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St. Charles Episcopal Church
St. Charles Illinois
Saturday Evening Presentation
September 25, 2010
Good evening. (I am Sam McDonald, Canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of Lexington.) It is such a pleasure to be with you this evening. First, I want to bring you official greeting from the Bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, Stacy Sauls, and I bring you greetings from many Episcopalians in the Diocese of Lexington, but in particular, greetings from a small group of Episcopalians in a small mountain town of Prestonsburg, in their small congregation of St. James’. You are known to us, and we feel connected with you, because of the gift that you have sent us for many years to St. James’, your gift have been the amazing young people and their adult mentors who have spent many mission trip experiences in our midst. They have touched the lives of those they have served in the Appalachian mountains, and they have touched the members of St. James’ Episcopal church who they serve alongside. So, you are known to us, you are known by the work you do. I want to begin, and end, tonight, by saying “thank-you.”
The Diocese of Lexington is a small diocese, comprising the Eastern half of Kentucky, most of our geographical area lies within Appalachian mountains. Based on per capita income, 16 of the 100 poorest counties in American are within the Diocese of Lexington. Kentucky is second only to the state of Texas in this category,; they have 17. Based on median household income, 29 of the 100 poorest counties in America are in Kentucky. A distant second is Mississippi with 13. Twenty-five of those counties are in the Diocese Lexington.
We only have 34 congregations. 2/3 of those congregations have budgets of $100,000 or less, and worship 40 people or less on a Sunday, (1/2 of those have budgets of $25,000 or less and worship 15 or less on a Sunday.) If, for instance, St. Charles’ was in our diocese, you would be our 5th or 6th largest congregation, we would consider you a MEGA CHURCH.
Our smallest congregations are mostly located deep in the isolated mountain communities, in demographically shrinking, sometimes dying communities, where our theological witness and liturgical practice is, to the say the least, in the minority, and usually seen as strange, and odd to the community. (Parker Boggs story, “We have more snake handlers in this county than Episcopalians!” but they have more than ANYTHING, than they do Episcopalians.)
However, I don’t want you to feel too bad for us. We have A LOT of fun doing ministry in our diocese. To do so, you just have to have a sense of adventure, and be creative. In fact, we are extremely dedicated, and even hopeful, about the mission, and the Episcopal witness in Eastern Kentucky, and we have some reason to be, which I would like to talk to you about this evening, and tomorrow morning, which may even, I hope, be helpful in thinking about your mission and witness here in St. Charles, which is certainly a very different context than ours.
You see, we pretty much spend our time bucking conventional church wisdom about The Episcopal Church, general congregational development theory, and stewardship strategies.
Most of the current thinking and emphasis in the church right now, and even in most denominations, focuses on finding the demographically fastest growing areas, the places with the most resources, and putting more resources in the those places in order to plant new churches, or redevelop the ones there, to increase the ministry, to grow the church, and get the biggest bang for the buck and leverage resources wisely, to grow the church in places that are growing, and growing with the people with money, who can help those places grow even more. It is in fact, highly successful. It makes a lot of sense.
And yet, when you live, breath and work in our context of Eastern Kentucky in the Appalachia, it doesn’t make much sense at all. Don’t get me wrong, I think we should be planting churches in growing suburban areas, but not exclusively, not at the expense of having absolutely zero response for anywhere else. Because then, we will only be left with the kind of church I grew up in Ohio. We will be left only with the kind of people in our churches that look like me, and sound like me, and went to college like me…and that, frankly, that doesn’t look like church to me. I could just go look in the mirror all day if that’s what I wanted.
Its why I have found myself now in the Diocese of Lexington. People I left in the wealthy suburb congregation of eastern suburbs of Cleveland thought I was crazy, or joking, to move to the Diocese of Lexington. It was fine to go there on a mission trip, they thought, but to live there seemed…. Silly to them I suppose.
But I wanted to begin serving in congregations where the conventional wisdom says, and the church says, implicitly, and explicitly to small poor congregations, and too poor people, you are a problem, you are a burden, you are a drain on our time, and our resources, and the most helpful thing we can do for you and for us is to close you down. We need to trim the dead wood from the tree and throw it into the fire. And, if that is true, then 2/3 of our congregations should be closed, and the entire Diocese of Lexington should no longer exist, and the Episcopal Church has nothing to say to the people of Appalachia. But, I wanted to join a group of people that believe we do have something to say. To say you matter, you matter to us, and you matter God.
We have decided that small, poor rural congregations are not a burden, but a gift. We have decided to completely reframe this conversation. We are taking the things that have been seen as liabilities, and decided to frame them as assets, by looking at our diocese, congregations, and people not through traditional lenses, but through Gospel lenses.
So how do we do that? First, we recognized and named what we had seen as our challenges and obstacles for the diocese to fully engage in mission in our congregations. Those were, Poverty and the poor people who live here, unemployment, single industry economy of coal that is essential to our lives but which continues to decline and permantly damage our environment , geographic isolation, demographic population decline, poor educational system, and a public perception, assumption, and even prejudice of Appalachian people and Kentucky. We resolved to deny those realities, and in many instances, not try and change those things, as they are not changing any time soon.
We looked at them and tried to see how they can be assets, and reframed them in our three strategy priorities which are:
1) Give the best we have, not the leftovers. Give God the best you have to offer, which includes giving the people of these congregations the best we have to offer, and best that the church has to offer. Too many times, these communities, and congregations, are givine our leftover time and energy, as opposed to being our primary focus of the best we have to give. This also means finding your treasure, and giving it away, not hording it. Give it away. This takes courage. Don’t be afraid. Take courage. Too often, we are afraid to lose what we have. But this fear only moves us from abundance to scarcity. It moves us away from God’s promise. It moves us away from each other.
a. In this instance, what we decided we had to give away was the amazing gift is to know the poor of Appalachia. We have taken our inspiration from the story of Brother Laurance, in the year 258 in Rome, when he was arrested in the catacombs for gathering early Christians to worship at a time when it was illegal. The authorities demanded that Laurence hand over the treasures of the church, at which point he gathered the poor and the sick in the city and responded, “here are the treasures of the church.” We have also taken as our inspiration, fomr the teenagers of St. Charles, who have come to the diocese, to come to know the poor of Appalachia, and they have been transformed by that service.
We have had surprisingly few youth groups and congregations connect with our Episcopal mountain congregations in similar ways, and we decided to change that. In the past year, the number of congregations and diocese have increased 10 fold.
b. We have also decided that while these realities had been our biggest obstacle to finding ANY clergy leadership at all for these congregations, let alone the best clergy out there, we have led our clergy recruitment now with the idea that this is an opportunity to serve the LEAST served, and found now we are getting the best clergy the church has to offer, because we are connecting them to their first love, to serve the poor. In the past two years, 10 mountain congregations who couldn’t find any clergy, now have dynamic, mission minded priests in every one of these congregations, in some instances its their first priest in several years.
2) Turn outwards. One of our mantra’s is “congregations that turn outward thrive, those that turn inward die.” This is quite counter intuitive for congregations in conflict, and congregations who are in the process of decline, and congregations caught up in the fear of scarcity. When we are fearful, we want to turn inward, to take care of our own, but actually, the cure is to turn outward, engage in mission out there, and you will begin to find new life. Again, this takes courage to step out, because we are afraid.
In this instance, we are afraid and turn inward we will lose what little we have remaining. So like sand, the tighter you grip it, the more it will slip away through your fingers until you have nothing.
a. All 34 of our congregations have been charged by the bishop reach out and gather a new community. To turn outwards. Every community has some group of people living in isolation, and we believe isolation is the greatest work of darkness. The way to break through that darkness is to shine the light of connection, and community. For us, in our context, its breaking through the isolation of poverty, and helping someone have safe, dry, housing. Or,here is another example, were you aware that some prison systems plan their budgets for growth of number of beds 10 years in advance of 3rdgrade illiteracy rates? Yup, they know that based on the illiteracy rate of 3rd graders how many prison beds they will need. So, we decided to try and break that cycle by starting a Reading Camp, which helps 3rd and 4th grade Appalachian children and it has increased reading levels up to 2 grades. Or, especially in our world of Eastern Kentucky, the Episcopal Church in these towns represent the only alternative to fundamentalism. (story about James) THIS IS A HUGE MISSION OPPORTUNITY! That means, in many of the towns where our congregations exist, we are the only church were a divorced person can attend, or that a woman can be heard in the pulpit or even serve on the church council, or where a gay, lesbian, or transgendered person can feel welcome. Its often, also, the only voice using reason, alongside of scripture, to talk about divisive issues of mountaintop removal for coal, or any other various social witness issue. Now, once we get our congregations talking about those things are reasons for existing, they start to see that being a Christian is not a Lone Ranger affair, its not about what’s in it for me, its about the others around me. Which brings me to our final core principle.
3) Get connected. Actually, the work is to recognize we are already all connected, and then we can respond. We are in relationship with each other already, bound together in our humanity through our love of Christ. But I am going to talk about that this tomorrow morning.
So, there you have, our commitment to a counter cultural understanding of where we has a church are committed to bearing witness. We words like courage, vision, adventure a lot. And we hold on to our three simple strategies in our congregations to achieve it,
1) Give the best we have to offer, not the leftovers
2) Turn outwards
3) Get connected.
You, the people of St. Charles’, and in particular, your young people, have been a part of that strategy, even a part of the inspiration for it. I want to thank-you, and give praise to God for you. Also hope that you will continue to walk with us, and with the people in Appalachia.
Amen.