!

At Missio on Friday and Saturday it was good to see some other Ohio participants and to connect with some folks from Southern Ohio I know from the Kenyon Conferences (OEC@K) and to meet some new folks.

College Chaplaincy
One new person I met was Andrea Bardelmeier whose business card lists her as "the Assistant Director of Ecumenical and Multi-Faith" but she introduced herself as this Roman Catholic university's Multi-Faith Chaplain. She is paid by the university to help Muslim, Hindi, Protestant Christian, and other student groups organize and get what they need to worship and grow in their faith. She says that college Student Life organizations are very interested in chaplaincies at this time. I hope to gather some more information to share with Kenyon.

Website Links
During the weekend, lots of people suggested lots of websites. Here are a few of them:
-Community of Communities is an interactive map of intentional communities around the US.
-The Christian Community Development Association
-Sabbath Manifesto

I've got more details about the conference in the postings below. Enjoy.

Slow Church

I went to a neat workshop by Chris from Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis about the Slow Church movement. The Slow Church movement takes its name from the Slow Food movement. The three pillars of Slow Food are Good, Clean, Fair: Food that tastes good and is good for you; food that is free from pesticides, hormones, and other things you'd rather not eat; and food that is grown and produced fairly to everyone in the food chain.

The Slow Church movement is about rejecting the idea of the speedy 1 hour per week worship "fix" and rather letting spirituality spill into your daily life. It's about making decisions by discussion and concensus instead of voting. It's about making costly choices for something better--taking more of your time to make the church a better place for you and God and others. It's about reimagining the church as a dinnertime conversation.

Here's an article about some Episcopal slow churches.

Parish Farmers and Good Earth Farms

Exciting things are happening with church and gardening these days. Vineyard Central in Cincinnati has a Parish Farmer who shared some of his theology, philosophy, and food with us on Thursday. The next day Kelly, one of the Common Friars at Good Earth Farms in Athens, OH spoke to us. Here are some of the fascinating things they are doing and thinking

Aquaponics
Vineyard Central has just set up an aquaponics system. They will be growing lettuce and other plants in water in a small greenhouse attached to their garage. Inside the garage they have a stock tank in which tillapia will grow. The water circulates between the fish and plants. Fish waste provides the nutrition the plants need, and the plants clean the water for the fish. What a great system! (Thanks, God.)

Working at a Kingdom Pace
Several times from several people at this conference, I heard the phrase, "work at a kingdom pace." Just because society is moving incredibly quickly, it does not mean we must or should move that quickly. Maybe part of our call as Christians is to slow down--to interact with others in ways which give us a chance to look them in the eye, to spend time growing and making some of our own food instead of spending just a few minutes buying it prepared, to chose to take time off from the immediacy of technology. That's working and living at a kingdom pace.
The Common Friars are currently discerning how they should work. Is God calling them to tend their (relatively) small plot of land carefully and produce a (relatively) small amount of food, or would it be better if they had more land, worked quicker and produced more food? On first reaction, growing more food seems like the greater good. But if you add in the value of working at a kingdom pace, the choice isn't as clear.

Deep Thoughts From Working the Land
-"We're not called to be heroes. We're called to be saints."
-Growing your own food helps you accept your own limitation. Just like the food we grow isn't grocery store perfect, neither are we or our communities. When we learn to use the imperfect food we grow, it can help us learn to accept and work together in our imperfect communities. God uses us in our imperfections, and we use lettuce with a bug-eaten edge, or a slightly shriveled apple.
-"The end can't just be love. The means and the end must be love."
-"We're called to be a sign, not a solution."
-Look around and see what you have now. Then claim it as a gift. Most of us don't need more--we just need to see all that we have as gift and then treat it as a gift.

Karen Ward Keynote on "MetaModernity"

Karen Ward is well-known for starting the Church of the Apostles in Seattle. They do emergent worship and lots of community building. At our conference, she gave us some new ideas about church and society. She began by sharing this short video.

Post-Post-Modern
When I was fresh out of seminary, "postmodern" was the new thing. Now, Karen says, we're post-postmodern and into a time called Meta-Modernity. In metamodernity, we oscillate. We oscillate between longing for and not wanting/not believing in something (community, God, etc). As leaders in the church, we must understand and accept this oscillation and learn how to help oscillators relax into the truth of God. Our task is to help "spiritual tourists" become pilgrims on the way.

Bounded Sets vs. Centered Sets
There is a new way to think about churches using set theory.
The old view of church is that of a bound set: people inside the boundary were "church" and people outside the set were "unchurched." More recently, however, some churches are becoming a centered set instead of a bound set. These churches do not have a clear boundary to delineate who is and isn't a member. Rather, some people are near the center, and others are far away--but they all are drawn toward the center (imagine the village well as the center of village life).
It seems to me that Harcourt Parish has always been a center set church. We have a wide range of folks worshiping on Sundays, some who participate weekly others occasionally. We have active members who consider themselves a wide range of denominations. And most of all, we let people participate as they feel comfortable.

Messy Church
How great is that?!? There is a movement of congregations hosting "Messy Church" as occasions for families and others to get together in a new way. Everyone arrives and works on a messy art project. Then they gather together to listen to a bible story and maybe some singing and prayers. And finally, they gather for a full meal together.
Sign me up!