"Here am I; Send me!" Annual Report to the Parish by The Rev. Donald Hamer, Rector

Posted on 5/31/2015

Trinity Episcopal Church

Trinity Sunday

May 31, 2015

“Here am I; Send me!”

 Isaiah 6:1-8

            This morning’s passage from the Prophet Isaiah describes Isaiah’s call to prophecy. The prophet’s description of his own call models to his readers an approach to recognizing the authentic call of God in the midst of changing and confusing cultural, political and religious circumstances. Even YHWH seems to wonder who will step forward in this situation. And yet Isaiah boldly responds: Here am I; send me. It is a great text for this year’s annual meeting.

          As I approach the middle of my 12^th year as your Rector, this is my 11^th annual report to the parish. Last year at this time, during my sabbatical absence, our Warden Mark MacGougan delivered an extraordinary sermon that began, “What would you do if you went to the doctor’s office and were told you had five years to live?” I think that got everyone’s attention. He masterfully highlighted our strengths and challenges as a congregation, and he inspired us toward a positive way forward.

          It bears pointing out that in the year since Mark’s sermon, I have been away for two and a half months on a scheduled sabbatical and, within one week of my return, was stricken with Whooping Cough, which is often fatal to infants and can be debilitating to adults with asthma. What we originally thought would be a one-to-two month absence extended into six months of illness. During this time my participation was not to be present among you, but to serve remotely as part of a management team led by our wardens and supported by my good friend Fr. Ben Brockman. While it was personally painful for me, there is good news in all this. When we as a congregation could have essentially put ourselves on “hold” until my return, our lay and assisting clergy leadership kept the congregation moving forward in virtually all aspects. While it may be true, as the Partners for Sacred Places report points out, that we perhaps lost a bit of momentum in certain areas during my absence, the fact is that upon my return, I have felt like I am running alongside a moving train and trying to figure out how to get back on. Thanks be to God for our lay and clergy leadership and for each and every one of you who has contributed to advancing the work of God through the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church during this past year.

          Since I wasn’t physically here for much of the year, I am not going to spend a lot of time this morning reviewing what everyone can read for themselves in the bound copies of the Annual Report. If you did not pick one up last week, they will be available once again prior to the start of the business portion of our meeting, along with copies of the Feasibility Study by Partners for Sacred Places. I do want to extend my profound thanks to our lay leaders, our dedicated parish staff, our assisting clergy and lay preachers and of course Fr. Ben Brockman for going above and beyond the call in keeping us all moving forward during my absence.

          What I want to report to you this morning is about the future. Your work has paid off. If you notice in this year’s Wardens’ report, included in your materials, Mark and Percy talk about our congregation as entering a period of adolescence. Oh, the doctor’s projection is still true – the 5 years’ worth of endowment is now down to four years based on our present endowment draw to support our budget. And yet most of the indicators for a healthy congregation continue to point upwards. We’re growing, giving is up, spending is down, new ministries are developing and flourishing. So it is natural for you to ask, “How can this be that we are on the one hand facing impending financial disaster, and at the same time poised for growth?”

          As part of my Doctor of Ministry work at Hartford Seminary I have come to experience firsthand what congregational development experts have known for decades: Every community of faith has a life cycle. If you take a look at the graphic in your service leaflet “The Congregational Life Cycle,” you will see that this life cycle – like a human life cycle –experiences periods of birth, growth, stability, instability, and decline. But unlike a human body, where the period of decline always ends in death, a corporate structure such as a church has choices other than eventual death. It has opportunities for redefinition, redevelopment and rebirth. And guess what, that’s what Jesus was talking about in John 3:3 when he answers Nicodemus, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ It is a spiritual rebirth that Jesus is talking about, and it is precisely that to which Jesus is inviting us at this point in Trinity’s history.

          In many ways, Trinity has been in a period of instability and decline since 1999, which was the last time that Trinity lived within its means. That was the last time that Trinity drew under 6% on its endowment to support its operations. And while Jack Pearson will share with you the financial aspects of how we got to where we are today and the realities of our present budget, what I want to point out to you right now is that what the Partners for Sacred Places Report is telling us is this: By virtually every measure of congregational health, Trinity is presently in the middle stage on the visual – in a period of redefinition, redevelopment and rebirth. The only place that we are in “decline” is in the extent to which we rely on our ever-shrinking endowment for our general operating expenses and the upkeep of our buildings. And this is where we get to Mark’s “5 – now 4 – years to live” scenario.

Many of you are old enough to remember one of the game shows in the early days of television called “Beat the Clock.” The idea behind the game was that contestants had a period of time – like a minute or so – to complete one or more tasks. If they “beat the clock” and completed the tasks, they won the designated prize. If they didn’t “beat the clock” then they entered virtual death as they returned to their seats in the audience empty-handed.It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to convince you that as in most games, it is much more fun to win.  And so it is that we are playing “Beat the Clock” with respect to our endowment. The Question becomes for us, how can we make The Parish of Trinity Church financially sustainable before the endowment “clock” runs out?

          Your Vestry, Lay and Clergy leadership have seen this day coming for most of the 11 years I have been with you, and led us to commission the Cynthia Woolever Futuring Study conducted in 2006, the time management study we went through with The Rev. Richard Tombaugh in 2010, and the present Partners for Sacred Places feasibility study which you received last week. Each one of these efforts has brought us closer to a stronger and broader base of lay leadership.  The good news from the Partners for Sacred Places study is that we are in most respects a very healthy and vibrant congregation. Their recommendations are that with some deliberate and sustained work over the next 12-18 months, we will be poised to mount an effective and successful capital campaign that will put a re-defined and re-developed Trinity into rebirth and financial sustainability. I hope we will have a fuller discussion of how this will play out at the designated point in our annual meeting.

          A word here about another initiative that has been working over the past year and a half, the Mission Discernment Initiative Group. This group concluded it meetings in April and is now preparing a summary of its deliberations. Whereas the Partners for Sacred Places study was conducted by outside consultants looking in with the goal of providing some very practical recommendations, the MDIG is a group drawn from a cross-section of Trinity parishioners with the goal of understanding, from a theological perspective, who we are as the people of God and what we are as a congregation. Unlike our Vestry, which by canon is responsible for protecting the institution of the church, the members of the MDIG were specifically asked to think outside the box of the church we know, to study and reflect upon the models of the 1^st century church – a study, I might add, that every mainline protestant denomination is presently undertaking. It is what Bishop Douglas has been asking us to do, and we are one of the few congregations that has actually undertaken such an effort on our own. Their work is but the very first phase of what will become a congregation-wide conversation about who and what we are called to be as a Eucharistic community of faith, the Body of Christ. Once their report is completed and reviewed by the group, we expect this to be the focal point of adult forums, preaching, and small group discussions over the next several years. Their work, and the many discussions that will flow from it, will help to guide our implementation of the Partners for Sacred Places recommendations.

And so, over the course of the next 12-18 months, I propose to lead you, arm in arm with our lay leadership, to implement the recommendations of the Partners report. This will include the following:

1. Tell our story. We have a remarkable history, starting with being the first “free” church in Hartford in 1859 and recognizing – in practice and not just in theory – the innate equality of every child of God. We, each of us, and more formally as a congregation, need to articulate that story and share it throughout the region.
2. We will offer two workshops to be held on a Saturday in the fall. One will be about preparing for a professionally-run capital campaign; the other will deal with ways in which we can share our space – including our worship space – with the wider community. These workshops will be offered for free by the Partners staff, and all parishioners will be invited and encouraged to participate. I also want to point out here that this in no way commits us to actually doing a capital campaign – it is simply exploratory so we are prepared if we decide we want to do a capital campaign in 12-18 months.
3.  Conduct a building conditions assessment and establish a space/use master plan for our expansive buildings. Such an evaluation will help guide our implementation of many of the other recommendations.
4.      Continue collaboration with community partners whose mission, vision and values align with our own. For over a year, I have been seeking another community of faith with a similar mission to our own to share in ministry and to share in the financial burden of maintaining our buildings and grounds. This past week, I called together the other Asylum Hill clergy to renew our own commitment to one another and to seek ways in which together we can further God’s mission here on Asylum Hill.
5. As I have already indicated, we will build upon the MDIG conversations with total parish involvement and align them with the Partners recommendations.
6. Communicate the diverse and important role that the parish plays in the life of our wider community. This involves articulating and advertising our parish’s important presence in our community, especially in our key areas of strength: Performing Arts, Education, Children/Families and Worship.
7. Continue to expand and improve upon our social media presence by developing a formal strategy to do so. Over the past several years we have moved money that used to be spent on newspaper advertising into digital communications and social media. Virtually every visitor to this parish identifies the internet as the way they learned about us, and we ought to expand our reach.
8. Continue to expand the pipeline of new leaders in the parish and create a mentoring strategy for same. Our Annual Team is a proven model of developing this form of leadership, and we need to model that to other ministry teams at Trinity. Each one of our ministry teams is a training ground for new and imaginative leadership.
9. To continue to grow in financial stewardship. This year the fruits of our annual appeal are approximately $100,000 higher than they were 10 years ago, at nearly $380,000.  For the second year in a row, more than half of our operating expenses are covered by current income and not endowment. As a congregation, we need to recommit ourselves to at least the goal, if not the actuality, of the 10% tithe. Our Annual Appeal team needs to continue and expand a year round conversation around stewardship. And we need to expand discussions around long-term Planned Giving by raising the profile of our Heritage Society, which has approximately 20 members at present. And as you can see in our weekly inserts, we need to keep the financial condition of the parish in front of the congregation throughout the year.
10. Continue to articulate, and create opportunities to engage, the myriad opportunities for shared vision and mission of the Choir School, Trinity Academy and the parish.  Among these proposals is to increase the visibility of the Choir School beyond the walls of the parish into the wider community, and Bert and I have been holding informal discussions as to what that might look like. Finally, we need to work on clarifying and articulating the relationship between the Parish, Choir School and Day School as mission-based partnerships rather than merely tangential or coincidental. They are investments in God’s mission.

11.And finally, we need to take better advantage of our rich history in the Hartford community and the historically-significant architecture of our buildings. Partners for Sacred Places started out 25 years ago as preservationists, and it is one of the aspects of our congregation that excites them about continuing to work with us. This is part of telling our story, and it can be done in a way that is vital and forward looking.

So that is what we are looking at for the coming 12-18 months. And we need to remember that this is not about “us.” It is about God’s desire for us to use our God-given gifts as investment capital for God’s mission not only on Asylum Hill but throughout our region and into the world. Those 1^st century Christians thought the world was going to end in a few years, and yet they committed themselves to changing the world one soul at a time. As Paul reminds us in this morning’s Epistle: For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

The plan we are laying out today by no means needs to include suffering, but it will be steady and continuous and always intentional, sometimes hard work. I, for one, am excited by it, and I hope you will be, too.    Like Isaiah, we are presently in one of those times of cultural, political and spiritual change. If we believe that the work God has set before us is important, Jesus calls us to follow him, and to follow Isaiah, in responding, Here am I; send me.” And I invite all God’s people here this morning to respond: AMEN!