Episcopalians have a unique and special opportunity. The basic unit of Anglicanism is not called the "church" but the "parish." Actually, there is much confusion about this term. The word "church," I think, should only be applied in two ways. It should refer to a building - to St. James' Church on Piney Mountain Road, for instance. And it should apply to a whole entity as in the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Episcopal Church. We often use the word church when we really mean to use the word parish.

In Anglican tradition, as in all the churches which have been national churches, the word parish applies to a piece of geography. The word diocese is still geographic even though we have been threatened from time to time with the creation of extra-territorial dioceses. A bishop is the chief pastor of an area; he or she can tell where that area begins and where it ends and therefore where jurisdiction and responsibility end and begin.

Episcopalians, however, do not adhere to parish boundaries very well. We can be enrolled as communicants wherever we choose to be enrolled. And priests are able to follow and care for their people wherever they live regardless of boundaries. Some clergy do think that they can marry or bury anywhere in town or city as long as they do not do it in the church building which is in the jurisdiction of another priest. In fact, I am as much forbidden to officiate at a wedding in the Episcopal church in the next town from me as in the Methodist church there unless the rector or vicar of that place approves of my being there.

There are many people who live in the parish where I serve who are not Episcopalians and there are Episcopalians living here who are enrolled in another parish, some of them in distant places and from very long ago. They are still part of my parish, and while I would not intrude upon the religious preferences of people who live here, I would feel a responsibility and an opportunity should anyone who lives in this parish's boundaries ask for something I can give.

It is part of our heritage that we are the outcropping of the Episcopal Church, even of the Anglican Communion, on this particular landscape. We are not the established church in this place; we do not have peculiar or particular rights or privileges here. But as clergy of other communities of faith have sometimes reminded me, Episcopalians have a unique opportunity because of our heritage. We do not think of ourselves as the pastors of a gathered body of people who worship in a church building alone, but as ministers of Christ in a community. We share responsibility for the spiritual life of that community with clergy of other communions, of course. Some of those clergy will share our notion of responsibility for a whole community. Some of them will assume that the church they serve is a gathering of like-minded people and is not particularly attached to the place where their building is located.

Some parishes, like Trinity in New York City, have more than one church building. Some parishes have a school, a retirement home, a campus ministry, or a soup kitchen.

If my sense of parish is correct, then we need to abolish the false distinction between parish and mission churches in the canons. Mission congregations serve geographical areas; new housing developments, for instance. And independent, self-supporting parishes have a mission, a special focus, to their ministry. Whether the ministry of a Christian community is subsidized by a larger parish or by the diocese in which it functions, or by the endowments inherited from the past, or by the Sunday offerings, has nothing to do with the ministry of that community. There are heavily endowed parishes with a tiny remnant of people clinging desperately to a building they love, and there are vibrant and healthy new congregations impoverishing their ministry by a desperate struggle to become "self-supporting." The church is universal and the parish is the place where people worship and serve and live. o

The Rev. Thomas Davis is the interim rector of St. James' Parish, Greenville, S.C.