Rector's Annual Report to the Parish
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Rector’s Annual Report to the Parish
Sermon Preached on Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2013
by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
This is my Tenth Annual Report to the Parish, and though older, whiter and thinner on the top, I assure you that I feel even more blessed to be addressing you today than I felt back in January of 2004. I continue to be amazed – and blessed – by the dynamic energy of the Holy Spirit’s presence in this place, furthering God’s mission through the ministries carried out in love by you, God’s apostles who work in this particular part of God’s vineyard.
This morning, as we have for a number of years past, we celebrate Trinity Sunday and our Annual Meeting in a time of uncertainty. I was at a seminar sponsored by the Hartford Fo0undation for Public Giving several weeks ago with some colleagues from the Conference of Churches, and the speaker stunned us all with the announcement: SHIFT HAPPENS. We did a double take also. He said: shiFt happens. He was reminding us that in the nonprofit world, as in all aspects of our human existence, change is not the exception, it is the norm.
And so it is with the Christian life. It is always a challenge to apply the eternal truths of Jesus Christ to society’s changing landscape. We have been talking throughout Eastertide about “Practicing Resurrection.” Putting our money where our mouth is, as we say. Not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. Living our lives as though we REALLY BELIEVE that Jesus is Lord, that he died for something that is worthwhile, and that his rising again means that we too have new life in him.
During the last half of 2012, we went through our “Church as Verb” series – talking about DOING CHURCH and not just BEING church. Being a faith community on the move, not being comfortable with what has been, but understanding that Jesus has something bigger and more important in store for us, and that it is up to us to partner with Jesus through the gift of the Holy Spirit to make that happen.
That’s what we celebrated last week on the feast of Pentecost – the arrival of Jesus’ promised gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus repeats that promise in today’s Gospel: When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
So Jesus sets the challenge before us: All that God has belongs to Jesus, and through the Resurrected Christ, God has declared this to be our legacy as well. What will we do with it?
As is customary on this day, I will now describe my activities as your rector and those of our members in furtherance of this important work, but very briefly. What I want to talk about this morning is the future.
My work in the Church and Community
As an ordained person in the church and as the Rector of Trinity, it is expected that I will share in “the councils of the church” and to be an ambassador from Trinity to the wider neighborhood. In that role, I am wrapping up in September my three-year term as the President of the Conference of Churches and a two-year term as President of the Board of the Farmington –Asylum Business District, which works with other non-profits and for-profit businesses to improve the quality of life in the Asylum Hill and West End neighborhoods. I serve on this latter board with Lily Miller and Jill Barrett, also members of this parish.
I am also pleased to report new life in the Asylum Hill Christian Community. With the appointment of the new Pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church, the clergy of Asylum Hill have formed a monthly prayer and meditation group, which has brought us all closer to one another and the ministries of our congregations more unified. Among the steps we have taken is for Trinity and Asylum Hill to share resources with respect to our Stephen Ministries, which will benefit both our Stephen Ministers, our leadership teams and those whom we serve.
In the Diocese, I continue to serve on the Program and Budget Committee -- this will be my last year of nearly eight years serving on that committee. I am also working with Bishop Curry on an ecumenical approach in the City of Hartford to the problem of gun violence.
We must be aware also of the shifting sands of the wider church and, more locally, of our own Episcopal Diocese. Our traditional relationship with our diocese – in practice if not in theory -- has been as the outer portion of the spokes of a wheel, with “The Diocese” as the hub and the parishes branching off from that. Bishop Drew Smith introduced us to the theme of the Diocese as “God’s People on Mission.” Bishop Ian is leading us further on that journey to a more decentralized understanding of church –and that is having profound effects on the way in which our diocese operates. As I indicated last year, the church of the 21st Century is going to look a lot more like the church of the 1st Century than the church of the 20th Century. In the past two years, the cathedrals in Wilmington, DE and Providence, RI, have closed their doors. Here in Hartford, our Cathedral enjoys a vibrant ministry to the homeless and the hungry, and the Cathedral is presently in discernment about the future direction of its ministries. This, of course, will not happen in a vacuum. The clergy and lay leaders of the Episcopal churches of Hartford and the region are in constant conversation about looking to the future.
And so I hope you get this sense of the possibilities that God is setting before us. There is little that is certain, but God is inviting us to follow Jesus, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to claim that which God has declared unto us.
Reviewing the Work of the Parish
It would be traditional for me at this point to review the highlights of this past year. You can read all about that in the Annual Report which will be handed out immediately after the blessing and hymn. This year, for the first time, our lay leaders of the four ministry quadrants – Worship, Parish Care, Christian Formation and Outreach—have coordinated the writing of the Annual Report rather than coordination coming from the office staff. As with all new endeavors, there were some bumps, but we continue to make progress in adjusting the operations of a very active parish to a new management system encourages our lay ministry leaders to collaborate and support one another in doing God’s work at Trinity.
I will tell you that 2012 continued Trinity’s trend of positive growth: We gained a net of 41 new active parishioners in 2012; our average Sunday attendance jumped to over 200; financial giving was up , again with a majority of parishioners increasing their financial support of the parish. Finances continue to be a struggle for us, however, due to our continued over-dependence on our endowment.
We did take a positive step in the direction of financial health this past year when the Vestry worked with the Episcopal Church Foundation in creating a “new” endowment which has a spending plan limiting the amounts that can be withdrawn. Now when someone leaves money to the church, they have a choice to place it either in our existing endowment with some or no restrictions on its use, or they can select the default position, which is to place those funds into the new endowment from which no more than 5% can be withdrawn on an annual basis. With this in place, 2013 will see more of a focus on the reminder that appears at the bottom of our service leaflets each week: “Please remember Trinity Church in your will.” Planned giving and endowment will continue to be important to the Trinity of the 21st Century. And we will continue to focus on the three other aspects of our financial management: Increasing revenue from Annual parish giving and outside sources of revenue; cutting back on operating expenses; and drastically reducing our annual draw from our existing endowment. For the full report on all that we have been doing here I will leave you to the Annual Reports.
What’s Ahead
All of the preaching about Church as an action word and Practicing Resurrection and the newsletter articles about a “mission discernment initiative” and the adult forums on “missional church” have been leading up to something, believe it or not. For the past 9 months, a group of us – basically the six of us who preach at Trinity on a regular basis – have been working together to plan for Trinity what Bishop Ian has been leading us through at the Diocesan level – becoming more of a missional church. This is what our Vestry will be working on when we go on our annual retreat the weekend after next, and it is what I am inviting each of you into as we continue our journey together.
Because this is a big concept, I want to look at a very simple example so you get a sense of what this will mean for us. Take Trinity Church, Take Asylum Hill Congregational. Take Immanuel Congregational. Take St. Joseph’s Cathedral next door. All of us are so-called “mainline” or large denominational churches that are part of larger established churches with certain ways of worshipping God and certain governance structures and certain notions of what it means to “be church”. We were planted on Asylum Hill as a “church plant,” organized ourselves for worship and all the attendant duties of “running a church” and then looked for something to do outside of the four walls. The mission became part of what the church did. It became the church’s “mission.”
Now I want you to think about Glory Chapel, which many of you know from our annual Asylum Hill Good Friday walk. Glory Chapel started as a ministry to the marginalized – drug addicts, prostitutes, , those who had lost their way in society or who had never found their way. After months and years of providing social services, it occurred to someone that they were doing God’s work, and that a focus on God could strengthen that outreach, and so it was only then that they formed a worshipping community.
Do you see the difference in focus? In the case of the mainline churches, mission became something that the church did, and those activities gradually came to be understood as the “church’s mission.” In the case of Glory Chapel, the people were doing God’s mission, and out of that, they formed a worshipping community.
Now I am not suggesting that we model ourselves after Glory Chapel. I AM suggesting that we take a lesson from our Christian roots and focus first and foremost on the work God is calling us to do when and where we can do it – whether that be on Asylum Hill or wherever – and organizing ourselves around God’s mission. And that inevitably must mean examining and rethinking the way we do business. This is what I mean when I say that the church of the 21st Century will look more like the church of the 1st Century than the church of the 20th Century – this is the model of Church that Roman Catholic author Raymond Brown talks about in his book, The Church the Apostles Left Behind. It is the church that Episcopal lay author the late Verna Dozier describes in her book, The Dream of God.
The good news here is that, almost without realizing it, Trinity already is doing a lot of “missional church” activity. That is the major underpinning of our Quadrant Leadership model – organizing ourselves around MINISTRY instead of around THE MINISTER. And this is a good time to recall the question and answer in our Catechism: Who are the ministers of the Church? It is the priesthood of all the people – lay people, deacons, priests and bishops. Many of our ministries -- Trinity Day School, The Choir School of Hartford, Loaves and Fishes, Church by the Pond, AA and NA programs – all of these are hands on, boots-on-the-ground ministries that further God’s mission and, in the process, define who we are as the People of God at Trinity Episcopal Church. It is not so much what we are doing that will change over time, it is the way in which we approach it that will change.
Over the summer, I will be appointing, with the guidance of the Vestry, a small group of 10 to 15 people who together will continue the work that our smaller working group has begun these past months. I’m not sure how long that work will last – maybe six months, maybe a year. The Holy Spirit will let us know. The idea will be to develop a strong core of lay leaders who will then take leadership in the wider congregation to continue this process of discovering our gifts for ministry, discerning the work God has for us to do, and figuring out how we apply the gifts we have to the work God has. This is part of St. Paul’s theology of gifts and needs – every community has the gifts necessary to meet the needs around it.
And so this morning we can state, along with St. Paul as he wrote to the Romans in this morning’s Epistle, that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
And so I close with this prayer for mission. Please pray with me: Everliving God, whose will it is that all should come to you through your son Jesus Christ, inspire our witness to him that all may know the power of his forgiveness and the hope of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. AMEN.