Monday, October 21, 2019

2020 Vision: A Future With Hope





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.

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