May I speak to you in the name of the one, holy, and living
God. Amen.
This morning I want to share about the 2020 visioning
process currently underway at St. James.
As many of you know, next year will mark the 130th
anniversary of the founding of the parish and the 10th anniversary
of my tenure as your rector. Realizing that the congregation has not engaged a formal
strategic planning process since 2008, the vestry agreed that 2020 is an
opportune time to renew our vision of the future. "For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with
hope.”[1] The prophet Jeremiah tells us that God
already knows the plan. Our work in the
coming months is to discern together what the future looks like consistent with
God’s hope for us.
In
undertaking this visioning process, we do so confident that God desires St.
James to be a spiritually vital congregation engaged with God’s larger mission
of renewing the world. Here, the vestry
has been guided by the work of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research,[2] which defines
spiritually vital congregations as those that come together for a divine common
purpose in ways that are transformative to the people within them and their
communities.
There
are three critical indicators of vitality:
1. Relationships – building strong, respectful, and
loving relationships among members, between members and leaders, and between
the congregation and the wider community.
2. Leadership – sharing vision, building consensus or
motivation, being willing to experiment and try new things; model spiritual
practices and moral leadership.
3. Practices – engaging in activities that cultivate
faith and action, in terms of personal spiritual growth and compassionate
service to others.
As we move through this
visioning process, I invite us to be attentive to these three important
indicators of vitality. The prophet
Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant between God and God’s people, one in which
religion is not merely an external law or ritual, but is internalized, written
on the heart; in such a way that lives and communities are transformed by a
direct relationship with God.[3] Our mission
is to transform lives and communities through the experience of God’s love
revealed by Jesus and poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has
been given to us. The vision we cast is
in service to this mission.
I also want to emphasize
that the vision we cast must be rooted in collective discernment. It is not my vision. It is not the vestry’s vision. It must be our vision if it is to come
anywhere close to the future with hope that God desires for us. But there is more: this vision is not the property of the
members of St. James. The church exists
for the sake of the world, and the Holy Spirit is at work outside as well as
inside the church. It is not enough for
us to listen to one another as we discern God’s hope for us. We must listen to our neighbors as well. How can we serve in partnership with them if
we do not know them and understand their hopes and needs?
To that end, the visioning
process includes several components. We
have already completed the first phase: a congregational survey using an
instrument developed by the Hartford Institute.
More than fifty members of St. James have completed the survey, which is
an inventory of membership participation and demographics, programs, worship,
beliefs and personal piety. This provides
us with a baseline understanding of who we are and the hopes and needs of a
representative cross-section of the congregation.
We are about to embark on
a second phase: listening to our neighbors.
Along with Faith in Action Bay Area, we are hosting a “Soul of the City”
workshop on October 30 and November 6, one of many that will be held across San
Francisco. This is
an opportunity to learn about San Francisco history and explore what it would
look like to reclaim the soul of the city; aligning civic engagement with our
values. These sessions will inform our
visioning of the future at St. James.
In addition, this fall we are
conducting three focus groups with specific demographic cohorts in our
neighborhood, supported by Stephanie Martin-Taylor, our diocesan Communications
Officer, who will facilitate the sessions.
Each focus group will consist of a small group of 6 – 10 neighbors,
unaffiliated with St. James or any another religious group.
The first focus group will consist of
single young adults. A surprising 46% of
households within a three-mile radius of St. James consist of single, young
adults under the age of 35 living with roommates. The second focus group will be with older
singles and couples, and the third with middle-aged parents with children. Together, these three demographic groups
constitute about 80% of households in our area.
The purpose of the focus groups is to explore with the participants
their experience of community, spirituality, and civic engagement in San
Francisco.
This will help us to learn more about
the hopes and needs of our neighbors, and fill out the demographic data that
the diocese makes available to us.
Finally, we will engage with each other
in small group discussions informed by the results of the congregational survey
and what we are learning about our neighbors.
We will prayerfully explore the challenges and opportunities we face in
the next five to ten years, as we seek to be a spiritually vital congregation. We will discern how best to deepen
relationships, foster leadership, and engage practices that support God’s mission
in our time and place.
In this process, we all have a role to
play in prayerfully listening, sharing constructively, and dreaming boldly
together. The vestry’s responsibility is
to collate and interpret what we discover, and draft a 2020 vision plan to
share at a congregational meeting early next year, which will then be further
refined by your feedback. As we move
into developing a written plan, we will do so with the support of diocesan
staff, who will facilitate the process. Who is God calling us to become to receive
the future with hope that God desires for us?
That is the big question before us.
Of course, this question isn’t just
before us – the whole Church is grappling with it. We are undergoing a huge cultural, economic,
and ecological transition that is challenging all our institutions and
norms. The Church is not immune to the
anxiety and uncertainty that surrounds us, but we must and we can respond with
hope, because we have been here before.
We have a usable past, a tradition of faithful ancestors, who can guide
us as we adapt to new circumstances.
The new covenant of which Jeremiah
speaks is, in fact, a renewed covenant.
The people of his time were discovering anew God’s desire for their
well-being as they began to heal from the traumatic experience of war, forced
migration, and finally return to their homeland. Seventy
years they were in exile, and the Temple had been destroyed: the symbolic
center of their whole way of life and all that they held dear. They had to discover a new way to be faithful
to God’s steadfast love, to reimagine beloved community, and to risk vulnerability
in the aftermath of bitter failure and profound suffering. They had to risk embracing change, even if
they made mistakes in the process, to preserve what was truly life-giving for
future generations. We face a similar
challenge in our time.
In such circumstances, we would do well
to remember two things. The first is
that we have the treasure of scripture, a living tradition, to ground and guide
us. We are rooted in a lineage of
faithful witnesses. Scripture is
inspired by God; it is God-breathed or God-spirited.[4] It is a living word that comes to life
through its transmission in community. One
of the great sages of the last century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, described
Jewish scripture and tradition in this way,
The storing of the
Spirit, the content of Judaism’s memory, is the educational material that
nourishes us. What has been written down
into books is like the body. The soul
exists only in the act of transmission.
The books are only signs, notes.
It is the aliveness of the Jew that makes music from it.[5]
We might say the same thing: it is the
aliveness of the Christian that makes music from scripture. We bring it to life, and it brings us to
life, in the dialogue between memory and hope.
Scripture represents the pole of memory.
The second thing is that we must always
pray and not lose heart, as Jesus reminds us.
In the parable of the persistent widow confronting an unjust judge, we
are given an image of prayer as active engagement in the work of justice.[6] Prayer is not passive, opposed to
action. It is not a question of praying
or acting, but of acting mindfully or acting mindlessly; specifically, it is a
matter of acting with awareness of God’s desire for justice, for right
relationships in the world.
There is a story told about Rabbi
Heschel, who walked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the long civil rights
march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand justice from Governor George
Wallace. Upon returning home, someone
asked the rabbi, “Did you find much time to pray while you were in
Alabama?” To which the great man
replied, “I was praying with my feet.”
Praying with our feet represents the pole of hope. It is in the interplay between memory and
hope that we discover how to live into the future that God desires for us.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen
[1]
Jeremiah 29:11
[2]
Linda Bobbitt, Vital Congregations (2018,
p. 2-5) at www.FaithCommunitiesToday.org.
[3]
Jeremiah 31:31-34.
[4]
II Timothy 3:14-17.
[5]
Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Idea of Jewish Education,” in Helen Plotkin, ed., In This Hour: Heschel’s Writings in Nazi
German and London Exile (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2019),
p. 13.
[6]
Luke 18:1-8.
