St. Theodore's Episcopal Church

State of the Parish Address

May 21, 2006

Jesus said: “You did not choose me but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide (in me and in my love.)

Before I was chosen to be the Rector of St. Theodore's, many of you attended a workshop and developed The Priest Profile . In the profile you articulated what were your needs and your hopes of the person you would call “Rector” and “priest.” As someone said to me, “After reading through our profile, I realized that what we really wanted was for Jesus to be our Rector but, if He couldn't accept our call, we would just have to call a human being to be our priest.”

Well dear friends, now that I have been with you for a year, I'm confident that you all realize that I am fully human, fallible, and not divine! You have blessed me this past year in many ways including allowing me to live into every rector's dream. I have been able to come here and live through a whole year with you before making very many changes. While I have immersed myself into the life of the community, I have also been free to watch and to learn from you the rhythm and the ways of you who are St. Theodore's. I have been blessed to wait and discern a vision of our future together that I know we can live into with God's help.

First let me say that our future is bright and holds a lot of promise for us as we seek to be those whom Christ has chosen to be in this place together and to bear much fruit in His holy name.

The Priest Profile accurately stated: “Bella Vista is no longer a retirement community . . .our congregational demographics are changing.” It is no secret that the demographics of Bella Vista and all of Northwest Arkansas are rapidly changing. I have been told that Bella Vista will double in population in four years. This past year our official Parochial Report stated that we had 378 baptized members. If all projections hold true, we could very easily be a congregation of over 750 baptized members or even more in the same four years! The average age in Bella Vista during the same four years will drop from 58 to 38, and we are already seeing that happen here in our parish family. Are we as a parish ready for this kind of transformation?

If anything I've said to you so far has increased your heart rate or brought a silent “I hope not” to your lips, stay with me a little longer and let's take a look at the word that is causing all kinds of heartburn. That word is “CHANGE.” When you look up the word “change” in the dictionary, all of your heart tremors will be validated -- and let's be honest with one another -- we are Episcopalians and we don't like to see a lot of change, especially when it applies to our church.

“Change” is defined in Webster's Dictionary as: “to put (a thing) in place of something else; substitute for, replace with . . . . The act or process of substitution, alteration, or variation.”

But that is not what the word “change” means to me as one who has studied Church Growth and Development. In the life of the church the word “change” also means to add on something. Several years ago you changed your worship schedule and you added on a Saturday night service. I have already changed our Sunday morning coffee fellowship not by taking away the coffee station in Sengel Hall but by adding an additional coffee station upstairs in the Gathering Room. I also know that the seven deadliest anti-change words in the life of a congregation are: “We never did it that way before.” That is the true tension that change brings into the life of the church. We should never be about change for change's sake, nor should we be about tradition just for tradition's sake.

One of our greatest strengths is that very few of us were born and/or lived all our lives in this county. We come from all over the country and have experienced significant change when we knew we were going to move, but still we came. We boldly have moved forward with our lives as strangers in a strange land and many of us have definitely prospered in our change of address.

There has probably no greater moment of change to all of us who are Episcopalians than what came after the 74th General Convention in 2003. What happened to me was not just the consent to the election of a gay man to be the Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire, but something even more. Our beloved church got caught up in political debates, and lines were drawn in the sand and you were either for it – whatever the “it” was that was being debated and there were many debates on a variety of issues - or you were against it. There was no middle ground. There was no Anglican/Episcopal via media . Then a great tragedy occurred. Laity, priests, deacons, and bishops refused to kneel down side by side and receive the body of Christ and the cup of salvation solely on the basis of how one voted in a political process. The Episcopal Church has had many fiery and contentious debates and arguments but we have always come back together around the table of the Holy Eucharist. I do believe at that moment Jesus wept.

After a time of prayer and reflection I realized that what actually happened to me was that my life long infatuation with the Episcopal Church had come to an abrupt and painful end. My naive romance with the church ended, but my deep love of her continues to grow and grow. No longer am I starry –eyed and in love with the church, but I have had to dig down deep into my heart and reflect on the love Jesus has shown to me and my love of Him and His Episcopal Church. By reflecting on what it means to me to be an Episcopalian and why I should remain an Episcopalian, I realized how important this church is not only to me and to you, but also to all of those who do not yet know Jesus Christ nor have any means of experiencing his unconditional and sacramental resurrection love. I do not want anyone to leave the church, and I invite everyone to pause and wonder how we can fall in love again with Jesus Christ and his Episcopal Church.

Continued