Clergy Renewal Grant

The Chapel of the Good Shepherd applied for, and received, a clergy renewal grant for 2025 from the Lilly Foundation.  Two questions from the application give helpful information about the activities the church and the chaplain will engage in during this time of renewal.

Provide a statement written by a representative of the congregation that summarizes the congregation’s views as to the intended benefits of the program for both the congregation and the pastor.

We are currently at a crossroads in our identity as a congregation. We see this renewal grant as an opportunity to plan a strategy for rethinking, planning, and rearticulating our activities and even our core identity as a worship community. We are not anticipating doing the planning in the priest’s absence, but to prepare for our rethinking. We are a community that, as one parishioner put it, punches well above its weight. They meant that we give many, many hours to local causes: the food pantry, homeless shelter meals, feeding students, and much more, at a level surpassing the service hours of larger congregations. Many see the church as the home of their volunteer activities, and these core identities of giving food, labor, and time will not change nor diminish in our spiritual leader’s absence or in our rearticulation of our identity.  In fact, her absence will give the congregation the opportunity to rethink what we, collectively and individually, want this church and this mission to become in the coming years.

Venturing—retreating—into nature for renewal and reflection has been articulated as the experience that makes the clergy member’s heart sing, and that experience matches the congregation’s contemplative practice. The church building houses meditation and reading groups, and discussion of practicing yoga and other spiritual/physical activities are under consideration. We are active, reflective, and intellectual. In parallel to our spiritual leader’s reflective renewal planning, we, congregants, are planning to keep photo journals of our own travels and excursions into nature: woods, mountains, and beaches, local and far-flung. We plan to also hold a small number (2) outdoor worship services at local parks and nature preserves, as weather conditions allow, in the Reverend’s absence. Attendees at these events and on personal journeys over the renewal period will be encouraged to take pictures and write about their experiences and post these images and reflective texts on a blog, as the clergy on sabbatical will similarly post reflective images and reflections from trips as described. The Priest has agreed to and would post these multimedia texts anyway, but on the blog they become an enduring memorial of the period of renewal, the thoughts and meditations, as well as reminders of the experience of both congregation and minister when apart. The blog becomes a collection point and commemoration, an enduring repository for later revisiting and reflection to build future plans.

We are hopeful that these practices in absentia reveal unspoken needs and quiet inner identities that we can amplify and bring forward once our steward has returned to us.  With her return and our insights from her absence, we will co-create the next iteration of this community, a powerful generational mixture of committed resident members and transient young students who join our community, become leaders in their own right, and then leave to pursue post-graduation lives.  Whatever our path forward after our priest’s return, our core values will remain the same: volunteer hours, feeding the hungry, arts and contemplative practice, and a lively group of students who are changed by their time here and who transform the community through their presence.   

Provide a statement that describes how the renewal leave and its activities will “make the pastor’s heart sing.”  In doing so, give careful thought to how the proposed activities relate to the vision and promote renewal for ministry.

Nothing makes my heart sing more than connecting with the people I love, especially in environments that unite us to God and God’s creation.  My most vivid memories from my childhood in Vermont are of the sights, sounds, tastes, and textures of the Episcopal church I attended weekly for most of my life.  The building was my personal playground:  my friends and I “rode” the great cement lions standing watch by the chapel doors; made “human sandwiches” with the couch cushions in the nursery; and climbed the smooth wooden ladder to explore the inside of the great pipe organ.  The Communion wine warmed my throat as it washed down the wafer that often stuck to the roof of my mouth, while the incense we used on high feast days tickled my nose and made me sneeze.   Gazing out at God’s creation through the enormous picture window in the sanctuary, the vision of the Adirondack Mountains over Lake Champlain, sometimes aflame in autumnal brilliance, sometimes starkly frozen white, never failed to take my breath away. I had the liturgy memorized before I could read and began singing in the choir when I was just five years old.  I was overwhelmed by joy as we raised our voices in song.  

I always knew that the congregation cared about me; I felt like I “belonged” to everyone there as much as I did to my biological family.  I was baptized into the household of God at two months of age in the midst of this congregation, this same congregation that stood behind me when I was confirmed.  The flower guild of this congregation planted their summer gardens in the colors of my wedding so that they could provide the arrangements for our August wedding; and this congregation discerned alongside me when I was in the ordination process so that they could wholeheartedly say “It is!” when asked if it was their will that I be ordained.

The things that ground me, that sustain my awareness of God’s presence, are my long-term relationships with the people closest to me and my connection to God through nature—most particularly in the mountains.  Elijah’s experience of God in the silence on the mountain has always been the call story I most resonate with.  For it was in contemplative silence and the Green Mountains of Vermont that I first recognized my call to ordained ministry.