Changes

Big changes happening at Messiah. One of the key staff members has moved on to other things, which means that we are having to pick up the left over jobs. It also means we have an opportunity to change around the way we do a number of things behind the scenes of Messiah. It's a good thing, but also a little nerve wracking. It's been an interesting experience, and I wish I could discuss it openly, but alas that is not possible! Perhaps I can put in my memoirs in 50 years!

-t

The Awesomest Staff Meeting Ever

Spent the morning getting my blood drawn for tests as part of my yearly physical, then went to another clinic to get my H1N1 Vaccine. It turned out to be pretty anti-climatic. I haven't noticed any change.

Back at church--AWESOME staff meeting. First we spent 45 minutes or so arranging chairs and liturgical furniture in the space to explore possible Advent configurations. The last few times I've done this it's been basically a lone-wolf exercise in liturgical planning. This time, I had THREE different staff members with me chipping in with excellent ideas and refinements. Between the four of us we came up with an arrangement that is better than what any of us had in mind individually. It will require acquiring a few small pieces that we don't have already (such as a brass menorah), but we have time to get them before the season begins.

After that we spent some time reflecting on the last two Sundays and incorporating the results into some changes to be implemented next Sunday. Some of the things we noticed won't be incorporated until next year.

Then we hunkered down and did some exciting planning for Advent and Epiphany. There are lots of projects and possibilities emerging, and the neat thing is that many/most of them are coming from the staff or the congregation! Wow! Really great to watch stuff start to spring up from fertile ground. Extremely rewarding for me to see and hear how well our group is working together for the building up of this community. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

At the end of the staff meeting we prayed for the church and for various pastoral and personal concerns, then we sang the Lord's Prayer together. We each walked away with a list of "to-dos" and much excitement.

Have I said lately how much I love being a priest at the Church of The Messiah? This is such a great job!

-t

A Rainy Friday

Got up Thursday morning to kind of blustery day here in Toronto. I started my day off with a trip to the Doctor. He doesn't want to give me anything for my cough until it's been around for a week or two.

I knew I had an appointment in the afternoon, but nothing else to do at the office, so I decided to spend the morning working from home. Techie that I am, I can do most of my office tasks using just my old laptop at home. We do our liturgical planning, for example, using a Google Docs spread sheet. Each Sunday (or major feast) gets a row. The columns contain notes about what the readings are, hymn selections, who is preaching, what we are doing with the kids that Sunday, and other details. All the COTM staff can log in with a username and password from any computer on the Internet and make notes and changes. No more passing around xeroxed planning documents or e-mail attachments back and forth. It makes coordinating multiple staff assignments on Sunday mornings MUCH easier. I also use Google Calendar to track my personal appointments and task lists, which I can also access from anywhere.

So I got a fire going in the fireplace and went to work answering e-mails and reading. The cats kept me company. Betsy worked upstairs. After lunch I went into the office to do some meetings and take care of other tasks. One of these meetings was with a student from Wycliffe Seminary that wants to be a Theological Intern with us this year. I'm very pleased to have him on board. I don't want to announce his name and so forth until I introduce him to the congregation a week for Sunday.

After meeting with him I spent some time with Eric talking music and plans. He continues to impress me with his knowledge and ideas about church music. When I was at Holy Cross I picked a book called The Emergent Psalter by Isaac Everett. The book's blurb will give you a sense what that's about:

Many alternative and emerging church communities have begun exploring ancient music and liturgical traditions despite a lack of high-quality, published liturgical music which does not require (or even desire) an organ and a four-part choir. The Emergent Psalter serves to provide that resource. Featuring music written for two emerging communities (Transmission in New York and Church of the Apostles in Seattle), this book is an excellent resource for anyone producing an alternative worship service or thinking of starting one. (source)

Not surprisingly, Isaac is friends with Emily Scott--who does the Paperless Singing stuff in NYC. Emily and I overlapped at Yale a few years ago. Anyway, Isaac does some really interesting things with these Psalms. On the one hand he is deeply invested in the tradition--Gregorian Chant and also the Hebrew approach to the Psalms. But then he let's the Word manifest in an new way in its new context. You can get a sense of what I mean by listening to his podcast. Every week he takes the Psalm appointed in the Lectionary and shows how to do it in his style.

So Eric and I had a nice talk about music and some of our ideas about how to develop liturgy at Messiah. Lots of good stuff in the works!

Today it was rainy and cold. I slept in hoping it would help the cough go away (it didn't) and read some of my childbirth/parenting books. Then I went on a pastoral visit. Now I'm home with Betsy with a nice fire and cats-on-laps. Life is good.

-t

Thoughts from a Tuesday

A busy day that started with some e-mails and phone calls and then the Trad Com (BCP Communion) service at Messiah. I regretted not transferring the Feast of Holy Cross to a Sunday, but at least I was able to transfer it to today! Not surprisingly, I had plenty to preach about on the Patronal Feast of OHC! A pleasant lunch with some of my parishioners followed.

In the early afternoon I drove down to Diocesan HQ for a meeting related to the Back to Church Sunday initiative. Bishop Poole was leading the meeting, but Bishop Johnson did stop by briefly to share some thoughts about the project. I couldn't help noticing that he was wearing a really flattering suit. And I admit thinking, "I wonder how many suits he had to buy when he became bishop?" Lol. He also shared that a new grand child was to be born immanently. Good for him.

After the meeting it was back to Messiah for a staff meeting. It went longer than usual, which I should have anticipated given that Eric is new on staff and it's the beginning of the church's programme year. We prayed briefly, then we debriefed last Sunday and planned for the next. Much of our time ended up focusing on the Confirmation Service/Bishop's Visitation/Back-to-Church Sunday marathon that will be September 27th! Now we've added a bouncy castle. Because everybody loves the bouncy castle! We also beginning to talk about the Christmas Pageant (yeah, really!).

In November Eric is going to the "Music that Makes Community Conference" in Atlanta. I've talked about paperless singing on this blog from time-to-time, and these conferences put on by the All Saints Company (the people that gave the world St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco) are the place to go to learn about that. I'm thrilled that Eric is going. In fact, he wanted to go long before he was called to COTM. It's a three day conference/workshop teaching the techniques of so-called "paperless singing." It's a method of congregational worship that recovers much older methods of making music in community. It uses techniques like call-and-response, lining, rounds, etc. to get a congregation singing together. Inevitably it feels much more organic, free, and intimate than head-in-hymnal, everybody-follow-the-organ, style singing.

Needless to say, I'd love to go to this conference. The only problem is that the same week I'm going to this year's Preaching College at St. Clement's. This is an invitation-only intensive four-day workshop for preachers. I'm wondering whether I can miss the last half-day and take the red-eye to Atlanta? The other option is to attend the same conference a few months later in January in San Francisco. I love San Francisco--but at that point I'll have a new baby at home and (probably) no desire to travel! Besides, there is a nice synergy that will happen if Eric and I are BOTH at the same conference. I had such a blast the last time I went to an All Saints Company conference, I'd love to share that with one (or more) of my worship staff.

One of the things I love about Eric that we have a shared language for talking about liturgy. I have yet to come up with anything (a term, a hymn, a resource, anything) that he doesn't know about. I suspect he may have a better liturgical library than I do! Going to a conference like this will only take that shared language to the next level: shared experience!

So I'm trying to figure out how to make that trip work!

Lots of other challenges at work. Many of which I just can't talk about for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say, my plate is full.

Meanwhile, Betsy's belly is getting bigger. She's feeling great except for a little bit of joint soreness in her hips. She's been getting good advice via Facebook about that. We are both reading and studying pregnancy stuff like the nerds we are!

The weather in Ontario is starting to turn cool. It makes me think about the need to schedule a firewood delivery and do more canning. Maybe we'll get the farmer's market again this weekend...

-t

Softball, cigars, Betsy update....

Softball last night was fun. My batting was much improved from two weeks ago--I managed several base hits, two ground-outs, and a fly-out to left field. Not bad, considering. I rewarded myself with a Cigar. I don't smoke very often, but playing ball with the guys in the park, wife away, seemed like the right time to indulge. I deeply thankful that I have an opportunity like this to hang out with guys my own age and do and say the sorts of things that guys do and say when they are together. Ah... bonding!

It's starting to become a mad dash to get stuff done before my trip. I have almost exactly a week left! I have my annual ministry review with Bishop Yu this afternoon. In the mean time I'm working on several other projects. I MUST finish the job description for the Minister of Music position today or tomorrow so I can start advertising that job before I go away on vacation. That way we can have interviews lined up for when I return. I originally drafted up some notes and other stuff right after Matthew announced that he would be leaving at the end of the summer, but I'm glad I've waited this long to finish that project. The time has given me new perspective on what kind of musician and worship leader I want and how I want to present it. Interestingly, the congregation has not said much to me about this except to express gratitude and appreciation for what Matthew has done. As usual, people seem to trust that the parish leadership will make a good decision about the future of the music programme, and no one feels the need to push a particular agenda. I think I have a pretty good idea of what people liked about Matthew and would like to see retained.

I talked with Betsy today. She is well. Belly getting bigger. Athens getting hotter. She is learning a lot, but the programme is intensive. Lots of homework and memorization to do. Interestingly, her roommate in a New Testament Professor who graduated from Union Theological (where my sister is currently studying). It's a good school, and I suddenly seem to have a lot of connections to it.

-t

All Saint's, King City

I made a visit to All Saint's, King City, to talk to their incumbent (The Rev'd Nicola Skinner) about their recent painting scheme. They worked with a color expert to repaint the church interiors in very dynamic and interesting way. Here's a picture of the Nave...

One of the interesting and subtle effects was created by using slightly offset colors in adjacent panels--so you'll notice that there are actually two blues and blue greens in the picture here. This is designed to create more sense of movement in the space. This replaced a horrid "dirty cream" color that was originally there. The scheme really compliments the stained glass and has a very warm feeling. The project has been well received by the congregation, and confirms for me that bold schemes are not necessarily controversial. The key is that they function aesthetically. So it makes me all the more eager to bring in a good color expert for our repainting project.

After the tour Nicola and I went out for lunch at the only restaurant in King City, a nice little Greek place with a surprisingly good Souvlaki Sandwich. Turns out that Nicola likes really hot peppers, too, so I'll have to send her a jar of my pickled "peppers of death." These are the hottest peppers I could legally purchase at the St. Laurence Street Farmers Market. I'm still searching for the "The merciless peppers of Quetzlzacatenango...grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum." (After Homer eats these peppers in an episode of The Simpsons he has a vision in which his spirit guide manifests as a coyote with the voice of Johnny Cash.) Anyway, Nicola and I had a good talk about respective churches.

Back at COTM, our weekly Staff meeting sorted out various details. I decided to have the meeting in my office now that's in presentable shape. After that I met with a local nun looking for a place to hold her an Out of the Cold supper for Christmas. She's providing the food, the volunteers, and the guests. All we have to do is unlock and lock the building. Naturally, I'm not going to deny a nun a place to feed the poor!

I'm still not sleeping well. Or, more accurately, I sleep well in the morning, but not at night. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, I suppose. There's just so much work to be done... and yet I want to have a healthy life and that means going home at a decent hour and praying well and meditating and all that. Then there is a whole 'nother part of me that is screaming for attention. At the planning meeting for the Pageant last Sunday I ended up literally dancing around the nave to demonstrate how I imagined Mary might dance during the Magnificat. I need to get out of my head and into my body. I've got a ton of creative energy to release!

Speaking of the pageant, I need to work on the script, now, so I have it for the planning meeting tomorrow....

-t

APLM

I'm joining The Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission (APLM)--it's an organization that promotes good worship, basically. For them (and me) in the Anglican/Episcopal context that means promoting the role of baptism in defining Christian Mission and Eucharist as the principle act of Christian worship. I know, these ideas are no longer considered as radical as they once were, but there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of their proper application. For instance, the implications for how baptismal preparation should be done are profound. Baptismal prep ought to be more than just an hour on the Saturday before the big day! So the APLM is a way to engage with the community of people who are doing interesting, progressive, and Spirit-led things with liturgy in the church.

We had our staff lunch at the Pour House today. It's a cold and rainy day, so I went with the Steak and Guinness Pie and a pint of Ale. When you're in a pub you should eat pub food, IMHO.

A few weeks ago I dropped off some historic architectural drawings from the construction of the church for framing. I picked them up today from the Tanglewood Gallery and was impressed with the results. I chose to have them "floating" on the matte, so you can see the frayed and burned edges. It really says something about the parish to have these beautiful yet battle-worn drawings properly mounted and displayed. My next parish identity project is going to be to assemble a gallery of the previous Rectors of the parish. No doubt that will take some time, but we'll see how far I get before we do the Parish History-Taking workshop of December 8th. On that day, we'll spend a few hours as a parish talking about the past glories of the place. Sometime in the new year we'll do a similar workshop focusing on our current mission context. Then a few months later we'll come up with plans and priorities for the next few years.

In the mean time, I've got plenty of brands in the fire! I still haven't heard about that grant I wrote a few weeks back, apparently they had more applications than usual and are behind schedule. Sigh.

-t