Aspiring preachers from across the United States and Canada gathered earlier this summer for a week of focused formation on preparing sermons. Established in 1998, the Preaching Excellence Program is a central ministry of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation, which aims to enhance and inspire great preaching.

Drake Douglas, a Postulant in the Diocese of Rhode Island attended this year’s program. “To spend such meaningful time both relishing and grappling with the holy task of faithfully sharing God’s Good Word, and to do so in community with other new preachers is pure gift,” Drake shares. “It’s a sincere privilege to learn from these talented and caring souls, and I’m grateful to have a growing network of support for what I hope will be a life-long practice of preaching.”

Seminaries from across the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada nominate students to participate in the all-expenses paid week. Noted theologians and preachers from across the church led workshops and small-group discussions. A central part of the program is preaching to feedback, so participants gave and received comments and critiques on their sermons. Workshops this year included Instant Preaching, Trauma-Informed Preaching, Instant Preaching, and A New Priest’s Journey.

Since its founding, the Preaching Excellence Program has offered formation in sermon creation and delivery to more than 2,000 seminarians, including two who later became presiding bishops. Other programs sponsored by the Preaching Foundation include a Lay Preaching Training Initiative, local partnerships with dioceses and seminaries, the Preaching Congregation, and conferences for deacons.

To learn more about the Preaching Foundation, visit PreachingFoundation.org.

The last time Bishop Nicholas Knisely visited St. Andrew’s, Little Compton, a member of the congregation asked what the parish had to do to attract families with children. The Rev. Virginia Army, the parish’s rector, remembers his response well.

“He spoke with warmth, but candor,” she recalls, explaining that rising housing prices and the attractiveness of communities such as Little Compton to retirees meant that fewer young families were moving into the diocese, and that some aging congregations did not have the capacity to support children’s programs.

“He told them, ‘You do not have to have children and youth to be a parish that is worthy and vibrant and serving and glorifying God,’” Army recalls. “I think a lot of the parish kind of took a deep breath and said, ‘We are who we are.’”

In numerous communities around the diocese, congregations are having to recognize that decades of declining church attendance coupled with the state’s shifting demographic profile means they are ministering increasingly, and sometimes almost entirely, to people of retirement age or older. The average age of St. Andrew’s congregation is 82. “We have children and grandchildren at holidays,” Army says. “But that’s all.”

But an older congregation can still be a vital one, says Army, a cancer survivor who works a 25-hour week. “You have to be good at and committed to what you can do and in recognizing what your neighborhood needs.”

St. Andrew’s is especially concerned with food insecurity in the three-town area that includes Little Compton, Tiverton and Westport, Massachusetts. Parishioners support two food banks and are planning a charity concert in July by the parish’s choir director and pianist, Gayane Darakyan, a classically trained concert pianist, to benefit the food banks.

The parish also supports the Little Compton Circle of Friends, a social group for teens and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, holds blood drives and recently co-sponsored a “shred day” with the Little Compton United Church of Christ on which a truck bearing a paper shredder arrived from a local vendor and community members brought documents that needed secure disposal.

St. Andrew’s has what Army describes as a “generous mission budget,” but the parish also likes to “roll up our sleeves and work together, too” she says.

There are particular challenges an aging congregation faces, and parishes must develop the capacity to face them, Army says. Three times this year, parishioners have collapsed during worship. Members of the congregation are now practiced in what to do on these occasions. Seven members of the parish are trained to use an automated external defibrillator or attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and on any given Sunday, Army says, at least three or four are present. On each occasion, after the ambulance arrived, members of the parish accompanied the afflicted person’s spouse to the hospital, and the community rallied around them, arranging meals and transportation when necessary.

“It has been a complete joy for me to serve with them. And I admire their commitment to taking care of each other and their neighbors, whether they know them or not,” Army says.

One misconception about older congregations is that they do not receive new members, Army says. “New people will come but they will just likely be older,” she says. “There are still people out there, like recent retirees who have moved to the area, who are looking for a warm, welcoming and faithful community who do their best to serve and glorify God. That’s where the sustainability can really come from, and there is nobody on the vestry who doesn’t understand that this is the challenge of our time.”

St. Columba’s, Middletown serves a broader demographic than St. Andrew’s, but in recent years it has also paid attention to the particular needs of older members of the congregation. In 2017, three years after her husband Art died as the result of a bicycle accident, parishioner Sara Chadwick put together a three-part series that began with a highly personal exploration on aging, death and dying and included one session with a registered nutritionist and another with a staff member of the American Association of Retired People, who spoke about driving, specifically about convincing older relatives not to, and home safety issues such as getting rid of loose scatter rugs and putting grab bars in showers.

At the first session, Chadwick told those gathered that her husband’s death had left her without passwords or other essential information for taking care of his unfinished business. “I talked about what people did for me when Art died, flowers, food and endless support,” she says. “And I talked about getting rid of his clothing. And then how I started coping with money matters. Like who is our oil company. Things I’d never paid attention to because he was so good at those things.”

Her co-presenter, Lois Rogers, another longtime parishioner at St. Columba’s, spoke of the long, slow death of her husband, Ray: how he prepared for his death and how she and her children carried on afterwards.

That first session was raw, Chadwick says, but the congregation was supportive, and attendance at the sessions grew. In 2018, she organized a four-part series that began with a similar presentation by her and Rogers, followed by a return visit by a local nutritionist, and sessions with a home organizer who gave tips on downsizing and a police officer who spoke about avoiding scammers who target the elderly.

The series was interrupted by the pandemic, but Chadwick says she hopes to relaunch it.

St. Columba’s has seen “an influx of younger couples” under the Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, who became priest-in-charge in 2020 and rector in 2022, Chadwick says. But the parish still relies on the experience and energy of older parishioners in mounting event such as its annual English garden party, held this year on June 10.

“Nobody seems to give a hoot about how old anybody is,” Chadwick says. “Nobody says, ‘You’ve done this five times, why don’t you let somebody else handle it?’ They say ‘You’ve done a good job, why don’t you do it again?’”

– Jim Naughton, Canticle Communications

This past weekend we celebrated Trinity Sunday. It’s the only Sunday festival of the Church that celebrates a doctrine rather than a historical event, and that tells me that the Episcopal Church considers something about the Trinity to be especially important.

And what about it is so important? It’s certainly not the specifics of how One God manages to be three persons in unity of being. Because pretty much the best we can do in laying that out is to say what it is not rather than what it is. It’s striking that in the end, we say it’s a Holy Mystery and back away from trying to explain it all.

So, what is it then? To me, it’s not the details of the doctrine but the implications that matter. I think there are three of those: Unity in Diversity, Interdependence and Cooperation, and Complexity and Order. Because God is the Creator of the reality we know, we ought to expect to see these implications everywhere we look. And when people insist on ideas that contradict them, we should be wary.

As citizens of a great democracy, I think we fundamentally understand how Unity in Diversity works. You can find that sentiment on our nation’s Great Seal: E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one. The motto doesn’t mean that we lose our distinctiveness by being part of one nation; it means that our individual gifts contribute to making the whole more robust than it would otherwise be.

One of the great gifts of being part of the worldwide Anglican Communion is that we have been taught the meaning of Ubuntu by our siblings from the nations of southern Africa. Human beings are fundamentally social beings who exist in relation to others. The philosophy of Ubuntu encourages people to be inclusive and value each individual’s diversity and uniqueness. Like E Pluribus Unum, Ubuntu is a reflection of the love that is the essential quality of our Trinitarian God.

One of the most striking qualities of chaotic materials and situations is that, over time, a sort of mostly stable order emerges spontaneously out of the chaos. It’s like the flight of a large flock of birds when the individual behaviors suddenly seem to be coordinated and arresting patterns emerge – what scientists call “murmuration.”

None of these things could exist if we were just one thing or all held to a singular set of beliefs. It is the diversity and, frankly, the sometimes frustrating division that makes us who we are. Our duty as believers in this Trinity is to recognize the power of our diversity and do what is needed to protect it when it is threatened. It’s why we celebrate Pride or Black History, Women’s History or Asian American History, or the History of our Native forebears. The wonderful diversity of our communities should be reflected in our congregations and our life as a church. Just as our churches and communities, at the very very best, reflect the Trinitarian God we worship and adore.

+Nicholas

Emmanuel Church in Cumberland is a youthful congregation by Episcopal standards with an average age of 44, almost 15 years below the churchwide average. Its members’ lives “are so full of upheaval with so few sacred cows, it can be easier to shift directions,” says the Rev. Joan Testin, the church’s rector of 10 years.

This stood the parish in good stead when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, forcing congregations around the world into a lengthy period of adapting services, ministries and formation opportunities for consumption online. And it was equally helpful when the cloud of COVID began to lift and some people returned to services while others did not.

Having a rector who taught music and drama for 23 years, and who picked up a few ideas about improvisation, and “telling stories through theater” didn’t hurt either. The process of adapting during the pandemic wasn’t always smooth, and Testin acknowledges that some of the “quirky” things that worked at Emmanuel might not work elsewhere. But the congregation’s experience illuminates the particular challenges that have faced congregations everywhere in the last several years.

Compared to many churches, Emmanuel seemed well-positioned to confront pandemic challenges. The parish began a virtual Sunday School in 2018 with a video each week featuring cartoons, a story, and other activities. The video was linked each week in the e-newsletter and themes and images presented virtually were then brought up during Children’s Chapel for younger children, reinforcing the lesson.

Testin created an avatar, or cartoon, of herself as “Vicar Joan” who engaged with children attending virtual Sunday School each week. “It was a lot of fun and we were poised, then, when 2020 hit to continue doing that kind of Christian formation for the kids.”

The congregation had also done the difficult work of reshaping its service schedule to meet the changing needs of its members. Recognizing in 2016 that getting to church on Sunday morning was a struggle for some people, it switched its 11 a.m. service to 5 p.m., a move Testin describes now as “an abject failure.” But moving the service to 5 p.m. on Saturday and setting a contemplative tone with reflective opening music had proven successful.

The pandemic, however, disrupted both dynamic and static parishes alike, and some of Emmanuel’s adaptations and innovations were lost, at least temporarily, only to be replaced by new ones. The parish worshipped either online—a 9:30 a. m. service each Sunday—or outdoors for most of the first two years of the pandemic before returning to in-person worship.

The virtual Sunday School did not survive the transition, and the parish has shifted its efforts to drawing children more deeply into Sunday worship. The Children’s Chapel is once again available during the 9:30 service, while older children serve as lectors and acolytes and confirmed youth serve as lay eucharistic ministers. Children who are not serving on the altar (where coloring books and crayons are readily available) are invited to sit near the front to see something other than the backs of other heads.

The 9:30 Sunday service—which is still live-streamed—had the parish’s highest pre-pandemic attendance. While that is still the case, Testin notes, the service has also had the highest level of attrition in in-person attendance. Some congregants to watch the livestream, as do newcomers who discovered the parish online, and the numbers of in-person and online attendees are about equal, Testin says. The 5:30 Saturday service is also back on the parish calendar.

The parish has come back to life in other ways, too. Bishop Knisely visited recently to confirm those who had completed the parish’s two-year preparation program. After baptizing nine babies this year, Testin and the parish held a reception for the infants and their families. Helping young parents get to know each other, asking what the parish can do to support them, and building a strong foundation of connection supports the parish’s goal of engaging children and teens in the worship and communal life of the congregation.

Emmanuel also offers opportunities for older members, whom Testin says “may have more time and energy for formation and fellowship.” Online, hybrid, and in-person, book studies, DVD courses, and a monthly lunch and learn program with the United Methodist congregation down the street meet many of those needs, while accommodating people’s varying degrees of ability to gather in-person. Some participants in a recent “theology of Harry Potter” series came for the study and stayed to become members of the parish.

Testin’s own attitude about the post-pandemic challenges ahead were best captured in a sermon she preached early in 2023 and her rector’s report to the Annual Meeting, which focused on the need to discern what comes next. “The church we were in 2020 will never come back. It is hard to let go—and it is gone.”

She believes that during the pandemic, Sunday morning became family time. Just as with the tension between worship and Sunday-morning sports practices, she wonders how the parish can continue to offer opportunities to participate in worship. “These families with young babies, I want to ask them if Wednesday evening works better for them. We are wrestling with two goods here: how can we figure a way for both things to happen?”

The best response to the challenges facing the church will arise from individual congregations discerning in their own contexts, she says.

“We need to be true to being Emmanuel, just as other parishes need to be true to being themselves … We see article after article after article telling us that the church is dying. I think the church is pregnant. And yes, it’s hard, and yes, it’s exhausting, and yes, it’s painful, but in the end, we have new life. That’s where we’re going, but it’s going to be a while to get there. You have to find what is going to work in your own context and what’s going to be authentic for who you are and go from there.”

-Jim Naughton, Canticle Communications

On Saturday, June 3, the Rt. Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely will be pleased to ordain Andrea Hutnak to the sacred order of Deacons at All Saints’ Memorial Church at 2 pm. All are welcome. If you wish to watch the service online, it will be streamed to All Saints’ Facebook page.

The service bulletin will be found here.

June is Celebrate Deacons month in Province I. Below you’ll find a link to a video about the diaconate, featuring some familiar faces from Rhode Island!

Deacons Make a Meaningful Difference