Charles Dickens began his classic A Tale of Two Cities with these memorable
and in many ways prophetic words, “It was the best of times. It
was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens was referring to events
in the early 19th Century but could just as easily have been characterizing
the times in which we live with so much to celebrate and with so much
of which to be fearful. Peace and war, affluence and poverty, medical
breakthroughs and epidemics—these are the opposite poles within
which we live and move and have our being. Our faith teaches us that
it is God in whom we live and move and have our being, and while it’s
easy to find God or at least be grateful to God for those successes
and celebrations—those things we would characterize as the best
of times—it’s not so easy to find God in poverty, war, and
disease. But these are the contexts for ministry, these are the contexts
for our concern as Christians that our homes, our communities, our nations,
and our world might be places where God’s spirit is known, in
which God’s spirit is working to bring peace and healing and hope
for all of God’s children.
Such
is the ministry to which you and I and the Church are called to exercise
both within and without this particular branch office. The reports that
you have before you for the year 2004 are signs for peace and healing
and hope, and are evidences of God’s spirit in our midst, empowering
us in our worship, our formation, our outreach, and our pastoral care.
These are collectively the mission of our church and I could not be
more proud of what you are accomplishing in Christ’s name.
In the
first place, Christ Church is incredibly well-served by the ministry
of our Wardens and Vestry. Robin Anstaett and Bob Wilcox have been effective
and attentive in their oversight of Administration and Program. It is
an extraordinarily collegial relationship they have had with me, and
I have been privileged to have their support. Our retiring Warden Bob
Wilcox and Vestry persons Stuart Miller, Annette Peck, Kevin Sido, Rick
Taft, and clerk Melanie Cody, have offered significant contributions
in the areas of administration, finance, member development, music and
worship, personnel, investments and planned giving, with Melanie keeping
track of all that plus much more in her role as our clerk.
Molly
Bayley, Barbara Spencer, Rick Potter, Steve Anderson, Jim McGee, Esther
Berry, Ken Gould, and Rick Jones are providing leadership in the areas
of music and worship, buildings and grounds, children’s ministries,
funds disbursement, pastoral care, outreach, and stewardship. John Lien
continues to serve as our Chancellor, and Lawson Whitesides as our Treasurer.
They offer focus, attention, and insight into our legal and financial
affairs. All of their reports and some others are included in this Annual
Report and are a vital testament to the seriousness with which they
are serving God and this parish and I ask you to join me in offering
our thanks.
I would
also like to lift up our staff and to preface my thanks by saying that
rarely has a Rector been so blessed as I have been by these good and
faithful and talented people. Patti Snickenberger and George Smith have
submitted reports which attest to the breadth of their leadership and
extraordinary ministry in the areas of continuing adult education, pastoral
care, outreach, Sunday coordination and training, and newcomers, in
addition to their priestly duties in preaching, celebrating the sacraments,
and pastoral care. I was particularly appreciative of their work in
my Sabbatical absence which demonstrated once again how gifted and able
they are. It is important to note that your clergy are very involved
in the Diocese on the Commission on Ministry, Brent House Board, and
Secretary of the Convention for Patti; Cathedral Shelter Board and Volunteer
Coordinator of the Convention for George; and Board service for Episcopal
Charities and Community Services and the Chicago Association for the
Lost Boys of the Sudan for me. A few Sundays ago we bid farewell to
Jim Mathes who assisted from time to time when he was not attending
to his duties as Canon to the Ordinary. Jim was elected to be the next
Bishop of San Diego and while we were happy for him and his family we
were sad that Jim, Terri, Lee and Sarah would be moving away. Jami Anderson
is serving as our Seminarian for these nine winter weeks. I know she
appreciates your welcome and encouragement.
Richard
Clemmitt, our truly beloved Organist-Choirmaster, demonstrated yesterday
his talent, patience, good humor, encouragement, deep faith, and love
for this church and its choristers in the nine-hour marathon we have
called our Hymnathon. Our choral program is a gift not just to us but
to the wider church of which we are justly proud. This summer the choir
will make its fourth trip to England to sing in residence at Durham
Cathedral, and we have already received invitations for Lincoln Cathedral
in 2007 and Salisbury Cathedral in 2009. Richard has been besieged with
phone calls from England and I overhear him responding, “Take
your turn, take your turn.” Kirstin Synnestvedt and Elizabeth
Clemmitt are wonderful assistants whom we love dearly as well.
Melly
Turner is our Director of Children’s Ministries. Please read her
report which reflects a depth caring for our children and her appreciation
for the wonderful teachers in our Church School. Melly continues to
battle colon cancer with grace and deep faith. She is back home this
weekend after some tricky liver surgery, but is encouraged with the
results. I know how much she appreciates your expressions of love and
concern but especially your prayers.
Molly
Ethridge is our award-winning Parish Adminstrator, and all you have
to do is to check out our web site to appreciate her handiwork. Molly
is so creative and unflappable that it’s hard to imagine how much
she cranks out in the course of a year. Bulletins, schedules, Vestry
agenda and records, annual reports, churchyard administration, web site
magic, and Southwestern spirituality can all be found in her capable
hands and mind and heart among so much else.
Cathy
O’Brien as our bookkeeper, Dale Krone as editor of the Parish
Paper, and Mary-Anne Badenhorst as our now-retired office assistant
and Rummage coordinator have all been valuable members of our great
support team. Rena Kowalski has joined us as office assistant and Sharon
Staine as Rummage coordinator and we have been delighted to welcome
them and encourage them in their tasks. Rachel Turner-Lauck was our
summer receptionist and furniture mover during office renovations and
Barb Hambleton assists Cathy with accounting.
Jim Caldwell
is our facilities manager with the continuing challenge of looking after
our daunting properties. He does so with skill, and we are grateful
to have him. Mario Ruiz who has been one of our sextons for twelve years
and Dominic DiPaolo who has been sexton for one year are hard-working
and personable, and we really love them when it snows and when we have
that cup of coffee on Sunday morning. Sylvester Bona is our other sexton,
primarily for Rummage. I would like to say how grateful I am for your
wonderful support for the benefit last year that we had in the Great
Hall for the Lost Boys of the Sudan as well as to put in a plug for
this year’s benefit which will be a walk on April 23.
This
staff is such a great group of people who work well together and support
each other and are tireless in their work for this parish. They deserve
our thanks and praise.
Bev and
I continue to bemoan our empty nest but even more so when Elizabeth
Prevost and her husband Mike Guenther moved to Grinnell, Iowa. We are
so proud of her having been offered a tenured-track professorship at
Grinnell College which reminds me that at this meeting last year I asked
you to pray for her because she was being interviewed there. She has
you to thank for the job!
Marnie
is finishing her Masters in Museum Education at Bank Street College
in New York City while she works part time for the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine there. Clergy families have unique challenges which
Bev, Elizabeth, and Marnie handle with grace and I could not be more
deeply grateful for their love and support for me and their love and
support of Christ Church. One sad note was our dog Teddy’s death
a few days after Bev and I returned from England and Ireland. We know
that you know what that loss means, but no, we’re not getting
another dog just yet.
This
coming year will prove to be a time of challenge for us both locally
and globally. Locally there are two challenges and opportunities we
need to address as a parish. Last year at the Annual Meeting I announced
the formation of an exploratory committee chaired by Bob Bradner to
examine options for the development of the West Building. The mission
of the committee was to research, evaluate and communicate to the Christ
Church Vestry the utilization possibilities of the West Building Property
for enhancing the fulfillment of the parish’s mission, including
concerns for financial resources, Rummage, and service to the community.
That committee made its report to the Vestry last June, detailing the
options that we needed to pursue further. The Vestry in turn had several
meetings to consider that report and has concluded that we need an advisor
to help us see how to develop the property whether as a joint venture
or an outright sale to a developer, what developer would be best for
us, and how to negotiate with a developer. At a special meeting of the
Vestry earlier this month, the Vestry voted to engage Bob Horne of Dodge
Capital to help us with that process. Some of the issues include but
are not limited to whether the building would be developed for offices,
or mixed use, and whether the church would retain space for our own
purposes. Bob Horne’s role will include but not be limited to
identifying and interviewing potential developers to see what’s
possible, to make a recommendation between selling the property or joint
development, and then, if appropriate, helping the church with zoning
issues and permits and then, finally, advising us during the actual
development itself. Short of deciding to keep the building as is, selling
or developing the West Building would require a vote of the parish with
a two-thirds majority. If we get to that point it should represent a
very exciting prospect of enhancing the mission of this church on a
variety of levels. I want to commend the patience and thoroughness but
also the vision of Bob Bradner’s committee and the Vestry in considering
the hard questions and answers to those questions, some of which we
did not want to hear, but also their persistence that we move fast slowly,
as it were, to use as much diligence as would be required for the best
interests of the church and our mission. By God’s grace all will
be revealed for which I am very grateful.
Our other
local challenge is the revival of our 11:15 a.m. service on Sunday morning.
Our congregation at that service has been dwindling in stark contrast
to the 9:00 service and the rock-steady attendance at the 8:00 service
which meets at 7:45. The Music and Worship committee is considering
ways to revive attendance at 11:15 or other alternatives. Currently
we average 35 people at that service which includes 20 of us in the
choir and the clergy. The choir at 11:15 is a good choir, the preaching
is the same as it is for 7:45 and 9:00, and there’s a nice little
coffee hour in the cloister to follow. We have combined Rite I Morning
Prayer and Eucharist on the second and fourth Sundays of the month and
have Rite II Eucharist on the first and third Sundays with Healing on
the third Sunday as well. While a life-long Episcopalian might be able
to maneuver through those liturgical options, I’m not sure how
welcoming they appear for a newcomer. I have long been an opponent of
combining the 9:00 and 11:00 services for a variety of reasons, but
until we have more people in the congregation than we have in the choir
that will remain an option. Twenty or so empty-nesters would really
give that service a lift, but I would stop short of accepting the suggestion
of a parishioner that we serve cocktails.
However
we deal with our parish challenges we will have cause for celebration
next November on the 100th Anniversary of the dedication of this church
building. You may remember that in 1903 Emily Hoyt Fox and her two children
were killed in the Iroquois Theater fire in downtown Chicago. Her father
and mother offered to the then Rector Henry Gratton Moore to replace
the wooden church which had stood here since 1869 with a stone church
inspired by St. Martin’s in Canterbury, England. And so in quick
succession Christ Church was granted Parish status in the Diocese of
Chicago in 1904, and this church was built and then dedicated in November
of 1905. A committee has been established to generate some events and
programs around that anniversary and I’m happy to anticipate that
as well as to announce that on that Sunday next November Bishop Persell
will be with us to celebrate.
There
is, however, a more global challenge by virtue of Christ Church being
part of the Episcopal Church which in turn is part of the Anglican Communion
worldwide. Last year at this Annual Meeting I expressed my concern about
the threatened unity of the Episcopal Church in this country and the
Anglican Communion throughout the world because of the election and
consecration of Gene Robinson, an openly gay person living in a committed
relationship, as the Bishop of New Hampshire. Last September we received
the Windsor Report from a commission established by the Archbishop of
Canterbury addressing the issue of unity in the Anglican Communion and
which will be the subject of our Sunday Lenten forums this year.
That you
and I live in a global village is becoming increasingly apparent. The
disaster of the Tsunami in decades past would not have elicited the
same awareness as this one has, and came very close to home when several
close friends of parishioners were vacationing there and it took two
to three days to determine that they were safe, and when I called one
of our parishioners who is from Sri Lanka to see if any in her or her
husband’s family had been lost or injured (and fortunately they
had not). That we live in a global village has been reinforced by our
happiness and that of the Lost Boys of the Sudan at the signing of a
peace treaty ending the civil war in the north and south of Sudan after
twenty-one years. That we live in a global village is illustrated by
the growth and influence of the Anglican Church in Africa and its criticism
of the Episcopal Church in this country over issues of sexuality. Those
churches are no longer content to be submissive colonial recipients
of benevolence by the theologically sophisticated western churches of
Europe and the United States. Our challenge is to find ways to bridge
our differences, to celebrate those things which unite us in faith,
and to love each other as Christ has loved us.
To that
end I am going to establish a new committee at Christ Church called
the Mission Committee. The charter of that committee will be to become
educated about the Church globally, to identify potential partnerships
we might establish with Christians in what we are now calling the Global
South, to find ways to support those Christians when their churches
and schools such as those in the Sudan need to be rebuilt, and to reach
out in faith that we are connected to each other and that we can learn
what true faith is by their example. Long gone are the Poisonwood Bible
days of mission as today we look for mutuality and ways in which we
can support one another in very different parts of the world.
What kind
of a parish are we in trying to meet those challenges, and so many more
challenges which include concerns for the health and wellbeing of our
own parishioners, particularly those facing great personal battles with
disease, including the health and wellbeing of those at risk in greater
Chicago, including the health and wellbeing of those parts of the world
in which war and disease and deprivation are a way of life. One of the
great blessings for me this past year has been my Sabbatical and one
of the great blessings of the Sabbatical was the appreciation of icon
spirituality. I discovered that icons are considered “windows
into heaven,” that icons represent that thin space between heaven
and earth, and I thought how appropriate an image for what a parish
is all about! Can Christ Church be a window into heaven, which is to
say a place that can mirror or illuminate what God’s kingdom is
all about? Can we be that place where all who want to enter can find
rest, can find nourishment, can find unconditional welcome? Can this
be a place where we know that as we serve the least of Christ’s
brothers and sisters we are serving Christ himself? Can this be a place
where our praise and thanksgiving are songs in which we join with angels
and archangels? Can this be a place where every one of us is called
be a window into heaven? I believe we can. I believe that as God has
given us so many resources, God also gives us the will to reach out
and to reach in for the sake of the world God’s son came to save.
What a joy it is for me to be your Rector, and to share that journey
with you. Thank you and God bless you.
