Calling : Parish Ministry & Experience
Calling : Vocation | Parish Ministry | Life and Work | Personal and Family
Parishes in which I have served.
As a second-career, mid-life priest who came to the Episcopal Church from a different tradition, I’ve worked in three different parishes but I graduated from seminary only two years ago and I’m in my first cure as a Priest-in-Charge now (I also served as a deacon and missionary in an evangelical tradition through my early-thirties—see Personal section). Here is my parish history:
Grace Episcopal Church
Siloam Springs, AR
In my Sending Parish I was heavily involved as an acolyte and Eucharistic Minister. I redesigned their website in 2015. I also taught several formation classes on Sunday mornings. I attended Diocesan Convention officially for several years before going to seminary.
St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
Alexandria, VA
My Field Education placement was with the Rev. John Baker and The Center for Spiritual Deepening. During my two years there, I ran the adult formation classes every Sunday morning, preached monthly, and offered a four-session evening class at the Center.
St. Thomas à Becket Episcopal Church
Morgantown, WV
I was called as Priest-in-Charge for a two year term in June of 2019 at this 85 ASA parish in a college town on the border of PA and WV. It has been a wonderful community in which to learn and grow into my priesthood. I’ve led liturgy, created budgets, developed technology and A/V, taught classes, and more.
Administration in the Parish
I enjoy the challenge of strategizing, developing, and implementing new programs.
Formation Programs
My first assigned task from my vestry upon beginning in June was to recruit a new Children’s Formation Director, and plan the children’s programs. I also wanted to start a regular Sunday adult formation program. By the end of August, all was in place and has continued.
Website and IT
The parish website and technology platforms were woefully outdated.
By November we launched an all-new website as well as a new cloud-based email, calendar, and file sharing system.
Early into the following year we gave our parish management software a ten-year upgrade and moved it into the cloud as well.
Reports and financial data research presentation for our Annual Meeting 2020.
Financials
Researching, compiling, analyzing.
The parish had been without a priest for three years, and needed to know where they stood. I developed a set of spreadsheets for all the data from our 40 years of parochial reports and budgets, and created graphs and projections to present at our annual meeting.
This helped give context and perspective on some unexpected negative news for the parish, and appreciation was expressed.
Pastoral Care
As a priest, one of my greatest joys and most weighty responsibilities is to walk with my parishioners and community members through all aspects of life. Companionship is my model for pastoral ministry.
I sat with a pillar of the parish while she lay gently dying surrounded by her friends and family, and I read aloud from her favorite book, Homer’s Odyssey.
I stood with doctors and family as they argued over resuscitation going on in the next room, holding space and being available.
I held both parties in a divorce in love, affirming their different perspectives equally while walking with each toward separate paths.
I heard the story of a beloved gone far too soon—years in the past but still vitally present in heart—keeping vigil until the time may yet come for closure.
I kept vigil with a family waiting for their loved one in surgery, listening to their stories about them and providing a prayerful presence.
These and many others are the burdens and privileges of a priest’s ministry.
Testimonies.
Mutual Ministry Review.
Vestry minutes from my current parish in October 2020:
1. As a clergy leader, what does John do particularly well?
Technical abilities in setting up live streamed services, etc.
Good scholar and teacher; knows a lot
Enthusiastic and good provider of information
Good at seeing any weaknesses that exist
Kindness, harmony, warmth
5. How can we help our clergy leaders to focus more on their strengths?
Help Father John delegate better
Be more proactive with the use of the building without relying on Father John
Pandemic Ministry.
None of us expected how much life would change in March 2020, and it’s been a huge learning experience for priests adapting to a new way of being community in worship.
It has been a blessing to draw on my first career in media in planning and implementing new ways of gathering and celebrating together.
A Virtual Holy Week.
My first Holy Week as a priest was an adventure in creative challenges:
For Palm Sunday, I recorded a service moving from our parish garden to a palm-bedecked nave for broadcast.
I created instructions on how to celebrate home Agape Meals on Maundy Thursday.
We had a live-streamed liturgy for Good Friday along with ecumenical Stations of the Cross resources. I participated in a community clergy recording as well.
I created an Easter Vigil service in 10 parts, covering every reading with a meditation and ending with a sunrise service of Mass on the World.
See this archive of our Holy Week 2020 at St. Thomas à Becket
Moving to video.
For the rest of the spring and summer, I filmed and edited every service during the week before putting it up on YouTube. I began a live-streaming Evening Prayer service on Wednesdays that includes chanting and a meditation on the texts.
Our vestry meetings and formation classes have been well attended on Zoom, and I’ve also offered virtual coffee hours and pastoral conversations in this medium.
Live-Streaming
The workload was too high to continue with filming and editing services every week, plus as the months continued I could see many positives to a permanent live-streaming solution for the parish.
Together with new committees for Pandemic and A/V, and with the blessing of the Vestry, I developed a list of requirements, a plan, budget, fundraising campaign, and eventually installed the gear and began streaming in September 2020. We’re still improving and adjusting, but it has been going very well so far. Since this summer, we have together:
With the advice and assistance of several audio experts in our parish, we installed an all-new audio system into our nave which had nothing before, with a mixer, several different kinds of microphones, and a plan to add ADA hearing assist devices and expansion into our parish hall soon.
We’ve added two PTZ Optics (HD NDI) cameras controlled by OBS software for the video.
I have written detailed scripts based on our different liturgies for our volunteers to follow, and we’ve just begun training rotating teams now.
Discernment: Why am I leaving?
When I accepted the call to be Priest-in-Charge at St. Thomas à Becket for two years in May of 2019, myself and the parish were hoping it would turn into a full-time Rector position.
I came to West Virginia because I fell in love with the people of this parish. They have been wonderful companions for my first call, and I have no regrets about coming here. We’ve learned and grown together over these nearly two years.
In the end, the decision came down to budget realities.
The previous rector had retired three years before I arrived. While the vestry had done an amazing job keeping everything running in coordination with various supply priests, there were understandably some areas of neglect. Together we worked on budgets, financial projections, and trends. We discovered that over those past three years without a leader (2016-2019) the parish had quietly lost one third of both attendance and giving, and this put the budget with a full-time priest into serious imbalance.
At the same time, housing constraints and costs have risen in Morgantown, WV (a booming college town on the Pennsylvania border) and this has put even more pressure on both the church’s and my family’s budgets.
The final discernment shows this parish is not in a place to hire a full-time priest without rapidly running through reserves, and to my sorrow we had to make the difficult decision to withdraw from pursuit of the rectorship and find a new parish.
I will miss these people and this parish greatly,
and pray for all good things in their ministry ahead.
Calling : Vocation | Parish Ministry | Life and Work | Personal and Family