Annual Chaplains Report - 2008

January 20, 2008

“As You Wait for the Revealing of the Lord Jesus Christ)”

- I Corinthians 1,7

“Things will be different this year.” 

Now you could quibble with that; “yeah, well, things are different every year.” 

Or . . . “huh; you want different, 2005 was different.” That was the year of our move from 545 Hayes St. to the First Church of Christ Scientist. And that really was different! 

But here’s why things will be different this year. Things will be different because things will be different this year AND I have no idea HOW they will be different – yet. I just know things will be different. So we sit here and wait for the revealing of the Lord.To begin, there are more of us doing just that; sitting here, sitting here waiting for the revelation. Attendance is up again. There were complaints about the parking last Sunday – and one suggestion that we buy a bigger church. We have gone from 60.4 people on a Sunday to 63.4 people each Sunday. A 4.9% increase (remember the base is small). This 10:00 service is up 15% (or 8 people; I told you the base was small.) But the student service at 7:00 pm is down 15% (or 3 people). Our 4.9% gain comes from an increase in the size of the morning service.

I am not sure why the student service is down. We wait for the revealing of the Lord. Some of it is cyclical. (With the overall trend down, by the way. Once we received 413 student names from the registrar in August; now 80). Some of it is students’ personality. Some of it is the worship style.  I think the 7:00 pm service is boring; one student thought it was too weird, what with people giving each other communion. We had two ordained clergy assigned to it last year. That didn’t seem to make a difference. (Also, remember that Hilary is not on the payroll this year. Her diocesan training funds have gone away and we are down $4,500 from our asking in the diocesan campus ministry grant. Now that’s different.) Things are different than they were in the hey-day of the 7:00 pm service in 2005.

The diocese is also different. In part because the Anglican Communion is different, looking now for some uber-national authority. In part because the national church is different, preoccupied with churches and dioceses breaking away over homosexuality and authority. This in spite of the permissive, not compulsory language used regularly by the Episcopal Church.

The Bishop is still sick (recall she has had a heart-attack) and will take February and March off to adjust her medications and her life. The diocesan budget process is changing. Once three people sat in an office on West 42^nd. St. and read the J.P Morgan report indicating the level of expected endowment income and built a budget out from there. Now the budget is to be “ministry driven” and built from the bottom up. This presumes a broad, lively, energetic lay response. So the audience for our grant application just got larger. The larger audience presumed I presume will be most interested in our student ministry. So it was very important to have Tina, John, and Liz serve as our delegates to the diocesan convention. It’s a bad time to have fewer students at the evening service.

Diocesan structure is changing. Last year we had a large “Standing Committee” which served as a kind of general parliament performing multiple functions. We are returning now to a more 

classical Anglican division in which a Standing Committee is responsible for priests, property and “popes” (the confirming of American bishops). In the absence of our Bishop, it serves as the diocese’s ecclesiastical authority. A kind of aristocratic House of Lords it has no program responsibilities. I am the President of this group. That’s different. Imagine a diocese where I am an elder statesman.

The newly formed Executive Council is responsible for the diocesan program and so the diocesan budget. It is a work in progress. I had no figure for our 2008 grant until yesterday. The member’s areas of responsibility are still to be decided. The diocese is different. We wait for the revelation.

I am different. As the former chair of the diocesan property committee and one of the few members of the former governing body elected at-large, I moved over to the new Standing Committee, the “ecclesiastical authority” which only has much to do in the absence of the Bishop. I was elected president of that body at a meeting, which ended with the Bishop announcing her two-month sabbatical. Last Tuesday I spent the day working on building projects in New Harmony and Rockport Indiana. Standing Committee takes time and could take more time. I wrote this chaplain’s report on a plane to Minneapolis. That’s different.

City Council takes time. Now some of my clergy colleagues have wondered if this is a mid-life crisis (I am officially too old for that.) and represents some sort of disengagement from active ministry. I tried that out on my spiritual director. His response was, “Are you going to wear your clerical collar to city council meetings; that would be cool.” City council is cool; fun, different than anything I’ve done before, interesting for a host of reasons. The gist of his response and my point here is to report there is no “drama”. My election reflects a level of community involvement that matches the civic commitments of many of you; some of who have served on city council. The old-fashioned parson’s call involved the community. I feel fortunate to able to do this. My thanks to Katy who is the family’s real civic leader, and the reason I was asked to run.

I am able, with this new “hobby”, to take advantage of the freedom your intelligence, experience, and general financial and emotional stability makes possible. It is a freedom we all have here and use in service in and out of the church. A freedom we also all use to rest or heal or just have a donut. Don’t over-think this. You do good work with seemingly little organization. If you depend on me to do that good work, then I’ve screwed up. If you depend on church structure to do it, that’s screwed up too. We wait on the revelation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Because you are “all that” other things will be different. Your interest in “Change for Change” (raking in spare change to do good deeds), “Family Promise” (a program for homeless families) and “Five Talents” (an Anglican micro-investment project) means we will be expanding our social ministry offerings. We will also offer our usual programming from Lafayette Urban Ministry, the “Y”, and the Crisis Center.

Building rehab; we have been all over that. Our building looks different. We have a bigger kitchen, nave lighting, and new upstairs furnishings. Our Nellie Johnston Award winner was most responsible for that progress. Our thanks this morning to Susan Anderson-Ray.

I hope our work with Engagement and Visibility will be different. It started with the same budget; the same size committee of talented folk as the Renovation group, but sales is hard work. 

Religious sales even harder, particularly when your strength is reflection and most religious associations are emotive, familial, personal, and relational. Why has “Friday school” worked throughout the years? Friends invite friends to free food. Why are Irish Quaker agnostics buried from St. Tom’s? Religion is bone and blood.

So we can talk about “Ritual, Community, and Free Food”. We can say we don’t have to say stupid things. We can say we are relaxed. Not like our Methodist friends pushed by duty and pulled by grace. We are not embarrassed by the holes in our programming. We are free to use the fullness of Western Christianity to enflesh, in the places where we live and work, the revelation we saw in our attentive waiting on the Christ, doing so for as long as we are called to do so. We can be as creative or as traditional as we want to be, working to the extent of our power at the size of the need. 

And still be invisible. Humility in presentation may not be the virtue it once was.

Things will be different this year in ways I haven’t imagined. Maybe you could say that every year. Every year we spend waiting for the revelation of Jesus Christ, seeing how things can be different.

Our annual parish meeting begins shortly upstairs. Come and try out the new chairs. Amen