Reality
Canon Loren Lasch
201st Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia
Thank you, Bishop Logue, and good morning, everyone. As Bishop Logue said, I am the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese. I began in this role in July of 2020, and so I may still be a relatively new face to many of you. However, before this time, I spent 16 years of my life as a part of this diocese, first as a high school student, and continuing on through college, seminary, and the first five years of my priesthood. This is the Diocese that shaped me and encouraged my vocation…I see many faces in this room who have played an integral part in shining the light of Jesus Christ into my life. I have been so grateful to be back in my diocesan home these last two and a half years!
Before I share with you what I’d like to talk about today, though, I should be honest…when I first arrived here, a month after beginning my freshman year of high school in 1995 I was…not grateful. And maybe just a teensy bit bratty about it. My mother and I had moved from Gordonsville, VA, a town of just over 1500 people where I’d lived all my life, to the sprawling, grand metropolis of Savannah (remember…1500 people). I went from being in a class with several dozen people I’d known since kindergarten, to a class of several hundred people I’d never met. And I’d left behind my church family at Christ Church in Gordonsville, people who had helped raise me from birth, who knew me and loved me, just as I was. I was not happy about this move.
In time my mother and I joined St. Paul’s in Savannah, and were graciously welcomed by the community there. In the spring of my sophomore year of high school, still unhappy with the move and feeling lonely and adrift, I attended Happening #52 at Honey Creek. Happening is a Christian weekend retreat for youth, led by youth, that encourages faith renewal, community, and discipleship. I’d been signed up for the weekend by Father William Willoughby, the Rector of St. Paul’s (a risky move on his part!) and I knew very little about what I was in for. We had a family funeral that week, and so I was several hours late arriving to Honey Creek. Happening doesn’t begin until everyone has arrived, so I walked into a room full of people who all turned to stare at the person who’d delayed their retreat. Not at all awkward. As my mother spoke with the organizers to get me signed in, a kind young man ran over to welcome me. At that moment the entertainment team began to play the song Lord of the Dance. If you were active in diocesan youth programs in those days, you know that whenever that song was played, the crowd went wild and began dancing and running around the room. The kind greeter grabbed me by the hand, yelled “hey, I’m Cletus, c’mon, let’s dance!” and took off running. I immediately fell to the floor, and proceeded to be dragged across the room while he sang with glee and joined the group.
If my life had been a movie, that would be the point when everyone else would suddenly freeze, and I’d look directly into the camera and say something like “how in the world did I get here???” At that moment I did not feel hopeful, or ready for renewal. I felt even more deeply in my bones that I did not belong here and I wanted my life to go back to exactly the way it was before.
During a Happening weekend there are a series of talks given by the teenage staff members, about challenges and opportunities that youth face on a regular basis, and how God is present in those moments. One of the first talks at each Happening is the Reality talk. It invites the participants to think about the different realities of our lives – physical, material, social, and spiritual.
Basically, it asks the listeners to ask where they are in the present, and how God is a part of that reality. Listening to that talk, on that first night, I did not have a sense of God’s presence in my reality. I so longed for what had been that I couldn’t see past my disappointments and envision a future of new possibilities, with Jesus walking alongside me.
As you might have guessed, much changed for me during that weekend. It was my road to Emmaus experience. I saw, possibly for the first time, how God was present in my reality, even when that reality wasn’t what I expected or even what I hoped for. When I was able to begin to let go of the way things were, I saw that God was calling me forward, into the community of this diocese and the joy could come with sharing in ministry here.
This is a long introduction to the core of what I’d like to share with you all today: the reality of our present moment as the people of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. The reason I share this story of my own recognition of God in the midst of reality is not to say “look at how faithful I was!” It’s to share that, even though I had that powerful experience, many times since then I’ve fallen back into the default of missing the presence of God in the now, because the then was better. I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that many of you have, too. Episcopalians aren’t really known for liking change!
The way in which I’ve embraced this tendency the most has been, of course, in the months and years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In March of 2020, I’d already begun the interview process for this role, and had spent a good bit of time thinking toward the things I’d love to focus on if I were to return back to the Diocese of Georgia. COVID guidance and risk mitigation strategies were not among those things. The arrival of the pandemic put a halt to so much, in our lives and in our churches. We spent so much time yearning to return back to normal, to pick up where we left off and not lose all the momentum we’d built.
But normal never came. Church life has been different in so many ways. Some of them brought unexpected joy, like livestreaming services so we could join in community. But many of them have brought stress and worry and disillusionment into our parishes. Rather than directly facing that reality, I’ve held tightly to what was, convinced that normal must be just around the corner.
Early this Fall I was putting together the annual full time priests’ salary survey. For a decade this has been an incredibly helpful tool, helping parishes to determine fair compensation relative to churches with similar attendance and finances, and toward parity among the clergy of the diocese. As I was working on this document, I was struck by seeing the average Sunday attendance of our parishes, knowing what they’d been in recent years. And so I went to the parochial reports, to compare the average Sunday attendance for in-person services across the diocese for 2019 and 2021. (In 2020 the report only used data from January to March, so those numbers aren’t as accurate a picture of the state of the diocese). I decided to look at 2019 because that’s the year that we’ve been looking back at in the Diocesan Office. Knowing our parishes have been in such flux, we’ve continued to focus on 2019 data, until things settle down (read: until things return to normal). We even used the 2019 ASA to determine the number of voting delegates for this convention. I knew we’d been doing a lot of looking back, and I wanted to see how different that really was from our current reality.
For the 2019 parochial report, the 68 worshiping communities of the Diocese of Georgia reported a combined total in-person average Sunday attendance of 5,176. For the 2021 report, it was 2,816. A 46% decrease across the diocese.
I’d like to note here that plate and pledge has gone up around $228,000 from 2019 to 2021…while this is heartening, it means that fewer people are giving more money to reach a modest increase, and that may not remain sustainable.
When I looked at those numbers, there in black and white on my screen, my first impulse was to simply close the computer, forget what I’d seen, and just keep looking back. But after the initial shock, I realized that much of the stress we’d been feeling as a diocesan staff, and much of the stress I’d seen in the parishes I’d been working with, could be attributed to the chasm between these numbers, and the struggle to move backward, thinking God was waiting for us in the before. And instead of feeling anxious, I felt relieved. (Ok, yes, I was still a little anxious!) Truly facing the reality of where we are with this data was a weight off my shoulders. Of course things have felt drastically different in our parishes. Because, on the whole, they simply are. And in a way that’s not likely to change over the course of just a couple of years. I shared these findings with two attendees of the Diocesan Lay Ministers’ Conference the following weekend, and recognized my own reactions on their faces: shock, anxiety, and then a bit of a sigh of relief, knowing that the things they’d been seeing were not just present in their own congregations, but across the diocese.
Around the same time as I was looking into these numbers, diocesan transition ministers from across the country were coming together for annual gatherings. At these meetings open positions and clergy searching for calls were being presented, in case a good match between priest and parish could be made. I met with colleagues from Province IV, which encompasses the Southeastern part of the United States. Together, from eleven dioceses, we presented 41 full time openings, 51 part time openings, and just 11 priests looking for positions. The next week another group of transition ministers, from 32 different dioceses across the church, presented 104 full time openings, 177 part time openings, and just 26 priests. We saw very clearly that the days when we had more priests than openings are far behind us. The reality is simply that there is a shortage of priests, and especially those looking for part time calls.
That reality has felt especially stark here within the Diocese of Georgia. Of our 68 congregations, we currently have 19 in transition, from rectors who have just announced retirement, to congregations with interims in place, and those actively searching for candidates (and we have another four congregations not actively in transition, who will likely rely solely on lay leadership and supply priests for the foreseeable future). Of the 19 parishes in transition, 12 are searching for part time priests.
This is all the reality of our present moment: we’re at 46% of our previous average Sunday attendance, fewer people are giving more to reach a modest financial increase, and 27% of our congregations are searching for priests, in a wildly different transition ministry landscape. It is not at all surprising to find ourselves wishing to get back to normal. To the way things were. This new reality is complicated. Scary. And, yes, like so much else since March of 2020, unprecedented.
I do not share all of this with you to leave you with a sense of depression or dread. Believe me, when the Holy Spirit led me to make this presentation to convention, I replied with a firm (but polite!) no thank you. Because who wants to get up in front of the dedicated leaders of the diocese and say here’s where things are, and on paper, they seem somewhat bleak. I share all of this with you because I hope that you too can find some encouragement, as I have,
in the fact that we are not alone in any of what we’ve been experiencing. Churches across all denominations are facing similar situations of lower numbers and clergy shortages and none of it is because we didn’t work hard enough or believe deeply enough. We simply are where we are, and we’re facing it together. I believe there is hope in that sense of community in the midst of our new reality.
But, here’s the most important thing I want to say to you all here today. The Triune God is present with us in this new reality. We don’t need to go back to the way things were to see the Holy Spirit’s movement. Even with fewer people and more churches in transition, the light of Christ is shining so brightly across the Diocese of Georgia. One of the gifts of coming back to the Diocese in July of 2020 is that I can say, without a doubt, that God was not only present here before the pandemic. Since I began in this role I have had the privilege of worshiping with 26 parishes. I’ve worked, in many cases multiple times, with 9 search committees and 30 vestries. I’ve spent time talking with most of the deacons and priests of the diocese. In all of this I have seen God at work more times and in more ways than I can count.
In the form of congregations who have spent their time providing lunches for children who didn’t have enough to eat when school wasn’t taking place in-person. In the form of parishioners banding together to build a home for a family in need. In the form of vestries and search committees prayerfully and deliberately leading and discerning throughout the pandemic. In the form of laypeople and deacons and priests across the diocese providing compassionate care for others in a time of immense worry and grief.
Though we find ourselves in a new reality, the mission and ministry of the 68 worshiping communities of this diocese has not changed, and the fruit of that work, God’s work, is all around us, here and now.
Throughout convention we will share a series of stories and resources, including some to take home with you after the closing prayers. These will hopefully provide some ways we can, even in the midst of uncertainty, move forward together and hold fast to the knowledge that God is here, and God is faithful.
I’d like to close today with the first of these, a video from Grace Episcopal Church in Waycross, which reveals God’s presence and work among us in this reality more beautifully than I could ever put into words.
