All Hands on Deck!

Dear People of St George:

In the last issue of the Dragoneer Mary Lou Bensabat, our senior warden, reflected on things nautical. After asking us to “look up” at the architecture of the church she uses the hull-shaped nave of the church as the analogical jumping point for a metaphorical pondering about where we might find ourselves as a church right now… “Are we drifting at sea?” she asks.

Truth told, I’ve been “looking up” quite a bit recently. I’ve been wondering where our “ceiling” is, really. Have we reached it yet? Expanding both literally and metaphorically on Mary Lou’s reflection, what would St. George’s look like if you turned it upside down and rather than waiting for visitors started sailing down the avenue picking up people who needed a ride with God? What if we decided that the most beautiful room in our house was the least versatile and we took out or moved around the pews?

Several vestry members and I attended a seminar this past weekend entitled “Buildings as Tools for Ministry.” The most fascinating part for most of us was a paradigm representing the difference between problems and solutions, problems representing potential abundance and solutions presenting potential scarcity. For example, before coming to St. George’s I was told that what the Vestry and Search Committee wanted was for the church to return to its pre-storm reality. According to the paradigm set forth at the seminar this past weekend, returning to a pre-storm reality is a solution, not a problem, and therefore can only bring forth scarcity, not abundance.

The paradigm we learned this weekend is uncannily accurate. In many ways we have returned to pre-storm numbers and the fact is things – people, energy, and dollars – are still scarce. Our seminar leader would tell us that we have identified a solution but not the problem! So, good people of St. George’s, what’s the problem? How do we move from scarcity to abundance? Why are we here? What is our Godly opportunity of abundance and ministry? To find out we might need to look at things differently. Turn some things upside down and see what falls out.

Look up at the ceiling. Look at the walls and the floors. Keep your eyes open for changes as we address new problems. Support our recent campaign to establish a healthy Associate Rector Fund. Attend and participate in the life of the church. Help us as we define and address Godly problems rather than human solutions, and we’ll see what God has in store for us…

Peace,
Jim