On the Roles of Vestries and Clergy

The Vestry is a learning, praying community of spiritual leaders
who oversee, plan and guide the ministry of the parish.

Background note: This was originally posted on the list-serve of the Diocese of Bethlehem, then known as “Bakery," in response to a conversation thread about the role of the clergy, Vestry, and congregation (through the congregational meeting). I cannot remember what the original situation was, except that what was being discussed was a lack of clarity among the members of the Vestry and, perhaps, the clergy of a parish as to the proper role of the Vestry. This lack of clarity was apparently causing a persistent “pinch." 

I wrote this post because the thread revealed many questions about the appropriate roles of vestry, clergy, and congregation in an Episcopal parish, which I found to be fairly common in the many parishes I've served and in others that I have come across. 

Canon Bill Lewellis published this on the blog DioBeth newSpin on August 24, 2014.

There is a tendency in this country to run Episcopal Churches according to a congregational (where the whole congregation makes decisions) or a Presbyterian model (where elected committees and officers make the decisions) and in both these the clerics find themselves in the role of preaching consultants or maybe as the hired help. Sometimes, in the name of promoting lay ministry, the cleric sets aside his or her appropriate role. Other times, the Vestry (or maybe one of the officers) has taken on the corporate, material needs of the parish to the exclusion of the pastoral, spiritual, and mission work of the congregation. The situation you described is apparently one where the lay leadership seems to have fallen into one of those models to bad effect. It is not an uncommon problem.

There is an equal tendency to organize Episcopal Churches along Roman Catholic lines, where the priest is in total charge and the vestry and lay leaders exist solely to raise funds, maintain the property and carry out the priest's vision. This can have the effect of holding lay leadership back from taking their full place in the life of the church. 

We Episcopalians, on the other hand, strive for that elusive via media.  Unlike our Catholic or Reformed sisters and brothers, we assume a partnership between clergy and laity. In the Episcopal Church, the congregation elects the vestry to work alongside the Rector as both partners in and leaders of ministry and mission. This works on two axes.

The first axis is procedural. The Rector has complete use of the property for mission, and complete oversight over worship including music and has final responsibility for Christian formation.  The Vestry has control over the purse strings, and yet is canonically charged to see to the materials necessary for the worship and mission of the church. That "check and balance" suggests that the process works best when the parties work together as partners.

The second axis is pastoral or theological. We assume in the Episcopal Church that vestry members share in the spiritual and pastoral leadership of the parish with the clergy. We don't specify this in the canons but best practices show us that Vestry members who attend worship regularly, give proportionally and sacrificially to the work of the church, and participate in both the formation and outreach of the parish will make the best vestry members. A well-functioning Vestry grounds their deliberations and decisions in prayer and study.  Vestry members share in the spiritual leadership of the parish along with the priest.

So the mission of the parish belongs to both the Rector and the Congregation through the Vestry. In our tradition, it is the Vestry and the Clergy working in concert that oversees, directs, manages, and envisions ministry.  And we do this in concert with the community of the diocese through the ministry and oversight of the Bishop. 

The Rector is not an employee of the congregation but is called to the congregation. The call is made and ratified by both the Bishop--who is the chief pastor of a diocese--and the Vestry. While the Rector has tenure, she or he still represents the Bishop to the congregation, just as the congregation is the living presence of the diocese in the community. The relationship in a parish is a three-way covenant between bishop, priest, and vestry. 

The rubrics and content of the celebration of a new ministry in the BCP describes this relationship very clearly.

When there is no resident Rector, the Bishop fills that role. The terms "vicar" means "representative" and in a mission church, the vicar represents the Bishop who is the Rector of that parish. In parishes that have priests-in-charge, the same applies. The difference is that missions are generally not self-supporting parishes while congregations that have priests-in-charge are generally self-supporting but without a Rector. 

The idea of a priest-in-charge is a fairly new creation of General Convention and (if I am not mistaken) was intended to give canonical authority to interim clergy, who have been utilized in the Episcopal Church for many years but, before this canon, were less than rectors but served longer than supply clergy. While the canon has solved some problems, there have been other applications which have sometimes worked well and other times not so much.

More and more, the Priest-in-charge canon has often been used to shorten the search process...a priest-in-charge is appointed by the Bishop with the Vestry's approval of a letter of agreement; and, if all goes well, then the Vestry might nominate and elect that person as Rector. There is considerable debate about the utility of using this canon in this way since, generally speaking, interim pastors do not become Rectors, but many Priests-in-charge do. In any event, the status of a priest-in-charge is similar to that of a vicar: they represent the Bishop (who is Rector in name or in effect) and serves at the pleasure of the Bishop. With both the Vicar and Priest-in-charge, the appointing authority is the Bishop and the person is not "called" in the same sense as a Rector.

Using long term supply, especially without a specific letter of agreement or with mission plans and detailed accountabilities has all the pitfalls that Scott mentions and, IMHO, tends to freeze a parish in place because they might get used to moving from Sunday to Sunday. Any congregation of any size and clerical status can slip into survival mode, for sure, but this might encourage that perspective.

Here are some very good resources that describe this in the Episcopal context very well:

Beyond Business as Usual by Niel O; Michell from Church Publishing. Michell offers a way forward for Vestry's to become learning communities and to take their place in the mission and spiritual leadership of a parish alongside their priest.

Back from the Dead: The Book of Congregational Growth by Gerald W. Keucher also from Church Publishing. Keucher has brought together most of the best thinking about congregational development and put it together with his experience in the stewardship and management challenges of parish ministry.

I also recommend another book by Keucher that helps vestries and clergy understand their proper relationship: Humble and Strong: Mutually Accountable Leadership in the Church.

Finally, I appreciate the bringing together of Benedictine spirituality and intelligent organizational wisdom found in Bob Gallagher's Fill All Things: The Dynamics of Spirituality in the Parish Church from Ascension Press. I have trained with Gallagher and have found his approach to be most useful and accessible to congregations. 

Six lessons from a missing Jesus

Sometime during Advent, someone made off with the baby Jesus figure in our parish's manger scene right in front of the church. I did not notice the missing Jesus until the Sunday after Christmas.

I put out the word on social media, which generated a newspaper story, and then a story on the local television, as well as various reports on the region's radio stations. The story went far and wide on the internet, particularly through Facebook. We received many kind words of support, offers to help or replace the figure, and even a few jokes and some snarky comments.

On the whole it was a good experience. All of the attention has, so far at least, has not resulted in the figures return but it did give us a chance to put our best foot forward to the community and for some very good conversation...often by e-mail or in social media...among ourselves, the members and friends of Trinity, Easton.

Here are few lessons I have learned from the whole thing.

1. When faced with a crisis, especially one not of your own making, decide early if your stand is going to hopeful or hurtful, compassionate or defensive, arrogant or humble. That means not only telling only what you know, but building a framework of meaning for the crisis that is consistent with your organization's or church's values.

I talked with three reporters during as this unfolded, and all three asked me in one way or another whether this was a "hate crime," or an example of the "war on Christmas." I don't blame them for this; after all, their job is to tell the story and a priest who was red-faced with anger or else calm and forgiving would be part of the story one way of the other.

Besides, these questions were certainly on the minds of their readers and viewers. All you had to do was look at the several comments that appeared on social media and the various web sites, speculating about the motives of the thieves. The comments included everything from assumptions that the figure was going to be sold to buy drugs, to derogatory names attached to the perpetrators. It would have been very easy to join in the chorus of offense.

We chose, more or less in the instant, that we weren't going to go there. That we just wanted the figure returned "no questions asked." It has happened that way once before, there was no reason to assume that it would not happen again.

2. Keep it in perspective. 

Behind the hate crime question (and the comments by some folks that this incident was a sign of the general decline of western civilization) was the temptation to catastrophise.

That's why I use the term "disrespect" in response to the television reporter's question about whether this was a hate crime. The act was disrespectful, but whether it was a prank, a bad joke, or a statement about the church, one could not say based on the figure's absence alone. To compare our loss to the real losses and injury experienced by people of faith whose churches are burned down, or who lose their lives for believing, or who are displaced because of their faith is at best silly and at worst narcissistic.

It seemed also to us that the presence of the hungry and the homeless in our Saturday Ark Soup Kitchen is a much greater scandal.

The pain and the sense of loss is real and we need to honor that, but we have to keep it in context.

3. Keep your eyes open for hidden and surprising gifts.

One of the gifts was the discovery that a significant chunk of the congregation had internalized the message that Advent is not the same as Christmas, but is a season of waiting. When everyone, lay and ordained, are necessarily running around getting ready for Christmas--both at home and in the parish--this lesson can lost in all the noise.

But it turns out that people noticed the missing Jesus a long time before Christmas and simply assumed that because it was still Advent, the baby Jesus would not show up till Christmas. So one gift was the realization that our formation works on levels above and below consciousness. In a strange way, the incident showed us to be more fully formed than we knew.

This did not only show itself in a better understanding of the church's calendar, but also appeared in the ability of lay people to think about their faith through this incident in wonderfully creative ways.

And, of course, our neighbors and friends outside the congregation and in our parish, the City of Easton, were wonderful and supportive. Even people of different faiths or of no particular faith, all sent us warm wishes and passed along our story hoping the thief would have a change of heart.

4. We are people with a message. 

We started out looking for a lost baby Jesus figure. We found ourselves being messengers of Good News. Media was our friend in this instance. The lesson here is that Christians who have a message of hope should not be afraid to communicate it in ways that our culture understands.

5. Humor helps.

I learned a long time ago in hospital ministry that humor can keep the stress demons away. At the same time, it is important that we stay present to the real pain of people who are hurting. So humor has to happen in the right way, in the right place, and at the right time.

Humor can help keep things in perspective, especially when the phone is ringing off the hook. But don't expect the joke to accepted or understood outside of your context.

I created two things which I circulated mainly among close friends and staff when things started to get a little surreal. One was a fake ransom note created on a thing called "The Ransomizer."

Another one was this:

6. In a crisis, the job of leadership is to give direction and to frame the meaning around the event. That means for religious communities being able to think on our feet theologically. 

We, of all people, have to be able to ask out loud where God is in the mess and what do we do as faithful people. This is made much easier if the community has done their work beforehand so that they know their mission, have a common language, and have decided what their core stance as a faith community will be.

This is the background for what became a general letter to the congregation that attempts to frame what was going on in terms of our theology and mission.

At Trinity, this work has been going on for a long time. For example, at the rear of our church, near the entrance to our parish hall, is an old "Episcopal Church welcomes you" sign that is perhaps forty or fifty years old. When we built our new kitchen and addition in 2010, we hauled it out of retirement and put it up over the new entrance. It says

"Trinity Episcopal Church

Founded in 1819

A Church for All People"

That's was quite a mission statement! Every day it is a challenge to live into that. Every now and then we succeed. This was a moment when the congregation led the community and in so doing witnessed to the Gospel in a powerful yet simple way.

Leadership that makes you feel safe

I have been thinking a lot about leadership especially over the past two years.

Over the next several weeks, I want to use this space to reflect on leadership and the communities they serve, especially in the context of parish ministry where I live and work right now.

To start, I share a TED talk by Simon Sinek who describes why good leadership makes people feel safe. It helps answer a basic question-- "What's a leader for?"

Here is a pull quote to start the discussion:

"Leadership is a choice, it is not a rank. I know many people at the senior-most level of organizations who are not leaders - they are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations, who have no authority, and they are absolutely leaders, because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them and to the right of them. This is what leadership is."