A few days
after I accepted the call to serve as your rector, I met up with Kathleen
Alexander for some orientation to our new home.
Just before I left, she told me that she had some reading material for
me—and I’ll say she did. She presented
me with a stuffed jumbo-sized three-ring binder entitled, “The New Century
Project,” circa 1998. This was followed
by a tall ream of printed sheets. These
were the collected comments from your rector search survey and a transcription
of all that had been written on newsprint sheets posted around Saint Francis
Hall at a big parish meeting held just about a year ago.
I went
home and dutifully set to work, and I read it all. And as you would expect, there was a great
deal of continuity. At the beginning and
end of nearly two decades marked by great change, the people of Saint Francis
placed their central focus on faithful Anglican worship, beautiful traditional
music and inspired preaching. Then and
now, you wanted to learn together, to grow in your relationships with each
other, to form the young, and to serve the poor. Of course, many of the people who were
leading the projects and making the comments were the same, a remarkable thing
in a part of the world where everything often seems to be in flux.
But there
were also great differences.
In 1998,
you were aiming to build a staff and physical structure that would be
sufficient to handle the crowds. You
were asking questions like “are there enough desks in the day school?” “How many more services do we need to
add?” “How large an addition do we
really need?” “Should we have three or
four priests on our staff?” You were dreaming big, acting with confidence,
certain of rosy days to come. Money was
no object.
A year ago
this time of year, it was quite different.
One of the questions asked where you would plot the congregation on a
life-cycle diagram. I was grateful for
one brave soul who faith enough to mention our belief in the resurrection,
because most of the other answers were not promising. Beneath the surface of what you wrote lay
questions like “Can we learn to trust each other again?” “Is what we do financially sustainable?” “Who out there can we find to help us?”
A week
later, I announced to a group of local clergy colleagues that I had been called
to serve as your rector. One of them, a
priest who has served in this county for many years, came up to me afterwards
and said-“So, Saint Francis. You know,
that place has been like a fortress for decades.” I told him I wasn’t really the fighting kind,
that maybe we’d have to look into pulling a few walls down.
A
fortress. That’s a rather grim image,
really. And I still find it odd, because
you aren’t anxious, angry, hostile people.
Much the contrary. My family and
I are continually amazed at how warmly and generously you have welcomed us into
your life. I am so pleased to see it when you warmly greet newcomers and
help them to feel that they have a place here.
But maybe
all your confidence in those glory days could have been mistaken for something
else. There was no need to partner with
other local churches for programs, no need to look for guidance from the
diocese. There was no need to watch
every penny when you could always count on more of them. There was no need to communicate clearly with
the outside world about what you were doing and why it is important when you
couldn’t guarantee a visitor a seat.
It's not
like that anymore, though. And that may
be a very good thing.
James
Smith, a Christian ethicist from Calvin College wrote a fascinating article a
few years ago called “The Gift of Constraints.”
His argument was that we often view the limits placed on us by inherited
traditions and scarce resources as things that drag down the institutions we
serve. We like to daydream about what
things could be like if we had unlimited resources or could tear it all down
and start afresh. We associate freedom
with the absence of limits and boundless possibilities. But Smith argues that limits actually force
us to be more creative. Constraints
invite us to discover the unexpected wisdom hidden in things that seem to
appear only as obstacles at first glance.
As an
example, he discusses Philadelphia’s newest museum, the Barnes Foundation. It houses a major collection of modern art which
was moved from the original collector’s suburban home in 2012. The eccentric Albert Barnes had made
provision in his will that none of the museum’s 800 objects could be sold,
loaned or moved from the elaborate installations he had personally designed. While the foundation gained permission to
move the museum, a court ruled that the objects had to be arranged in an
identical manner at the downtown site.
The new
museum’s architects, Tod Williams and Billy Tsien, refused the easy option of
duplicating the original collector’s mansion in a more convenient locale. Instead, they designed a building that shed
light from above into the galleries and created an inventive central courtyard,
modifications that helped people to see a deeper level of significance in the
collector’s original plan. “Remarkably,”
an art critic observed, “Williams and Tsien found unexpected expressive range
within the confines they were bound to observe. In that respect the outcome of
this project is dazzling -- the new Barnes is infinitely superior to the vast
number of museums designed with a completely free hand.”[1]
We do not
have a completely free hand at Saint Francis anymore. We are deeply aware of constraints that are
humbling and that force us to view the gifts we do have with deeper
appreciation. That’s a good thing,
because the church is not meant to be self-sufficient, to advance always with
effortless confidence, much less to act as if called to man a fortress against
the outside world.
In our
Epistle lesson, Saint Paul reminds his readers that not many of them were wise,
or powerful or wealthy. The Corinthian
church faced all sorts of constraints in doing God’s work. But this he says, is how God intends it, to
work through flawed people and limited institutions to do marvelous things. God’s power revealed in weakness, His wisdom revealed
in the midst of human folly, so that “no flesh should glory in His
presence.” This is the logic of the life-giving Cross.
I hope
that my work as your rector this year will focus on discovering the gifts amid
our constraints and exploring creative responses to our challenges. I will continue to work at getting to know
you and this wider community in which I have been called to serve. I am grateful to so many of you who have met
with me one-on-one, around 60 families so far, and I have begun meeting with as
many religious and civic leaders as possible.
In these conversations, I’m on the lookout for partnerships and
unexpected gifts, seeing how God is bringing us together to do vital things I
cannot do on my own.
We’re also
aiming to tend our own resources more carefully. Norm Barker will talk at the meeting later
today about the internal controls audit several of you have been deputized to
conduct. We’ll also be developing
written policies for personnel management and trying to improve the
administrative systems we use for “the back office.” It’s not headlines material, but I have
consistently found that careful administration is vital for developing trust
within a congregation. Having things in
order also better equips you, the saints, to be fruitful in the duties God has
placed before us.
We will
also be focusing on sharing the good news in new and innovative ways. The foundation for this work is being laid in
a more regular common prayer life in our weekday services. We will continue to expand our presence on social
media and will design new programs to connect with the interests and questions
of those outside the church in our community.
As you can read in the Annual Report, excellent work is already being
undertaken in these areas by our Church Membership Growth and Newcomers’
Committees, and I look forward to guiding them in this work in the coming
months.
I believe
that God is calling us this year to become a little more nimble and
scrappy. His will is that we be a little
more humble, responsive and open—“poor in spirit,” perhaps, and a great deal
more reliant on His wisdom and power.
No flesh should glory in His presence.
Maybe those constraints we face are not signs that He has abandoned
us. Instead, the can reveal that God is
at work among us to do something even more important, something He can only do
when we wake up and receive them as gifts.
[1] Martin Filler, qtd. in Smith, James K. A. “The Gift of
Constraints.” Faith and Leadership, 10
Sep 2012. https://www.faithandleadership.com/james-ka-smith-gift-constraints
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