Yesterday I joined a new network of blogging Episcopalians. I had been part of an older network that seems to have gone defunct, but this new one has garnered twenty-nine members already and looks to have a good future. One reason I joined is that I got a very nice invitation, written as a comment on my last blog post, from proprietor, Lisa Jones. I’m convinced that folks like Lisa and her young family are the best hope we have as Episcopalians looking at declining church numbers. That’s certainly been the case in my parish.
St. John’s Episcopal Church is the second oldest surviving Episcopal church in the city of St. Louis, founded in 1841. Only Christ Church Cathedral is older. I served two terms as Senior Warden of St. Johns, from 2006 until 2012. During that time we increased membership and budgets so that the parish now supports a strong pastoral size congregation that is on the verge of becoming program size. Here is a photo of our present building, where the congregation moved in 1908. And here’s a video (embedded below) that tells our story. It was made by the national church in 2012 and illustrates what I think is needed if our national church is to reverse its present decline.
St. John’s had declined to a handful of members at the fime I first attended a service, partly because of changing demographics and partly for other reasons. One index of our growth is that we now have a thriving children’s program supported by a number of young families who have joined us over the past eight or ten years. We built some new nursery and sunday school spaces in 2010. Here is a picture that we recently featured on our Facebook page. It includes many of our youngest members. If you look at our Facebook page today, You’ll see a spread of photos from last Sunday’s Christmas Pageant in which you’ll see these same children and others. We’re blessed.
And we informally call St. John’s Tower Grove Church, affirming that we strive to be relevant to the Tower Grove/South Grand community in which we are embedded, with programs such as Peace Meal, Isaiah 58 Ministries, Integrity, and our partnership with Mann School. Also as we are called to a progressive ministry of relevance to the times in which we find ourselves, we seek to continue the work of the gospel as we are given to understand it.
In my last post I wrote about why I need the dark time of Advent, as the days grow shorter whilst a new liturgical year begins. It’s appropriate, I think, that we begin a new Christian year with a time set aside for reflection and waiting. What begins is the familiar story of the history of salvation, which is also the history of human being. We are called annually to renew that history in a world from which suffering and death and injustice and hypocrisy and crime have not only never disappeared but have also remained parts of our fundamental experience in the richest nation on earth.
Like many churches, my church has several congregations. We serve a meal every Saturday that is free and open to all who come, not just during Advent but all year. Some who come are homeless. However, in advent we might reflect that in serving this meal we honor Jesus’ Parable of the Banquet, which ought to remind us that the risk to our spiritual lives is always the practice of indifference to misfortune, and in modern times particularly the practice of ideological indifference. Advent reminds us that there is a darkness deeper than winter and calls us to a particular mindfulness. The vulnerability of the homeless, the hungry, the destitute, is our own.
Kyrie Eleison—God bless us every one!