Narrative Biography        Answers to Questions       Resumé

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All candidates were asked to submit a professional resumé, a 200-250 word narrative biography and answer the same 4 questions.

Four Questions Answered:

Question 1: Describe a time you led others through a variety of choices to develop a vision, and what were the results.

When I came to my current parish, St. Matthias, nine years ago, it was in a state of deep transition with resulting conflicts. Years before, it had been a large parish with most of its members wealthy and powerful at the height of their professions. Due to the many economic and population shifts of the Los Angeles area, by the time I arrived Whittier had changed to being a city that was influenced more by the Latino cultures of east Los Angeles, not far away, than the office towers of downtown Los Angeles beyond. St. Matthias had lost many of its members to death or retirement relocations. Those remaining were on much smaller incomes, with less time for church activities, and with a different view of what life was about than their St. Matthias forbearers. Yet the congregation was trying to function as it had in the past glory years. It clearly was in need of a clearer vision of who they were at that moment in time as well as what God was leading them to become next.

     After I had spent about a year getting to know the congregation and community, I led St. Matthias through a process of celebrating its past while opening itself to other possibilities. I designed a very open process, where there were multiple opportunities to participate both in giving ideas and responding to others’ thoughts and feelings. This helped to heal many of the hurts and wounds that members had given each other, while also helping us to look beyond our own expectations of what an Episcopal congregation should be. We used demographic data, interviews with non-St. Matthias Whittier residents, and lots of anecdotal evidence about how Whittier was changing and how St. Matthias could be more faithful to God through ministry in the present and future. We also did our best to pray throughout the process, and to have prayer as times of listening as well as talking. Settings were as varied as centering prayer groups, “town hall” style open meetings, small group study groups, and many announcements during Sunday services about what was happening with this process and how people could become, or stay, involved with it.

     The result was that St. Matthias was able to celebrate its past as a place of hospitality in both welcoming hundreds of new people during the baby boom years thirty years before and in its later development of outreach ministries to the needy, and build on that core value of hospitality to become open to new people and ways of doing things in the present. We also dealt explicitly with the conflicts so that they were laid to rest. We then offered focused programming on racism sensitively and newcomers ministries to enable us to reach out to the changing community around us with sensitivity and care.

     These experiences and new perspectives helped to change St. Matthias for the better, and to give it the courage to try new things, embrace new people, and to become open to God in new ways. It was a transformative time that shifted both individuals and the congregation from a limited, inward vision to one that joyfully looked outside the doors to see what and who God was bringing next into our lives. Living now with a vision of holy hope rather than survival focus, St. Matthias has greatly expanded its outreach programs, including offering healthcare services, leadership in opening a new homeless shelter in Whittier, and offering to the wider community the opportunity to serve others through St. Matthias.

     These visible outreach efforts give St. Matthias credibility in Whittier as a parish that lives out its vision of welcome to everyone. Consequently, St. Matthias has been on the rebound the last number of years, even as older members continue to retire and move away, and some younger members have cashed out their real estate in recent years and moved out of state. Yet our overall membership levels have slowly increased even with these loses as we attract more people than we lose. Our new members have been less wealthy but no less enthusiastic, and St. Matthias has made a concerted effort to minister with the growing Latino population of Whittier over the last five years with good results.

     So while our neighboring historic churches in the urban core of Whittier are declining and closing, we are growing in numbers and spirit while becoming financially stable with new approaches to fundraising and stewardship that have included a very successful grant writing program to bring in funds from beyond St. Matthias’ membership. All this has happened with a happier, more unified congregation as we have worked together to develop a vision of welcoming hospitality to people both on Sunday mornings and to people of various needs during our expanding daily social outreach ministries.

     

Question 2:  Describe how you led a congregation to grow both spiritually and numerically, the associated conflicts and “bumps in the road” and as a result, what new understanding of God emerged with the final outcome?

    To avoid repeating the St. Matthias story, I will talk about my prior parish, Good Shepherd, in Hemet, California. Hemet has an interesting history as a semi-desert community that started as an agricultural center in the 1880’s, then in the 1960’s saw a boom of retirement developments, and finally since the 1980’s has experienced growth as a bedroom community to the Los Angeles region. Becoming rector there in 1989, it was easy to see that the congregation had not benefited from the many new housing tracts that had been built (and which produced many non-denominational Christian churches). Consequently, Good Shepherd was in deep conflict over how to attract young families while still serving the needs of its predominately retired membership.

     Fortunately, a few key lay leaders saw the need for change, and with them I worked to find ways of making new approaches to parish life not just acceptable but meaningful to the current members. Consequently I worked with the congregation in both large group and small group settings to discern what were the “essentials” to our individual and corporate spiritual well being, and then both the lay and ordained leadership of the parish repeatedly promised that those values would not be lost in possible future changes. Once members started to trust that their needs and concerns were truly being respected, they were willing to let go of much more than they first thought they could.

     So we entered our parish growth program with a renewed sense of who we were and with a deeper appreciation for our Episcopal spirituality, as we had prayed, learned, and talked about what was most important. My role as a teacher was crucial in this process. I taught about those things people had said were important, such as the sacraments and the Episcopal approach to Scripture and learning, so that the membership at large could talk to people in the wider community about what was important to the people of Good Shepherd. I also taught about techniques and approaches to inviting and incorporating new people into a parish, as I had received special training in this field (and applied it as a resource person to the diocese) when I was in Indiana.

     In addition to listening to each other in the parish, we listened to those outside as well. For example we learned that most of the new residents in Hemet commuted as much as two hours each way on a daily basis, so we made sure that none of our newcomer-focused activities took place on weekday evenings. We also completely redesigned our Sunday School program for children, to better reflect the portion of the Episcopal ethos we found crucial at Good Shepherd, meaning the children were immediately getting a sense of what made this congregation different from the other Christian churches in the area. We quickly expanded this program to include adults, as we found parents had so little time with their children during the week that they wanted to spend all of Sunday morning together. Soon we had whole families learning together in our Sunday School program, which quickly grew.

     That immediate success encouraged the veteran members of the congregation and helped them trust that this growth program was going to work. They saw that we did not have to give up our core values of sacramental worship, sophisticated approaches to Scripture, theology and ethics, and of life long pastoral care for all members, in order to gain new members. In fact, the members we were gaining (very few with an Episcopal background) were embracing the very things Good Shepherd had identified as key to its present life and past vitality. The coffee hour was very different as it was more child friendly, Saturday programming was as well attended as any during the week, parking was harder to find, but Good Shepherd, at its core, was still a middle of the road Episcopal Church, but better able to serve its surrounding community while experiencing significant growth in numbers and spirit. The fears that we would have to become more conservative, evangelical, and trendy to attract young people were blessedly unfounded. Instead, we were resurrected by God to be more loving, Christ-centered, and reflective about mission and ministry. This change in the congregation made it stay centered in who we were as new people came in droves, and we were able to share with them from deep within ourselves who we were and how much God was part of that identity, most of the time by action rather than words. More than any particular technique or approach, a congregation being transformed by God into a place of blessed peace, healing, and compassion will be a place of the best kind of growth, regardless of whether or not the membership rolls blossom.

Question 3:  Describe when you were a community leader, for what purpose or mission, and the final outcome.

     Since I view a major portion of parish ministry as being community ministry, based on the image of the English village church being a place of welcome and ministry to the entire village and not just to those who sit in a pew on Sundays, I have always been involved in the towns and cities in which I have served. A good example is in Whittier, where St. Matthias has become a place where all sorts of people come together to talk, to serve the hungry and homeless, and where people know they can turn in time of personal need. Knowing that I and St. Matthias had developed such credibility in Whittier, I developed a program to address deep social needs in our community through new and inventive measures. Even though Whittier is rather large, with around 80,000 residents, it had a history of high involvement by many of its citizens that I felt I could build on to do something new and effective.

     I invited faculty and students of the local liberal arts college and of local homeless services organizations to join me in hosting what we came to call the Whittier Homeless Summit. My goal was to find new ways of addressing the causes of homeless, as well as creative means of helping those in need. Combining various models of community conversation, I created a structure in which everyone was welcomed to the table, which became the image the leadership carried throughout the project. After a year of preparation, the Whittier Homeless Summit had around two hundred people from throughout the Whittier community gathered at round tables where they shared food, leadership, ideas, feelings, and experiences around the conditions of homelessness. By design and hard work, we had people who were currently homeless, social workers, police officers, elected officials, business owners, volunteers from helping groups, representatives of social service organizations, home owners and miscellaneous Whittier residents in discussions carefully facilitated by college students I had trained. These discussions took place over most of a day, and built levels of mutual awareness and respect that went beyond what any of us anticipated. The approach I designed required people to act in a way that was very respectful of everyone at the table, no matter how different the others were, and that forced behavior helped create a feeling, both individual and as a whole, of trust, respect, and even affection.

    The results were many, including developing new ways of dealing with individual homeless people in Whittier, since now so many of the people involved know and trust each other. Organizations that had distanced themselves from issues around poverty are now actively  involved in trying to address them, including the police department and the local hospital. Structural changes also continue to occur in Whittier as a result of the Homeless Summit, so that other groups and organizations are using a similar approach of community discussion to address major issues in Whittier in order to both get deeper participation and also a more creative and effective result. Finally, the experience for those who participated was so positive that I sometimes get stopped on the street by a merchant or home owner asking when we are getting together again to talk about improving our common life together as a community. Now the planning has started for a Healthcare Summit, to talk about both emergency and long-term care health issues in Whittier as we have discovered that this is an area that needs our attention and creativity and could benefit from a Homeless Summit type of program.

Question 4:  Having read our profile, name three major challenges/opportunities upon which you would base your episcopate.

   

     This question is the hardest to answer at a distance, since reading the profile, doing additional research, and having many conversations about the Diocese of Rochester will not substitute for knowing the diocese as an insider. The first opportunity and challenge for me would be to spend significant time in conversation about what the diocesan has been and what it could become. I would anticipate using much of the first year as a time to get to know the ordained and lay members of the diocese. Supplementing the traditional Sunday visitations, I would also make midweek visits spread through the diocese during which people could talk informally about their sense of personal, congregational, and diocesan ministry. Some of these times would be gatherings of people from multiple congregations, some would be focused on a particular congregation or ministry, and others would be one on one conversations, particularly with the clergy. My hope would be that this process would build trust and pastoral relationships between the members of the diocese and myself.

     The profile already identified growth as a challenge for the diocese as a whole. In addition to the work I have done at St. Matthias and Good Shepherd, about which I wrote in the first two questions, I led a very small rural congregation in Indiana to find a new sense of purpose and direction, and it continues to flourish nearly two decades later, as it grew in spirit as much as in numbers. While it is still small, it is an effective and faithful center of worship and ministry. In each congregation I have served, whether large or small, urban or rural, together we developed new ways of seeing more clearly who we were at that moment in time. This step may sound obvious in trying to grow, but too often we want to overlook the problems, blemishes, and short comings of our congregations and so develop unrealistic destinations in our vision goals. When we overlook the “here and now” we also can too easily overlook people around us who very much need our help in the various ways God calls us to minister to those around us, to be good Samaritans to the stranger hurt at the side of the road of life.

     The other crucial aspect of being based in the here and now is that it is easier to experience God’s guiding presence when we ground ourselves in the present, in the incarnate world that God has created for us in which to live and minister. The task of both numeric and spiritual growth can happen simultaneously when we start from where we already are since then we are starting in God’s loving hands, more likely to successfully develop plans and approaches that will keep us immersed in God as we grow in numbers and faithfulness.

     The third opportunity and challenge is to maintain and strengthen connections within the diocesan community, especially with people who could easily feel marginalized because of geography, theology, congregational size, economics, ethnic background, and other factors. The bishop as a symbol of unity can be a helpful tool in this process, by building personal ties with groups, congregations, and individuals who might otherwise not find their vital place in the whole. The bishop can also foster the holding up of values of reconciliation and hospitality which leads to tighter bonds between all individuals and groups. Being a presenter and member of the Los Angeles diocesan Reconciliation Team, which has put on training events both locally and nationally, has been just one way I have experienced the nurturing of the values and practices of reconciliation and hospitality in an effective way. I have also used these skills and perspectives in my parishes, communities, and interpersonal relationships.

    These three opportunities merely scratch the surface of what I anticipate the servant ministry of bishop in Rochester would look like for me, but they are definitely important ways of knowing how I would foresee starting life with the Episcopalians of the diocese as well as the wider community in the region.