Downton Abbey Reflection: The Church in a Changing World by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church
3rd Sunday After Epiphany
January 31, 2016
Jeremiah 1:4-10 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13 Luke 4:21-30
How many of you have ever watched the PBS Masterpiece Theatre Series Downton Abbey? It’s on each Sunday night at 9 p.m. Now in its 6th season, the series depicts the lives of the aristocratic Crawley Family, headed by Robert Crawley, also known as the Earl of Grantham. They all live in a grand Yorkshire country estate known as Downton Abbey, along with their crew of servants. It is set in early 20th Century England and over its six seasons the viewer has lived with the family and their servants through personal tragedies and triumphs, trials and intrigues even as we witness the changing social landscape in aristocratic England and the rest of the world.
Now, I don’t watch much television and I confess I had not seen so much as an episode until the third season. I watched it because Debbie was watching it, along with half my friends. Except I hated it. I hated the aristocrats with their sense of privilege and feelings of entitlement. I hated what they stood for. I didn’t feel sorry for them when it turns out that their lavish lifestyle and their poor investments of their inherited wealth required that, essentially, they marry into more money in order to keep the whole operation going. I hated that the servants were trapped in a kind of permanent caste system, even as they upheld this system that supported them and provided them with a certain sense of security. I had trouble keeping the characters straight because they all looked alike to me.
In the fourth season I continued to struggle, but at least kept the characters straight. In last year’s episodes, I found that I was actually beginning to get into the show a little bit, getting to know the characters better and coming to appreciate their situations. I still bristled when the aristocrats had their servants prepare them to mount their horses and take a hundred dogs to chase a single fox.
And this year I find I am actually engaged, looking forward to each new episode. I have actually begun to sympathize with them, at least a bit, when the neighboring estate has to be auctioned off and the Crawley family dutifully goes over to share their condolences. I have a touch of empathy as we see one of the servants, trying to get a senior position at another estate, finds that each estate is worse off than the previous one, teetering on the brink of suffering the same fate of having to be auctioned off, as the aging owners sit in despair waiting for society to reverse itself and return to the halcyon days when the job of the rich was to manage their estates.
And it suddenly dawned on me as I watched the show about three weeks ago, as I saw the neighboring estate up for auction, as I watched the various members of the Crawley family wishing their neighbors well and watching their priceless family heirlooms on sale for pennies on a dollar, as I heard of the neighbor’s plans to take a small apartment in London, I thought, “My God, this could be Trinity.”
n They live in a beautiful, huge, expensive mansion that their shrinking resources can no longer maintain. Among the financial figures that you will hear later this morning is that this building and associated costs swallows up a full 50% or more of our annual pledge income.
n They are living off of inherited wealth that they neither merited nor earned – they simply have come into it by the chance of birth or association through marriage. While very few of us were actually “born into” our Trinity family, the fact is that as far back as the 19th century, clergy and wardens were cautioning the congregation that it could not continue to rely on its endowment – its inherited wealth – for operations – either that, or it needed a far bigger endowment. When I was called as your rector, one of the conditions that the diocese set was that the congregation cut its expenses. And, with the exception of capital expenditures to preserve our buildings, we have been doing that ever since I arrived here.
n They are living a lifestyle that is a throwback to another era, challenged by modern technology and a shifting political and social climate. The fact is, the paradigm of the church as many of us grew to know it and love it in the mid-and even late-20th century is no longer a sustainable model in the 21st century. Please hear me: I am not saying that we should, as it is said, throw out the baby with the bathwater. There are many, perhaps even most, of the traditions and practices we have inherited that still further God’s mission, that should be honored and nurtured. But we have in our own congregation two religious leaders – retired bishop Drew Smith and retired Methodist District Superintendent Dennis Winkleblack – who have watched the pattern across denominations for years. Professor Scott Thumma, my advisor at Hartford Seminary, has spent his career studying this phenomenon. More and more across the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, we are seeing the pattern that when a full-time rector leaves, the position is filled by a part-time Rector or Priest in Charge. The very same thing just happened at our sister church down the street, Grace Lutheran. It was only last month that the Vestry of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Waterbury – an urban church with a proud history – voted to sell their building. It is a reality that we at least have to acknowledge as we look at our future, and certainly not one that we can ignore.
So I saw these parallels with our situation at Trinity. And in the very next instant, I breathed a sigh of relief and thought, “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Because unlike the folk on Downton Abbey, we together are far more than an anachronistic social society. We together are built on far more than the accident of where and to whom we were born along with the bank account and social entitlements that came with them. We are the Body of Christ, built upon the strong rock of our faith, Jesus Christ, and the testimony of those down through the ages who have assured us that God does have a plan for us.
For more than a decade, our Treasurers have been telling us that we are overdrawing on our endowment. A number of things have been suggested – that we increase our membership and that will expand our pledge base. If we “just get the word out” about what a great group of Christians we are more people will be drawn to join us. All of these and others are great ideas and should be part of any plan. But the fact of the matter is that unlike almost all Episcopal churches in the area, we ARE growing, our income from parishioner offerings IS GROWING, we DO have young families in the congregation. And yet – and yet – the endowment continues to shrink as we continue to draw excessive amounts in order to keep the property – our Downton Abbey – afloat.
Our dilemma for 2016 is framed by two resolutions that came out of our Diocesan Convention this past November.
- Any church that does not contribute to the diocese an amount equal to 10% of its prior years’ operating expenses for two years in a row will be considered an “aided parish” and basically lose its right to manage its own finances.
- Any congregation that draws more than 25% of its endowment over a three year period is also to be considered an “aided parish.”
The bad news is that Trinity, as it has been operating until recently, was running afoul of both of these resolutions. The result: If we did nothing differently, by early 2017 the diocesan financial officer would show up to take control of our remaining endowment and begin managing it for us, severely restricting our access to it. Now, we can bristle at this and complain. But the fact is, even without diocesan intervention, if we continued to spend as we have in the past, we would run out of money on our own in the next 3 years so.
And so your Vestry has taken the courageous step to review our operations and make some dramatic cuts in the 2016 budget that will set us on a firmer financial footing and establish a strategic foundation on which to build for the future. These cuts also buy us some valuable time to explore alternative futures for us and all of the Episcopal churches in the Hartford area. We will highlight those specific budget and program areas during the discussion that will take place following our worship this morning.
But let’s look beyond money to look at what Christ’s church is really about, and that is mission. In some ways, we have been building for an alternative future for a number of years.
n Five years ago, when we officially became a “one clergy on staff” parish, we introduced our system of Ministry Liaisons, in which experienced and dedicated lay leaders take on the primary responsibility of coordinating the individual ministries in the areas of Christian Formation, Outreach, Worship and Parish Care. That system has been strengthening for five years, and will now have more of an impact than ever.
n Our Vestry commissioned the study by Partners for Sacred Places which you all received last summer, a study which makes specific recommendations over the next 12 to 18 months for ways in which Trinity can continue to grow its ministries even in the midst of the societal and financial challenges facing us. The budget choices which have been made for 2016 go a long way to addressing some of those challenges.
n And my own Hartford Seminary Doctor of Ministry project, the Mission Discernment Initiative, which reported to us in late summer of this past year also took an in-depth look at our ministries and made recommendations about possible paths to a healthy and robust future.
Facing change is never easy, and leading it is even more daunting. We wait for someone else to show us how to do it, hoping that some ecclesiastical super-hero is going to rise up and make everything better. Look at the Prophet Jeremiah – we saw this morning how he resisted his call to lead change. Like Moses did before him, when the Lord asks him to take up his ministry, he protests, “I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” He revisits this theme in various ways throughout the book. But notice how God responds: Do not say, ‘I am only a boy,” for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Unlike our Downton Abbey friends, we are not meant by God to sit in our Temple on Sigourney Street and wait for the next great thing to happen. Our manor house, sacred as it is, is not to be an end in itself: It is a place of welcome, hope and healing where God’s chosen are called, fed and nurtured not to rest happy in that, but so that they can go out into the world to the glory of the God who both calls us and sends us.
God also tells Jeremiah that his task will be to pull up and pluck down those things which do not serve God, and also to build up and plant what will become the fruit of God’s mission. It is a full-scaled renewal of the creation to re-align it with God’s mission for the future.
But perhaps most importantly, going back to my opening discussion of the Downton Abbey family, look at what God tells Jeremiah at the very beginning of the passage: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. Unlike the characters from British aristocracy, Jeremiah’s mission is not based on his ancestry or his station in life; it has nothing to do with his abilities or what he has shown himself to be capable of – it is based on God’s call to him. Jeremiah is kind of the “everyman” of Biblical heroes. And what he is called to is to tell his people that God desires more for them – and expects more of them – as a community of faith.
At our Vestry meeting last week, we talked about all kinds of alternatives for Trinity and who we are as a community of faith. And for the first time, we forced ourselves to wonder out loud what would happen if we sold this building. It was pointed out – correctly – that the parish of Trinity Church is more than the building in which it meets. It is the mutual bonds of affection and care that we share, coupled with our baptismal covenant to follow and further the work of Jesus Christ, that makes us a church. And we as a community of faith must at least have this discussion over the next couple of years: How much of who we are as a parish is tied into this building, in this neighborhood of Asylum Hill? We are not going to answer this question today, but we do need to know this: If we determine – as well we may – that this much beloved house of worship is to continue as part of our identity, then we have to develop in the very near future a realistic plan for doing so.
We at Trinity Church – in the Christian church in general—share Jeremiah’s call. It is the same call each of us received in our baptism, a call to renewal that many of us committed to just three weeks ago. God is calling us to something greater than we have been, and God has promised, through the incarnation of Jesus the Christ, to provide us with all that we need to accomplish God’s deepest desires for us. So let us gather strength and courage for the journey in our worship, and having been fed with the spiritual food of Jesus’ Body and Blood, approach the work our Lord sets before us. The Lord does lead us through times of change; life is always changing, for as Paul writes in 1st Corinthians: For we know only in part, and we prophecy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. . . For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully . . . In the words of the blessing from the Daily Office, Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the church, and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever. AMEN.