In this week’s e-newsletter, you will notice a different format, which I hope will more effectively draw your attention to what is happening at Good Shepherd. A lot is happening! But the e-newsletter is also organized intentionally. Pay attention to the headings: worship, formation, music, outreach, and community and fellowship. These headings represent defining characteristics of our parish life, which visibly rose to the surface in a vestry conversation in late May. Worship is where it all starts, because worship is the most important thing we do. If worship is not the foundation of all that we do as Christians, then we will be misguided in everything else. Prayer is what enables us to maturely discern the shape of ministry to which God is calling us. It’s also what sends us outward from this parish to serve in love. In some sense, outreach/community and fellowship are reciprocally related. On the one hand, we need an identifiable sense of community and fellowship in order to be outward looking. On the other hand, our ability as a parish to engage in outreach is strengthened as community and fellowship grow.
At the end of August, I will have served as your rector for four years. It has taken nearly four years of being and serving together for the defining characteristics of our shared life to crystallize. The categories of worship, formation, music, outreach, and community/fellowship seem rather obvious. They are, in my mind, the marks of a healthy parish. And yet, four years ago, when we began our journey together, I would argue that worship and music were evident in the parish’s life, but other areas, which are now central to parish life, were lacking. So, in four years, we have grown through God’s grace and in working together. There is robust formation for children and adults, worship and music remain strong, community and fellowship have become more cohesive, and we have begun to establish thoughtful outreach.
Consequently, this point in our shared life together seems like the right time to go one step further. It’s one thing to establish an outreach ministry such as our retreat house—which is our primary outreach ministry at the moment—but it’s another to make an active, coordinated effort to invite the local and wider community onto our campus. Until now, our retreat house ministry has been principally directed to the wider Church (beyond the local community). And yet, if we call the retreat house the Rosemont Community Retreat House, we need to let the community know that we are here and what we have to offer. Additionally, our Parish House once again has available space for rental partnerships, and it can and should be an asset to the local community. As we begin August, a local therapist will begin renting out three rooms on the first floor of the Parish House to use for her work in the mental health profession, specializing in healing from trauma. Although her practice is not explicitly religious, the vestry and I believe that her work is consonant with the Christian call to healing. This is the aim of renting space in our Parish House. While it does provide the church with crucial rental income for our operating expenses, it also witnesses to an alignment of values between the Church and those outside the Church.
In last Sunday’s sermon, I noted that the world force feeds us fear by capitalizing on a scarcity mentality. But we in the Church are invited into an abundance mentality, vividly portrayed in Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000. Strangely enough, the Church too often operates with a scarcity mentality. Look around, and you will see desperate parishes impetuously selling their property just to hoard more bucks in the bank. You will see parishes slashing budgets, eviscerating music programs, and getting rid of staff members, all while expecting the remaining smaller staff to do more work for the same amount of pay. This, however, is not the case at Good Shepherd, and I’m grateful to our vestry and parish leadership for believing, time and again, in God’s abundance. We should not take for granted a marvelous opportunity before us: as God continues to rebuild this parish from the ground up, we can actively cooperate with God in letting a spirit of abundance and trust permeate all that we do.
At Good Shepherd, we see our buildings and property as magnificent gifts from God to be used for his kingdom and for the flourishing of our local community. Here, we are expanding financial support of music because music supports our worship (the most important thing we do), draws people into our common life, transforms lives, and will now be a source of formation for children. Here, we are investing more in our staff so that they are justly compensated and also valued as essential partners in ministry.
As we continue to trust in God’s abundance, our vestry has engaged Partners for Sacred Places to lead us in more effectively connecting with our local community as we seek to maximize use of our buildings and property. In their own words, Partners for Sacred Places “brings people together to find creative ways to maintain and make the most of America’s older and historic houses of worship.” Partners has a proven track record of guiding congregations in everything from space assessment to capital campaigns. For our purposes at Good Shepherd, Partners has already conducted a space assessment of all our buildings (the Parish House, the church, the rectory, the education building, which is rented out to Play & Learn, and the retreat house). Partners has presented us with physical dimensions on all those spaces, as well as recommendations for potential use in the future.
Partners is now helping the vestry plan for a Community Conversation to be held in early October. This conversation is intended to invite selected members of the local community into our buildings for a tour and brief presentation so that we can “show off” what we have to offer. We pray that a natural fruit of this conversation will be a greater awareness among our neighbors of who we are at Good Shepherd, what we do, and what we hope to do in the future.
While the Community Conversation is intended to be a focused, relatively small event led by a handful of parishioners, we welcome your input in connecting with people in the local community who are involved in the musical, dramatic, and visual arts as well as mental health and wellness work, all of which are consonant with the importance of the arts in our worship and with the healing ministry already happening in our retreat house. If you have suggestions for individuals that we might invite to the October Community Conversation, please let me know.
As planning for this conversation proceeds and in its aftermath, I will keep you posted on insights and future plans. Please pray for our work in the coming months, and as we do each day in our public prayer, pray for those, yet unknown to us, whom God will draw to this parish to be fed and to be a part of the feeding that happens so abundantly here.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle